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CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

nytimes.com

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Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#691

Post by llamaimperative »

danenania wrote: post #462
hakfoo wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the above-the-board justification for gain-of-function the promise of built-for-purpose microbes? The dream of "we spilled a million litres of toxic soup, here's a jar full of bacteria that eat that stuff and poop out useful compounds" or "let's make a virus that selectively over-infects tumours to weaken them?" We might have the usual problem with every high-powered technology, from the fission reaction to the…

Gain-of-function in the virology context doesn’t mean creating helpful microbes/viruses. It means purposely engineering pandemic-caliber viruses so that (the theory goes) we find them before evolution produces them naturally and so have time to study them and create vaccines before they are widespread.

> It means purposely engineering pandemic-caliber viruses

This is not true.

GoF includes any research that amplifies specific characteristics. Transmissibility or severity of infection are just two of those possible dimensions.

For example, the research that enables us to produce insulin (and tons of other biologic medicines) with E. coli is GoF.

I lean on the side of banning GoF that's designed to increase transmissibility of a contagion, but that is indeed just a subset of GoF generally.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#692

Post by llamaimperative »

ahartmetz wrote: post #449
jdietrich wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question of whether we should do gain-of-function research is a fairly complex cost/benefit analysis. The precise cause of the 2019 pandemic is only a very minor variable in that analysis, because that specific outcome doesn't change the underlying probability of a lab leak. More to the point, do we realistically believe that everyone will stop doing it, even if there's a credible international moratorium? If not…

GoF pro: might help in some case, to the best of our knowledge never did. (Some scientists like their deadly toys!) GoF contra: might cause a pandemic, kill millions, probably did. So, yeah, I don't know, tough decision.

All sorts of medicines are manufactured using GoF'd E. coli. We need a tighter definition of "bad" GoF.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#693

Post by paul_h »

breadwinner wrote: post #267

Americans had a role to play here as well: In 2014, Obama administration halted the so called "gain of function" research because of laboratory accidents. In 2017, Trump administration restarted the research. See links below. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/white-house-to-cut-fun... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih... The U.S. government, through the National Institutes of Health (NI…

This was published 17 Jan 2017 - https://www.science.org/content/article/after-criticism-fede... - before Trump's inauguration. The process to reconsider the ban started under Obama.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#694

Post by paul_h »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #404
cyberax wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> President Obama had banned it through an executive order. Can you provide a link to the executive order? It sounds seriously strange.

I can’t find the actual order but a search turns up many articles about it. Here’s one: https://www.nature.com/articles/514411a

Reconsideration was started under Obama, too: https://www.science.org/content/article/after-criticism-fede... (published 17 Jan 2017)

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#695

Post by rayiner »

camgunz wrote: post #655
mike_hearn wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a two sided argument. You could also argue the prior view was being suppressed by the previous White House, for the same reasons.

There's not an equivalence between post-Cold War Democratic and Republican administrations manipulating intelligence. My evidence is the Iraq War and Valerie Plame.

Except those guys are all democrats now. My evidence is the Hunter Biden laptop CIA letter.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#696

Post by renewiltord »

lolinder wrote: post #306

Can someone help me understand why a lab leak looks worse for China than zoonotic spillover? Why would Senator Cotton need it to be a lab leak to give him more leverage? From what I understand, one theory is that China has for decades tolerated unsanitary wet markets that allowed dangerous diseases to evolve, get stronger, and eventually transmit to human hosts. They'd been warned about this over and over again and h…

Lab leaks admit the possibility that China was developing a bioweapon. If you're a Chinahawk, this is something you'd be concerned about.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#697

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

ocschwar wrote: post #276
dandanua wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the lab leak theory is true, why Trump was so confident about it? Does he have sources that CIA does not? I would be so confident in it only in the case if I myself caused that virus leak...

Trump wasn't confident in the theory. He is not confident in anything. He does not care about the truth or falsity of anything he says. He only cares about it serving his interests.

Don’t you people tire of this? Do you really not realize why he just won every contest we have?

He was the president at the time - yes - he had better info than you. The people saying it wasn’t a lab leak had motivation to do so - and the head of that group just took a president pardon for their efforts.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#698

Post by draw_down »

tw04 wrote: post #521
jdietrich wrote: post #320

If we actually care about public health, we should act as if both the lab leak and zoonosis theories are correct. We should take laboratory biosecurity, wet markets, the bush meat trade and intensive livestock management equally seriously as threats. We should do this because we have no idea where the next pandemic - and there will be a next pandemic - will come from. It seems fairly clear to me that a lot of people…

Well, assuming you’re part of the “we” that resides in the US, I think we’ve made it pretty clear we’re aren’t taking any of it seriously. Pulling out of the WHO is akin to burying our heads in the sand. Sure, technically it “isn’t our problem” when some new disease breaks out in another country. But when (not if) it is eventually our problem, it’ll be a very big problem.

[dead]

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#699

Post by theptip »

oneshtein wrote: post #485
theptip wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The theory is quite clear, if you know which strains could hop to humans then you can prioritize monitoring them, just like we monitor influenza types in animal populations now. The problem is just that P(avert catastrophe) is fairly low, and P(create catastrophe) is substantially higher.

[flagged]

I’m pretty sure there is funding on both sides; NIH vs DARPA for example. I suspect that NIH funds a lot more here and I’m skeptical that DARPA funds labs in China for this.

The experiments WIV were doing were specifically targeted at identifying wild-type viruses that could cross over. This is not where you would start for a bioweapon. (Unless, tinfoil hat, you want to start a pandemic that looks like a zoonotic event. But that’s not the threat model the US military is worried about in the research they fund.)

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#700

Post by danenania »

llamaimperative wrote: post #691
danenania wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gain-of-function in the virology context doesn’t mean creating helpful microbes/viruses. It means purposely engineering pandemic-caliber viruses so that (the theory goes) we find them before evolution produces them naturally and so have time to study them and create vaccines before they are widespread.

> It means purposely engineering pandemic-caliber viruses This is not true. GoF includes any research that amplifies specific characteristics. Transmissibility or severity of infection are just two of those possible dimensions. For example, the research that enables us to produce insulin (and tons of other biologic medicines) with E. coli is GoF. I lean on the side of banning GoF that's designed to increase transmiss…

Fair enough that it has that meaning more generally in biology. My point is 100% of the policy discussions about it are referring to that particular subset—no one means producing insulin when they talk about the risks of GoF.
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