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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

#711

Post by pclmulqdq »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #546
pclmulqdq wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would expect, as was the case with SARS, that we would then find the population of infected animals. That did not happen with COVID, and in fact when we went looking, the closest virus in a wild population was a bat coronavirus located 1000 miles away.

> You would expect, as was the case with SARS, that we would then find the population of infected animals. In the case of SARS, the animals were not culled for months. The entire SARS response was slow - the virus kept spreading in farmed animal populations and kept spilling over into humans. With SARS-CoV-2, the Chinese government immediately ordered all the suspect animals to be culled. No test results for those an…

> In the case of SARS, the animals were not culled for months. The entire SARS response was slow - the virus kept spreading in farmed animal populations and kept spilling over into humans.

It's been 4 years. When are we culling the COVID animals? The answer is that there's no culling because there's no animal population with a virus that is close enough that it could have been the basis for COVID.

The closest known wild-type virus - the one in those bats from over 1000 miles away - is still missing several key features (eg furin cleavage sites) that would be exceedingly unlikely to have all evolved multiple times in the few animals that made it to the wet market.

Almost every animal population that has resulted in a pandemic in the past has been pinned down in a matter of months and "dealt with." Obvious examples are SARS, MERS, and the recent influenza pandemics. That hasn't even gotten close to happening with COVID. This is a core competency of public health agencies, much more so than you might have realized.

In 2020, the lab leak sounded like a conspiracy theory to me and I thought it was a matter of time until the animals were found. Now, with it clear that there is no population of animal hosts with a similar virus in a similar area (given huge databases of bat coronaviruses that were developed post-SARS), it's looking increasingly like a virus that has been through a lab IMO.

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

#712

Post by shakow »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #705
shakow wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple zoonosis events from close strains over a couple months from a local animal population strikes high on the probability scale. Virtually simultaneous, in time and space, zoonosis events from different strains at the same place is still possible, but reaches much lower on the scale.

If both variants are spreading in the farmed animal population, it's not unlikely at all. It's what you'd expect.

If it were coming from a farm population, I would have expected the said farm to have been found pretty easily by the Chinese investigation – and they would have had no incentive to hide it, as it would have pinned covid on basically a bad luck case once and for all.

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

#713

Post by pclmulqdq »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #551
pclmulqdq wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you believe that lab workers only work with cloned viruses? Do you know the exact nature of the research that was going on there? Two spillovers at a lab that has one spillover does not seem that unlikely. There's a good chance that the lack of safety was in the culture and not just one careless person. In November and December, several Wuhan Institute personnel were reporting unknown illnesses and took standa…

> Do you know the exact nature of the research that was going on there? We actually have a very good idea of what research was going on there. The groups in question publish their research, give talks at international conferences, upload the viruses they discover to US databases, talk with colleagues abroad, etc. We have a very good picture of what they were working on, and every indication is that they didn't have a…

> If that were the case, you'd see the outbreak centered on the lab. It wasn't. It was centered on the market, on the other side of town. So you have to start making implausible - and obviously motivated - assertions that two different lab workers went and infected people at the market, without infecting any of their colleagues or anyone else along the way.

There literally was an outbreak among lab workers in November to December of 2019. Many of them got sick with something that looks vaguely like COVID and quarantined over it - this is a standard precaution when you work around weird pathogens. Social media from these workers was suppressed when they talked about getting sick. Chinese whistleblowers discussed this at the time.

I'm frankly surprised you haven't seen any of this evidence given your interest in the subject.

And we only know about the research they published, not what goes unpublished. That includes various kinds of failed research, research that someone did for fun and wouldn't make it past ethics boards (a not-infrequent problem for this type of virus research), and research that was done under the table to nefarious ends.

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

#714

Post by [deleted] »

AngryData wrote: post #443
Enginerrrd wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not saying it, but you're obviously starting with a very different bayseian prior than my 50/50. As someone that makes forecasts for a living, I'd like to see what you're assumptions are about the base rates there. As for how the facts produce modifications to the base rate, personally I think that a virus identified in a cave over a thousand miles away popping up in a very urban area right next to a BSL facil…

Its origin is at a huge meat market full of both hunted and farmed produce and animals both live and dead from all over the country and attended by thousands of people daily. I find that far more convincing than the fact that there was a virology center in an urban area, there are virology centers in tons of large cities and all of them hold samples of many corona viruses because they are incredibly common. The fact…

[deleted]

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

#715

Post by tripletao »

strangecasts wrote: post #703
tripletao wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending how we count, there have been a dozen or so pandemics comparably novel or deadly to the 1977 flu in the last fifty years. Of those, at least one was research-origin. So are you really saying p ~ 1/12 is an "extraordinary claim"? Is a 6'1" American man "extraordinarily tall"? There's unfortunately no standard map between English phrases and numerical probabilities, but I think most people would understand a…

> Depending how we count, there have been a dozen or so pandemics comparably novel or deadly to the 1977 flu in the last fifty years. Of those, at least one was research-origin. So are you really saying p ~ 1/12 is an "extraordinary claim"? Yes, I think it is extraordinary to extrapolate one event in 1977 to a "once every fifty years" rate

Can you quantify what you believe is a correct prior then, and explain how you got that number?

I hope you're not going to count every natural spillover since prehistory in the denominator. The technology to culture and freeze an influenza virus didn't exist before ~1930, and the technology to genetically enhance a sarbecovirus didn't exist before ~2010. The absence of pandemics with such origin before that means nothing. No one had ever suffered a cancer induced by an X-ray tube before 1904; but that doesn't mean the risk wasn't there, and Edison's assistant still died horribly.

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

#716

Post by mitjam »

krona wrote: post #591
throwaway290 wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you followed events at the time and the suppressed rumours from doctors in China end of 2019, the new illness began exactly around that area actually ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang etc). There were no similar reports in another place on this planet. (Since 99% of other places do not have full control of media and many have better healthcare so if it happened it would be less likely to go unnoticed)

The main database of samples and viral sequences of the Wuhan Institute of Virology went offline on Sep 12th 2019.

Satellite images of Wuhan may suggest coronavirus was spreading as early as August 2019:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52975934.amp

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/08/health/satellite-pics-cor...

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

#717

Post by tripletao »

otherme123 wrote: post #628
timr wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Evidence suggest that patient zero was someone in the Wuhan market, around november 2019, and the SARS-CoV-2 genetic "signatures" where all found in wild animals for sale in that market. You're just repeating the conclusions of papers that made ridiculous leaps of logic based on circumstantial evidence. For example [1], which is the likely source of the argument you're (mis-)remembering, bases this conclusion on: 1…

Your guessing of my sources are wrong, thus your message is a strawman fallacy from beginning to end. There are studies pre SARS-CoV-2 about coronavirus in natural environments (like bat caves), and they found motifs that we found also in SARS-CoV-2. Zoonotic infections are very common and specially for coronavirus, so it should be our first guess unless overwhelming evidence shows that the virus was originated in a…

You provided no references, and you've made your claims in generally nonstandard terms. Given that, I don't think it's reasonable to criticize other users for guessing incorrectly what you meant to say.

> There are studies pre SARS-CoV-2 about coronavirus in natural environments (like bat caves), and they found motifs that we found also in SARS-CoV-2.

You're doing it again here, but I think you're probably referring to Andersen's Proximal Origin:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

But nobody disputes that SARS-CoV-2 evolved mostly in bats; the question is whether its path from bats to humans included a trip through the lab. No genomic evidence can distinguish between a novel natural virus and a chimera of two novel natural viruses. As Davis Relman wrote:

> Some [that's Andersen] have argued that a deliberate engineering scenario is unlikely because one would not have had the insight a priori to design the current pandemic virus. This argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory

https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2021133117

The WIV had the biggest collection of novel sarbecoviruses in the world.

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

#718

Post by camgunz »

rayiner wrote: post #695
camgunz wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Man, you're a smart guy. Just once I want you to like, do the reading and argue in good faith. I'm sure a lot of people on HN respect you, including me!

Let's say that any donation to any Democratic campaign makes you a Democrat (ignoring for a moment that being against Trump isn't the same as being for Democrats). By that logic maybe half of the signatories on that letter are Democrats--and also a few are Republicans. Also many "Democratic" signatories signed a letter against Obama when he revoked Brennan's security clearance, so how in the tank can they really be? Also the main way the Hunter Biden emails were "authenticated" was via DKIM, which would allow you to mix fake emails in with real emails (we recently learned you could do this with $8 of server time). Too farfetched? The Russians did it to Macron in 2017. Also let's not equate creating a false basis for a full on war with 51 intelligence professionals raising doubts.

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

#719

Post by belorn »

silverquiet wrote: post #98
pessimizer wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain. There's never going to be any conclusive evidence of the source of covid, and anyone claiming they have certainty (who wasn't a witness to a lab leak) is simply lying to you. What they're doing is going along with everyone else worth listening to, who find the coincidence that we were f…

I assumed it was a non-lab origin at first because that's how all previous pandemics have started as far as I am aware. A lab origin (and what precisely that means has never been particularly clear to me), but I have to say that I'd say your last observation cuts both ways - if one thinks this is such a great crime, then perhaps one would have encouraged masking, shutdowns/distancing, and vaccines, but those seem ant…

If we are looking what we could do better next time, then we should look to the studies that showed what worked and what was most effective. The most effective initial method against the virus was neither masking, shutdowns/distancing (vaccines are not applicable since they didn't exist initially). It was to close down mass transportation. Shared recycled air is a highly suitable transportation mechanism for this kind of virus, with airplanes, trains and busses being mobile centers for outbreaks. We should try to look towards this kind of research next time something like this hit and be more focused on what actually work, rather than what either the governing party or opposing party want to promote. Airborne diseases travel by air and if you want to prevent that you need to make sure that people who are non-infected do not share the same air as people who are. If that is impossible, shutdowns/distancing helps to reduce the risks until a vaccine is developed.

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

#720

Post by ikrenji »

pro lab leak: 1, WIV being 10 miles from the outbreak area 2, WIV housing dozens if not hundreds of strains of coronaviruses 3, poor bio security / laboratory technique amongst WIV staff 4, previous incidents of accidental leaks in Chinese labs

does it conclusively establish that the virus leaked from WIV? no. but i’d say it at least moderately probable…

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