Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

721–730 of 868 posts

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

#721

Post by rob_c »

drewbug01 wrote: post #707
rob_c wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh again this is where we were ending up. > So... I'm not certain this is a development worth trusting. Maybe it really did originate from a lab! But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me. 0. COVID-19 was mostly harmless. Even more so than Douglas Adam's books. 1. China reacted asif they'd accidentally released a biow…

You have some interesting thoughts. But: > 0. COVID-19 was mostly harmless. Even more so than Douglas Adam's books. At the beginning of the pandemic, I found out that my father and his partner had COVID. He lived, at the time, about 12 hours drive from me. Where he lived, his support network was thin (to say the least) - the little family he had nearby needed to keep away because they were responsible for caring for…

> How dare you paint it as “mostly harmless.”

Yes I am sorry for your loss. Now let's get to the point.

Because I understand statistics and am making sweeping statements I can and will make them from an objective viewpoint. Please do NOT sensor proven facts. I don't care for bible thumping tora humping nonsense that does not match reality. I'll take 2k years of religion and raise you 50 years of tech, oled TVs and microprocessors.

I know someone who ended up hospitalised and several years later does from complications due to a winter flu, doesn't mean we shut down society _every year_.

CV19 was a novel virus introduced into an existing population without any pre-existing immunity. This meant we will see complications, deaths at every age group and people's lives ruined by something that most 4yo, 25yo and 68yo will simply shake off.

Again the statement of millions dead _DOES NOT_ match the real world where several developed nations with populations sub 1B did not have dead numbers into the 10M+ of healthy individuals.

People died yes. This is expected. It is an illness. People die of staph infections. Life is unfair.

That _DOES NOT_ mean that this is equivalent to small pox. It's not a bioweapon it just meant the subpopulations who we identified really early (2020) should have isolated or accepted their risk.

The rest of society should not bend for the risk (again high survivability even in at risk groups). If it did we wouldn't sell guns, scissors or cross the road.

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

#722

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #713
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Novembe…

> There literally was an outbreak among lab workers in November to December of 2019.

No, there wasn't.

The 1st Trump administration leaked a rumor to the press that three workers got a respiratory virus sometime in the winter in 2019. Even if true, that's completely uninteresting. A large percentage of Earth's population gets any number of respiratory viruses every winter.

I have no idea where you're getting the rest of the details that you're claiming ("looks vaguely like COVID," "quarantined over it," etc.). They're not even in the Trump administration's leaks, and I suspect you're getting them from the online rumor mill.

> And we only know about the research they published, not what goes unpublished.

We actually know much more than what gets published. Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology regularly go and give talks at international conferences. There are visiting scientists at the WIV from other countries, including the United States. WIV scientists upload RNA sequences that they gather in the field to US-based gene-sequence databases. This wasn't secret research. It was out in the open. They would have had no reason at all to conceal the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 if they had had it. Yet there's no indication whatsoever that they had it. Everything we know indicates that they were just as clueless about the virus when the outbreak began as everyone else.

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

#723

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #711
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

> 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 animals were culled right at the beginning of the pandemic. The Chinese government immediately ordered all of the farms that raise the types of animals that caused the original SARS to cull their stock. We have never seen a sequence from any of those culled animals, either because no sequences were taken, or because the government doesn't want them to be published. In any case, culling the potential host population would have been a very effective measure for preventing the virus from spilling over again.

> 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.

First off, the fact that the closest known virus is in bats 1000 miles away is not at all surprising. With the original SARS virus, the closest known virus in bats was also from a site about 1000 miles away from where the human outbreak started. Second, other coronaviruses have furin cleavage sites, so this is something that has evolved multiple times. Third, we're not just talking about a few infected animals. We're talking about a population of infected animals, maybe on different farms. The few that were brought to the Huanan market in Wuhan seeded the outbreak in humans, but they were part of a larger infected population.

> 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."

This is not true. It took literally decades to locate the origins of AIDS. We still don't know the origins of Ebola (not a pandemic, but it has caused a series of large regional outbreaks and is the subject of intense study). There is a vast diversity of coronaviruses in bats, and the more scientists look, the more they find.

> it's looking increasingly like a virus that has been through a lab IMO.

Literally every piece of evidence has pointed towards the market, from epidemiology (which has firmly established that the outbreak radiated outwards from the market) to genetic evidence (multiple lineages of SARS-CoV-2 present in the very stalls where wild animals were being sold at the market).

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

#724

Post by gtgvdfc »

echoangle wrote: post #645
gtgvdfc wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a Chinese colleague in January of '20 saying it was obviously a leak. I hadn't even heard of Wuhan before, and he told me there is a bio lab there.

And what does that tell you? I could probably find 10 people in every country on earth that claim COVID-19 originated in a lab there. I don’t think being Chinese is a good qualification for determining where COVID-19 came from.

You're right of course.

This gentleman works in a US national lab, graduated top of his class in a top Chinese school and has friends that, at the time, worked in the Wuhan lab.

He, while very proud of being Chinese, was very critical of what he perceived his countrymen's lax safety standards. Myself, I can't judge that as I am not Chinese or an experimentalist so I deferred to his expertise and experience.

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

#725

Post by gtgvdfc »

gtgvdfc wrote: post #463
fgna wrote: post #3

Was thinking this would be due to the inauguration or decree spree, however the analysis was started under the biden administration

Actually under the original Trump administration. The intel community never dismissed the lab leak theory. The discrediting of it was 100% a psyop

Specifically, we now have internal emails dating to 2020 from the CDC (NIH? Who remembers, it's been literally two years since this came out) about how it was probably a lab leak and then about the importance to bury the lab leak theory.

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

#726

Post by gtgvdfc »

tim333 wrote: post #639
gtgvdfc wrote: post #467

What I never understood about the politicization of the lab leak theory is this: How is it more racist and Sinophobic to support the lab leak theory vs the wet market one? The lab leak theory has single individuals messing up. The wet market theory judges an entire nation's culinary habits. Of course racism has nothing to do with the Truth of COVID's origins. Im was just always perplexed how the lab leak ended up spu…

I have puzzled about that too. One issue with it being a lab leak is the Chinese very clearly said it's not a lab leak and tried to cover up, hiding databases, banning access to the lab or the area etc, so they would have been shown to be lying and covering up. Also about half the work at the WIV is military stuff and you're not really supposed to be doing military virus research these days.

I understand why China would spin it.

I understand why the NIH (who appears to have funded this) would want to spin this.

What was in it for CNN and MSNBC to spin this as racist when, IMHO, blaming COVID19 on culinary habits is far more racist? What was in it for Rachel Maddow to lecture America about the lab leak when she could have more effectively lectured us about financing the whole thing?

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

#727

Post by ksec »

giantg2 wrote: post #149
drewbug01 wrote: post #17

> The agency made its new assessment with “low confidence,” which means the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete. 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. --- One thing that is, however, quite certain: there are very real political reasons to favor one theory or another. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton is quoted as…

I have family that have worked on developing NBC equipment for the military. The first thing they said when covid was spreading was that it was most likely from a lab. That was before anyone in the news was saying that. So an independent first-look assessment by someone with experience, followed by later finding out that there was in fact a lab there, has me heavily leaning towards it being true. But it doesn't reall…

>That was before anyone in the news was saying that.

May be in the west? It was certainly well publicised in other regions.

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

#728

Post by sumedh »

maxglute wrote: post #676
sumedh wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't China not allow WHO to inspect the origin of the virus?

Because it validates US propaganda that virus originated in PRC, instead of PRC position that they were merely first to detect and warn. There is no reason to give WHO unfettered access based on US/western propaganda - that's stupid amount of soverign leverage to cede because Trump/Pompeo wants to pressure PRC via WHO. PRC has also asked WHO to investigate Fort Detrick, until US reciprocates, which they haven't? Does…

Can you post some videos from people who posted on social media reporting that people are dying in the US before Chinese people did it?

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

#729

Post by ocschwar »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #697
ocschwar wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A narcissist like Trump doesn't have better information than I do.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.

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

#730

Post by teddyh »

rayiner wrote: post #109
silverquiet wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Perhaps we'll do better next time around? We won’t, because the judgment of many of our cognitive elites has been impaired. This is a bit of a digression, but I’m reading a tweet thread by a $2,300/hour attorney who is an MSNBC contributor that is making just basic logical errors in discussing the birthright citizenship EO. Not even on the merits, literally in just summarizing the implications of the argument being…

> a tweet thread by […] an MSNBC contributor that is making just basic logical errors in discussing the birthright citizenship EO

No surprise there. Some people are not, contrary to your apparent assumption, actually trying to analyze something logically and arrive at some form of truth. I very much doubt that this has anything at all to do with COVID.

Post reply on HN