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What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

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Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#741

Post by blitzar »

lazyeye wrote: post #652
blitzar wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not long after Australia pointed the finger at China, it emerged that Australian Government Labs had been doing gain of function research on bats ... If the bar for proof of guilt is "swift and furious reactions" then by the playground court rules; "whoever smelt it, dealt it" and "whoever said the rhyme did the crime"

This sounds exactly like the kind of disinformation the CCP would be creating and promoting.

Ah of course I am parotting disinformation from the CCP, not quoting from statements made by the Chief Executive of Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO.

Perhaps your aggressive rebuttal was a sign of your guilt and complicity in the global pandemic.

https://www.csiro.au/en/news/news-releases/2021/response-to-...

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#742

Post by Supermancho »

Supermancho wrote: post #555
themitigating wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obvious?

Magic Bullet Theory was an obvious consequence of a coverup at multiple levels, which most elementary school children understand.

I truly didn't think this was controversial. I would suggest talking to some pre->highschool kids shrug

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#743

Post by tripletao »

scotty79 wrote: post #689
kaitaincps wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A standard serology chain through animal populations showing a plausible path to Wuhan would make the lab leak hypothesis unlikely, or at the very least redundant. We do know that the pandemic started in Wuhan, or certainly that that’s the first major population centre it hit. Had it started elsewhere that’s where all the early hospitalizations would have been.

People have various definition what they found plausible. Majority of researchers think path leading from bats through civets is plausible enough given the evidence. As you said, Wuhan was only the first major population centre. First human patient or even first hundred patients could be from a small village that don't even have hospital nearby to have a hospitalisation and one or two elderly village dwellers dying b…

> Majority of researchers think path leading from bats through civets is plausible enough given the evidence.

Are you thinking of SARS-1 here? There's reasonably strong evidence that SARS-1 entered humans from bats via civet cats, since infected civet cats were found in the markets. For MERS we have very strong evidence of zoonosis, since many infected camels have been found and the phylogenetic tree shows evidence of repeated introductions.

No animals infected with SARS-CoV-2 have been found, except those infected by humans. Various researchers have proposed various natural zoonotic paths, but I don't think civets are a leading contender. It's hard to say what a majority of researchers believe, since most have stayed prudently quiet.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#744

Post by MisterBastahrd »

dpbriggs wrote: post #655
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget that the lab leak hypothesis was championed by political figures who were embarrassed that they were woefully clueless about how to implement pandemic response plans, even though their agencies already had those plans in place for years, and that their aligned media pushed these conspiracies without evidence.

Why is that a justification for heavy-handed censorship of a topic? Do you think that's right?

Well, let's see.

First, reporters are incapable of discovering this information on their own. They just don't have the tools. Investigatory bodies do, and reporters would have to wait.

Secondly, there were multiple plausible ideas about what could have happened. The drum was beaten on only one of them. Trump got caught with his pants down because as with everything else he's ever been a part of, he was woefully unprepared and out of his depth.

Third, and tying in with the first point, the more important story to virtually everyone was not how the first people were infected, but what the response and fallout of the infections were.

So again, you had a bunch of clueless, embarrassed political partisans who got caught with their pants down, and their base ate up the blame-shifting because of their xenophobic tendencies.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#745

Post by unity1001 »

throwoutway wrote: post #510
unity1001 wrote: post #506

Its pretty much alive. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/health/germs-fort-detrick... Considering the history of 'budget cuts to cut government spending' combined with 'innovation' causing many environmental and social disasters in the US, I see a lab leak from the US Army's lab in Maryland much more credible than anywhere else. Budgets get cut by 75% by Trump Admn. The Army labs 'get creative' in cutting costs and…

Imagine if this was coupled with the “publish or perish” academic culture. Do any universities have similar labs?

The format of relationships in between private, public institutions and universities and research organizations is extremely convoluted. Anyone may have a hand in anyone's pocket and anyone may be working with anyone. So, you could say that 'publish or perish' could also be a factor in such incidents.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#746

Post by tripletao »

mikeyouse wrote: post #572
mikeyouse wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are tons of horseshoe bats in Hubei, that particular misunderstanding needs to go away.

Too late to edit, but here's an article from 2018 following a group of scientists into a cave 60 miles from Wuhan to study horseshoe bats: https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002326/how-chinas-bat-caves-... Unfortunately for us, tons of bats carry viruses of all types and some of them are literally found on the campus of the WIV: 18.5% of Japanese housebats sampled in one study had beta coronaviruses: https://pbs.twimg.c…

There are bats almost everywhere in the world, including Wuhan. The question isn't bats, but bats carrying sarbecoviruses related to SARS-CoV-2, not just betacoronaviruses. Dr. Shi herself has stated that she didn't expect such bats anywhere near Wuhan:

> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201206204844/https://www.scien...

I've responded to you with this link before, and you didn't reply. It begins to feel like you are willfully disregarding all evidence contrary to your predetermined view, which is unfortunate.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#747

Post by kaitaincps »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #629
kaitaincps wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, wait...does this whole debate hinge around the idea that you think the WIV staff are reliable, honest agents ? The very idea is hilarious. They operate within an authoritarian regime that restricts their freedom of speech and makes threats against them and their families for non-compliance. It is irrational to trust anything they report as being true.

It's even more irrational to just assume the opposite or whatever you want to be true.

Well, that's an interesting question. If the public health dept wants to inspect a restaurant to make sure its hygiene standards are adequate, and the restaurant goes out of its way to try to delay or block such an inspection, should we lean towards: a) The restaurant has something to hide and is therefore likely to have poor standards or b) It is irrational to hold ANY position on the hygiene standards of the restaurant, given the lack of dispositive data

?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#748

Post by tripletao »

elil17 wrote: post #670
tripletao wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you'd like to see greater regulation of biological research, then I'm pretty sure strong evidence that it killed millions of people would help with political support for that? So I'm not sure why we wouldn't look, especially when many obvious paths (e.g. subpoenas for all data potentially containing early viral genomes as contamination, like from Illumina's cloud services) remain unexplored.

I think practically it would be used to generate hostile sentiment between countries and wouldn’t drive good regulations. But maybe I’m just a pessimist!

Hostile sentiment between which countries? The WIV was on Chinese soil, but received American funds and had many American collaborators; so I don't think either country is in a great position to blame the other. On the other hand that gives China and the USA a shared interest in discouraging investigation of the cause, as seems to have occurred.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#749

Post by gojomo »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #520
gojomo wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would two different non-bat animals shed two different (but closely-related) bat viruses, in a market with no bats, and far away from the bat caves where related viruses are documented? And further, manage this with no evidence of any other animals infected with related viruses in that region, nor along the trade routes any such animals/viruses must have followed? Those were the two luckiest bat-viruses ever! On…

Uh, are you aware that many different species have confirmed infections of Covid-19? The US department of agriculture has a list of different species where the virus was found: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/dashboards/tableau/sars-das... So evidently the virus has many options for intermediary hosts, there's no reason to require that there must be a bat nest directly on top of the market. Further, note that we've…

Yes, COVID has since spread back to many animals, & viruses can travel far. But they still haven't found the precursors of the Wuhan outbreak's original strains.

It is suspicious that EcoHealth lied about what research they had performed. It is suspicious that some very-dangerous, previously-undisclosed pre-May-2019 experiments were only revealed in a belated report.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#750

Post by Izkata »

kgwgk wrote: post #734
Izkata wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the source they're giving for the number, and there's nothing there that indicates it's valid. From every other source unrelated to that one, the UK's numbers have never been as high as they're claiming. Therefore, it's gibberish.

From every other source? The "Official estimates of incidence of new PCR-positive cases" published by the Office for National Statistics in the latest release of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey [1] add up to 160k per day in the UK for the week from 28 May to 3 June. The official estimate of people testing positive for COVID-19 has increased strongly since then - almost doubling from 900k for the week 27 M…

That's an estimation of unreported cases rather than actual counts. Actual counts are what the rest of us are talking about.
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