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What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

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Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#751

Post by kgwgk »

Izkata wrote: post #750
kgwgk wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

TFA says “Covid cases are rising again. In the UK, they have broken through the 200,000 infections-a-day threshold for the first time since April.”

You can choose to talk about whatever you want but given the 200k figure and April reference it’s quite obvious that they are talking about the total number of infections in the UK - not just the laboratory-confirmed count.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#752

Post by tripletao »

mikeyouse wrote: post #582
handmodel wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also very weird that the same type of people who normally talk about corporations/governments covering up pollutants do not talk about how many people could die from a potential lab leak.

Every single pandemic before SC2 was of natural origin. You have to make a much more persuasive case than "people could die from a lab leak" to ban research that could plausibly reduce the death toll from the next pandemic.

Are you not familiar with the 1977 flu pandemic? About 700k people died. You can argue about whether that was a "lab leak" or (as Gronvall prefers) a mere "vaccine accident", but either is unnatural.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#753

Post by inquirerGeneral »

lupire wrote: post #532
chasil wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I will tell you is a thing that I have read, and I hold close: Forgive one another, and you will be forgiven. In order to forgive, we must have the truth. Without it, we are in a fog of blind judgement and accusation. Clarity of the source of this misfortune allows us to forgive. I cannot say that I hold the full pantheon of the origin of these words to be true, but the four books that imparted this teaching to…

What books are you cryptically referring about? The USA just launched a major assault on the human rights of 55% of its population (women and homosexuals), after a yearlong assault on the foundation of our democratic government, all under the guise of four books of "mercy, justice, and hope". Forgiveness is not on the political table.

No post body was provided.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#754

Post by harishcs »

blitzar wrote: post #741
lazyeye wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Though your link doesn't quite say that, there are strong advocates of GOFROC (Doherty, Subbarao and others) at the Peter Doherty Institute, Melbourne. Moreover, one of the leading Australian virologists, Eddie Holmes, is a long-term collaborator of WIV and other Chinese institutes. But these facts by themselves are not indicative of guilt or complicity. What has been missing is an independent investigation of both possibilities (lab related and zoonotic spillover). The baffling reluctance of the US and China to call for such an investigation is very disturbing. However, to talk about guilt is premature at this stage.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#755

Post by l8rlump »

ayjchan wrote: post #663
trompetenaccoun wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Alina, thank you for doing the work that some others are seemingly afraid to touch! There are many fair-weather scientists, but researchers who consider all credible leads and data, no matter the popularity or political implications of the results, are much rarer. I have two questions: 1. There were genome sequences removed from the 'Sequence Read Archive', at the request of Chinese scientists.¹ It was later port…

Hi, Thank you for the support! :) 1. The deletion of published data is thankfully not something that commonly happens, but it is not against the rules of the NCBI database. Scientists who deposit their data into the database have the right to ask for that data to be taken down even if it has been published. That's why there is a concern that some scientists may have used this mechanism to delete original data with ea…

Hi. Re (1), did anything ever come of the story about the scientist who discovered some of the deleted genetic sequences on Google Cloud (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/science/coronavirus-seque...)?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#756

Post by ksec »

ayjchan wrote: post #531

This is Alina Chan, one of the co-authors of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. I’m going to answer some of the questions that have come up in the comments. 1. Are Chan and Ridley selling a book? Yes, the updated paperback comes out in the US next week: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/viral-matt-ridleyalin... The updated epilogue now discusses three significant new developments since the publication…

My question has been the same, ( apology if this was already answered ) why do we accept Dec 19 as the starting date, when we have evidence that partial Wuhan lock down due to "lung disease" started in November when Wuhan blocked International ( but not national ) flight to Wuhan airport.

I am going to ignore the WeChat evidence for discussions on WuHan "lung disease" in October and prior since those could be fake. But surely flight schedule cant be made up?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#757

Post by bayesian_horse »

kaitaincps wrote: post #747
bayesian_horse wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 restau…

I completely reject he analogy between health inspections of a restaurant and blaming a country for a pandemic using a highly speculative theory. It feels so ridiculous I don't know where to start.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#758

Post by Terry_Roll »

Terry_Roll wrote: post #383

> But what has disappeared is any real or urgent interest from the media and the scientific establishment in finding out how it started. It is the biological weapon that cant be proved it is a biological weapon.

Its symptoms are particularly nasty in a low humidity environment, like air conditioned vehicles, buildings and desert environments.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#759

Post by mrlonglong »

Virus is of zoonotic origin, not from some weird gain of function experiment that leaked. Period. The real problem is that the Chinese government (who I don't like very much) have such an ingrained culture of secrecy and censorship that prevented vital information from getting out that was the cause of the pandemic. Had we known by November 2019 it could spread through the air we might have stopped this in its track much earlier and saved millions of lives.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#760

Post by KaiserPro »

harshreality wrote: post #213
mikeyouse wrote: post #84

For those with a bit more background in the sciences, there's an increasingly massive amount of evidence to support Zoonotic origin. Philipp Markolin has a good rundown: https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g... Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing (e.g. whether it's a natural vir…

Most of the "evidence" against lab-leak is just weird insinuation. Speculation about how the virus wasn't created wholly synthetically: nobody is seriously arguing it was, or it wouldn't be SARS-family. Arguments that the spike protein binding domain wasn't synthetically engineered: it didn't have to be. It could have been serial passage in humanized mice, considering that's what Daszak and co had literally proposed…

The biggest single reason against the lab leak is this:

Its really fucking hard to reliably grow human virus. Yes, the Wuhan lab does it, but for like ~10 strains. It takes years of planning, and lots of money. Its not like you can easily hide that kinda shit.

Its not like you can dump the virus into a Petri dish, shove it in a incubator and have done with it. You need hosts and proxies. And guess what? something that replicates well in hosts doesn't replicate in humans. Not only that, there is a strong chance you have to modify the hosts to better accept the virus.

Also, its not like SARS-like virus is rare. MERS is relatively recent. MERS didn't catch on because you are very symptomatic.

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