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Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

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Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#791

Post by cameldrv »

freeflight wrote: post #708
andai wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute [Wuhan Institute of Virology] published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect HeLa. The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[11][12] https://en.wikipedia.o…

One of the sources for that part is: "A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence" [0] The other source is a nature news article [1] which has by now following disclaimer: > Editors’ note, March 2020: We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is…

Right. There is a very reasonable explanation for the work they were doing. They were trying to modify existing non harmful viruses, to determine if it could evolve into a harmful virus. In order to do this, they created a harmful virus. As long as the biocontainment is perfect, this is potentially useful research.

Unfortunately, SARS-CoV-2 is a very contagious virus, so it's hard to contain. A lot of ink has been spilled about the Wuhan BSL-4 lab, but these viruses were only considered to be a BSL-3 pathogen, and were handled in Baric's lab at UNC in their BSL-3. I would assume that they would also have been handled at the WIV's BSL-3. There had been reports of biocontainment lapses at the WIV, and there have been a number of lab escapes of various pathogens including SARS at other Chinese labs.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#792

Post by 29athrowaway »

gregwebs wrote: post #397

This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1] This article points out that a lab outbreak could…

No need to demonize China, or better said, the Chinese Communist Party. They already behave in ways that are the envy of actual mythological demons.

Social scoring, mass surveillance, the Great Firewall, forced labor, harvesting organs from healthy people, Uyghur genocide, Falun gong murders, Tiananmen square massacre...

And actively trying to cover up every crisis, torturing and murdering anyone who speaks up. From environmental disasters to COVID-19 to party corruption.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#793

Post by [deleted] »

strogonoff wrote: post #468
gregwebs wrote: post #397

This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1] This article points out that a lab outbreak could…

An eerily prescient quote from a paper[0] published in 2015, two of the authors of which are with Wuhan Institute of Virology: > Understanding the bat origin of human coronaviruses is helpful for the prediction and prevention of another pandemic emergence in the future. China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I…

[deleted]

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#794

Post by thaumasiotes »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #637
agumonkey wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be pride over shame of incompetence maybe ? the wuhan labs are said to be lacking in standard safety biohazard practices.. so investigating may reveal that.

You gotta remember the culture, and that everything in China is political. You can't just say "oops" and learn the lessons. Any investigations will have the goal not of finding the truth, but of minimising damage to the political powers that control it.

> Any investigations will have the goal not of finding the truth, but of minimising damage to the political powers that control it.

This seems sufficient to explain why China wouldn't be interested in a foreign investigation into their labs.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#795

Post by ergocoder »

refenestrator wrote: post #701
marcus_holmes wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You gotta remember the culture, and that everything in China is political. You can't just say "oops" and learn the lessons. Any investigations will have the goal not of finding the truth, but of minimising damage to the political powers that control it.

That's not a cultural thing, it's a universal human/organizational thing.

Every time when there's a question about China's bad behaviour, someone will point out that it happens everywhere.

Yes, but in a vastly different degree, China goes to an extreme of making it political and look good.

In US, most leaks don't look good. Sure, US tries to make some problems look good, but they don't try very hard (or there's more balance in how an issue is investigated with multiple different parties).

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#796

Post by wonnage »

lamontcg wrote: post #684
dillondoyle wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CCP would also not release serology from blood banks and other blood from before dec which from what I understand would be a gold mine showing earlier spread. Which wouldn't that be in China's interest? I don't get why the 'cover up' (maybe i'm too biased with that term, utter lack of cooperation) beyond just the top down controlling nature of the CCP. Their actions don't lend us any trust so we do have to ask why..…

Because the intermediate animal is likely animal farming, and they don't want to take the economic and political hit of shutting down an entire industry. We don't have the will to do that either, we still haven't shut down our mink farms. And just for domestic propaganda reasons. If it came from China they could be blamed for it, and they want to deny/deny/deny and defect blame. Serves their propaganda purposes to ha…

Shutting down wildlife farms and consumption was actually one of the first actions taken, this was widely reported last year: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/03/15/9775278...

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/28/8839000...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/world/asia/china-coronavi...

etc.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#797

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

garmaine wrote: post #169
tbenst wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary. A leak implies that something was contained. Notwithstanding the complete lack of evidence for a leak—and one could waste a lifetime trying to disprove claims that have no evidence-if of natural origin, the virus was already infecting animals and/or people.

The lab had samples of a disease that is remarkably close to COVID-19: https://nypost.com/2020/08/15/covid-19-first-appeared-in-chi...

No, they didn't. The ancestors of RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 diverged decades ago. RaTG13 is not the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#798

Post by anothernewdude »

Izkata wrote: post #717
andrewflnr wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression was that "lab escape" was conflated with "deliberate release" by conspiracy types early on, and once that took hold it became impossible to talk rationally about the accidental escape hypothesis.

What I saw was the opposite: proponents of "came from a lab" were generally clear about distinguishing whether they meant "escape" or "release", while anyone trying to discredit them were the ones conflating the two - by starting with the ambiguous phrase "came from a lab", ignoring the rest of the argument, and then debunking "created + deliberate release".

Some of the debunking relied on the analysis showing that it wasn't the result of Gain of Function research. Whereas an accident could certainly be a release of a natural sample they were originally working on.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#799

Post by wonnage »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #427
lamontcg wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest difference between all of those and this virus is that those were leaks of already-known viruses. SARS-CoV-2 wasn't known to exist before 2019 and there's no known precursor virus. There's a somewhat closely related virus that infected the miners in Yunnan but it was only 96% similar. There's nothing at all in this article on how SARS-CoV-2 was discovered or created. The problem I have is that China isn't…

>The problem I have is that China isn't interested in investigating the start of the pandemic. Why should they be interested? We know how SARS type viruses can spread to humans, we know what other species are vulnerable, and we know what things make it more or less likely. A new outbreak was not a surprising result. What benefit is there to aggressively investigating the exact transmission method? If your mink idea w…

In any case, the original statement is silly in light of the fact that the origin of the much smaller SARS epidemic was still diligently researched and traced for 15+ years until it was finally found, in 2018: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#800

Post by [deleted] »

bitreality wrote: post #766
ethbr0 wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ask a liar a question, and they lie, then the strongest conclusion isn't that you asked the right question -- it's that they're a liar. China stonewalls pretty much every attempt by the international community to interfere with their internal control. So this is more "business as usual" than "Clouseau found the smoking gun."

The smoking gun is that labs in Wuhan were studying different coronaviruses in bats at the time the virus emerged. One of those labs was right near the seafood market which had one of the first documented outbreaks. It's all circumstantial evidence of course, but that's really all you're going to get with a country like China. We can be damn well sure that they would never admit to the virus originating from a lab le…

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