Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would be counterproductive.
Why? We should santion them worse than Russia.
Yes, we should, but not for that reason.
Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
911–920 of 1001 posts
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#912Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it clickbait? A US intelligence agency did say that the lab leak theory was more likely than the wet market one, even if their confidence is low to moderate.
And 4 other US intelligence agencies still say the wet market is more likely.
Got a source?
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#913No idea if it's possible to still find the source, but the doctor of patient zero also got infected (and died/"disappeared" afterwards like her boss at the wuhan hospital). Patient zero was a virologist that seems to have been censored off the Chinese internet afterwards, and I can't find the links anymore :-/ In the beginning of sars-cov-2 breakout there was an article shared on wechat that later got censored in var…
What about the guys who turned purple/brown?
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#914Earlier quoted context omitted.
A "sightly-less-shitty-than-other-theories" theory is still a shitty theory. Low-confidence means exactly what it sounds like.
Where’s your comment from two years ago belittling the wet market theory as shitty? This whole saga is a damning indictment of: science journalism, government agencies’ public engagement, scientists’ public engagement, and the critical reasoning skills of middlebrow audiences.
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Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#915Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where’s your comment from two years ago belittling the wet market theory as shitty? This whole saga is a damning indictment of: science journalism, government agencies’ public engagement, scientists’ public engagement, and the critical reasoning skills of middlebrow audiences.
>>> This whole saga is a damning indictment of: science journalism, government agencies’ public engagement, scientists’ public engagement, and the critical reasoning skills of middlebrow audiences Aint this the dang truth.
It's but just one example of the firehose of garbage aimed at us every waking moment.
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#916Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar? You have a long history of doing this on HN. I don't want to ban you again but if you keep this up, we'll have to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't know what you're talking about. This is not a flamewar, it is what is called "counter reasoning". There are people claiming that USA (and only USA) suffered because someone else's incompetence, but I lost a friend during COVID in the USA because of the undeniable underestimation (to say the least) that the Presidency of US showed. He would have lived if he was in China. So, please, if you have to ban me, do i…
This sort of fulminating rhetoric is obviously not what HN is for. We've banned you for it many times and if you don't stop, we'll have to ban you again. It has nothing to do with criticizing the US or any other country or thing; it has to do with not following the site rules and consistently violating the intended spirit of the place. Plenty of other commenters manage to be critical without doing that, and that's fine.
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#917Earlier quoted context omitted.
That you think it's a coincidence that a novel coronavirus pops up in the only place in china working on coronaviruses blows my mind. Any sane, rational human thought it likely a lab leak from the moment this thing started.
Or the scientists sensibly chose to build their lab near where novel viruses are expected to be found, to make studying them easier? You'd probably, for example, find that charities studying/helping poverty are often found near where lots of poor people live - yet you wouldn't blame charities for creating poverty.
> chose to build their lab near where novel viruses are expected to be found
Then they should have built the lab 800 KM south west in Yunnan. The lab is there for the same reason we have labs in NYC major regional hub with many universities, the lab has been there since the 1950s. Researchers had to travel to places like Yunnan and Laos to collect samples.
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#918Earlier quoted context omitted.
The headline is absolutely, literally true. I also don't understand the nuance that anyone could miss here. The astounding thing is that the Energy Dept. can say that a lab leak is the most likely cause of the pandemic, and people jump out in front of them to say that what they somehow still mean is that a lab leak wasn't the cause of the pandemic. They have "low confidence" that it was a lab leak ( there might not e…
How can "low confidence" and "higher confidence than all other theories combined" jive? Does it require "all other theories" to not include "we don't have a clue" which is the most likely of all or am I missing something else?
Well say you have one theory you reckon has a 40% chance of being correct, one theory with a 5% chance, and one theory with a 55% chance. One theory is more likely than the rest put together, but is still almost as likely to be incorrect as not.
Plus "none of the above" is always an option. You could have 3 theories that all have very little supporting evidence - one of those theories could be the most likely of all the actual theories, but "none of the above" could be even more likely if the best theory is still weak.
It sounds like it's just semantics but there's a world of difference between saying a theory is very likely correct and saying that it's the most likely of competing theories.
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#919Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need to "discredit" the hypothesis very much, because it shouldn't have any real "credit" to begin with. The only evidence for it at all seems to be the proximity of the Wuhan lab to the first known outbreak, plus the fact that 3 researchers got sick in November ( i.e. flu season) with some unknown virus. If you ask me, that plus $5 might buy you a cup of coffee.
So you discredit an incredibly likely theory that a rapidly spreading epidemic from an origin city in a totalitarian state with a highly specific lab focusing on coronaviruses, based on lack of credit ? I don‘t know what to say.
It's called "lack of available evidence." You can't use the fact that there isn't evidence of a thing happening in order to give the theory weight. When the evidence comes out, if it exists, and if it ever does come out for general consumption, then my opinion is subject to change.
Why not just say it came from North Korea? There's just about as much publicly available evidence for that as there is that it came from a lab leak in China.
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#920Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe because they are not easy to find? How long did it take to find SARS reservoir?
looked it up and it seems they found the source of SARS from 2002-2004 in 2017 so a bit over a decade.
Not true, it took them a few months. In this paper published in 2003:
> "Civet cats, a raccoon dog, and a ferret badger in an animal market in Gunagdong, China, were infected with a coronavirus identical to the one that causes SARS in humans save for an extra 29-nucleotide sequence" which demonstrated that these animals had a very close ancestral virus circulating within their populations.
Source: https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs.
You're mistaking ancestral origin with proximal origin. It took a decade to find the bat virus that infected the civet cats, but the intermediate host responsible for the spillover was found within months.