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Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

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Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#921

IMO, it seems obvious from the behavior of China's government that they know it is a lab leak. If it wasn't a lab leak, then presumably there is an animal reservoir of the virus somewhere in China, but as far as I know they haven't claimed to have found it. But if there is an animal reservoir of the virus in China, then how could the Chinese government ever expect a lockdown to work? A lockdown on travel would only r…

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9 It took years to discover the location for the SARS bats. China is large, undeveloped and has lots and lots of bats.

But it took months to find the intermediate host: Paper from 2003 finding the virus that spilled over into humans in an animal sampled in the market https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#922
post #853

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't the intermediate pangolin idea also discredited as exceedingly improbable relatively early in the pandemic?

Can you link to a source?

No, I can't, that's why I'm asking a question about it.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#923
post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well its been years, why haven't they found the reservoir yet then? They would obviously want to since it would prove that it wasn't a lab leak, yet as far as I know they haven't claimed to have found it yet.

One argument against the cross-species transmission theory is that Chinese horseshoe bats (the reservoir for SARS and possibly SARS-CoV-2) don't really live in Wuhan. They live mainly in the south of China, see for example this map[1] from the paper "Bat Coronaviruses in China"[2]. This is where SARS was found in the wild, and where it first emerged as an epidemic[3]. It's not impossible that it would emerge in bats…

They absolutely live in Wuhan, or at very least, 60 miles away from Wuhan.

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002326/how-chinas-bat-caves-...

We have a huge sampling error problem since SARS clearly came from Yunnan, so much of the research and characterization focus has been in the South -- but bats and bat coronaviruses are endemic to all of China. Hence the caution on relying on this type of thought-process to make sweeping conclusions.

E.g, just "ctrl+F" for Hubei in this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7106260/pdf/mai...

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#924

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trump was demanding that "China pay" and people were beating up random Asians who were just walking down the street Unfortunately, random Asian people getting brutalized when they're going about their daily business has been a long-standing problem in a number of cities. Is there any evidence to suggest that the people perpetrating these crimes were even aware of Trump's words, let alone motivated by them, rather t…

> Unfortunately, random Asian people getting brutalized when they're going about their daily business has been a long-standing problem in a number of cities. It increased after the pandemic ( https://abcnews.go.com/US/hate-crimes-asians-rose-76-2020-am... and https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-hate-crimes-against-c... ). It's hard to get data on people's motivations for crimes, but we can very clearly see drastic…

https://www.justice.gov/crs/highlights/2020-hate-crimes-stat...

increases

anti black - 50%

anti white - 30%

anti asian - 75%

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#925

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A distinction without a difference. I've said it was a lab leak from about month two of the pandemic. Any sane person hearing me say this should assume I have low confidence as the sort of evidence necessary to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt is information a random hn commentor could not possibly have. Unfortunately, even expressing that you thought it likely it was a lab leak was enough to get my accounts bann…

If I ask you what time it is and you're not really sure, do you say "It's 1:04:35.023"? So if you 'said it was a lab leak', but expected people to know you really mean "based on the extremely limited information I have on the situation, it don't feel the possibly of it being a lab leak can not be entirely discounted", then you've communicated poorly. You've said in this comment that "you thought it likely it was a la…

What is your motivation in making this post other than to protect the Chinese communist party from any and all criticism? Since we're questioning motivations and all. Exactly what do we get by leaving the origins of COVID a mystery, and uninvestigated. Why do you think it's not important to know exactly the source of the virus.

Yes, if the virus were engineered or even just leaked from a wild source kept in the lab, we deserve to know, for a multitude of reasons.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#926

Earlier 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…

Yeah, this is how the fake news can lie with facts. "Most likely" might be technically true - in the sense that there might be a 2% chance it was that, but there's a hundred other possibilities each with lesser probability, so that one is on top. But it's not really likely at all. So writing the headline that way is absolutely designed to give you a false perception if you don't stop to think about that, which nobody…

Where did you get 2% from? I tried searching for what "low confidence" means when given by an intelligence agency, and in the process I'm finding a lot of people like yourself that apparently like to pretend it means whatever they want it to.

> But it's not really likely at all.

Is that what low confidence means in this context? After digging, I finally found a news site that said something that sounds credible: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan...

"Intelligence agencies can make assessments with either low, medium or high confidence. A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion."

That's a far cry from your made-up definition, which is, to be honest, likely motivated by your own partisan biases.

> So writing the headline that way is absolutely designed to give you a false perception if you don't stop to think about that

This news story was broken by the NYT, probably the most leftwing major print media company in the world. I'm pretty sure they have nothing to gain by misleading people into thinking the lab leak theory is more likely to be true than not, especially given their previous stances: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/health/wuhan-coronavirus-.... On the contrary, they risk offending their payer base by reporting the truth in this instance.

Let's face it. Your partisan side lost this one. They worked hard to suppress and censor anyone who dared claim the lab leak theory was plausible. They were wrong. And they were evil to do the censoring in the first place. Take your loss and move on.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#927
post #530

Earlier 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…

A "sightly-less-shitty-than-other-theories" theory is still a shitty theory. Low-confidence means exactly what it sounds like.

How many people in this world just put their blinders on and distort new information to fit their preconceptions and biases? What do you think "low confidence" means in the context of an intelligence report? I tried finding out myself, and I mostly just found people like yourself pretending it means whatever they want it to.

I was surprised to find, at CNN, of all places, something that actually sounds credible: "https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan..."

"A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion."

That's a far cry from "shitty theory".

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#928

Speaking of lab leaks... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/health/germs-fort-detrick...

> But there has been no threat to public health, no injuries to employees and no leaks of dangerous material outside the laboratory, Ms. Vander Linden said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#930

Speaking of lab leaks... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/health/germs-fort-detrick...

> But there has been no threat to public health, no injuries to employees and no leaks of dangerous material outside the laboratory, Ms. Vander Linden said. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

In the US common law, that is the thing that you need to say in case you face any court case whatsoever in the future. Any objective details that you give about the situation may be used as evidence against you in a court case by the prosecutors. Therefore you always need to start from 'nothing ever happened' and then negotiate down the responsibility as much as you can.

Immediately in that period the retirement homes in the area and later the state, started experiencing 'mystery pnemonia cases' in which a lot of elderly have died.

This is without the fact that the US govt. fighting the Army in the court to shut down a bioweapons lab should already signal the severity of the affair.

For anyone who follows the US corporate & regulatory space in regard to public interest lawsuits, that article at NYT not only being up today, but also having been branded 'published in 2019' to attract attention says a lot:

That article basically says that there was a leak in a bioweapons lab in the US due to failure of security measures, but the government has properly acted and even took the army to the court to shut it down. It basically exonerates the US admn. legally by hooking up the army, and actually the administration that very specific lab with all the responsibility, meanwhile signaling to all international observers including the decision makers in countries around the world that it was not the US govt. who did it. Therefore the US govt. cannot be sued for that even inside the US.

So the very article is a legal precaution per US law itself.

...

"Whataboutism"

Any claim/proposition has to be made on an objective framework. Otherwise they become hollow smears.

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