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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

#961

Post by intrasight »

goolulusaurs wrote: post #192

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…

IMO also it is obvious. And that was before a friend told me that his wife, who worked with the lab director, said it was a lab leak and that the Chinese govt had ordered all the lab notes destroyed.

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

#962

Post by yellowapple »

pagekicker wrote: post #840
yellowapple wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also weird to me that the Department of Energy (and not, say, the CDC/DHHS or USAMRIID or what have you) is advancing such hypotheses in the first place. What does the origin of SARS-CoV-2 have to do with American energy policy?

DOE supervises the national labs, which have 1) bio experience 2) high classification 3) supercomputers 4) lots more scientists than CIA or God help us FBI. DOE has organic science resources. The other agencies tend to rely on academic consultants, who are compromised because no one wants to bring virology labs under intense and blaming scrutiny.

Right, but that still doesn't answer why the DoE is supervising the national labs or otherwise has any significant degree of bio experience in the first place.

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

#963

Post by rleigh »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #942
rleigh wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you exactly mean that Gain of Function is "easier said than done"? We routinely engineer changes in viruses for all sorts of purposes. Even I can do it [baculovirus expression cassette vectors--takes less than a day from engineering the cassette to getting expression products]. The tools to do this can be ordered from a catalogue, and it's never been easier to manipulate genomes. You design and order the prim…

Then you don't understand viral evolution or genomic epidemiology. "Gain of function" genomes just aren't that viable. Modifying genomes always means the virus becomes less effective in most ways - except one. It's so much not like "programming" it isn't even funny. Posing "Gain Of Function" experiments as the origin of Sars-Cov-2 also forgets to answer the question of what exactly the starting genome was. At the ver…

I don't think it's me spreading baseless misinformation, it's you. Take a long hard look at what you wrote, what I wrote, and then think critically about the problem from all of the angles.

I have a degree in Molecular Biology and a PhD in immunology, and I've worked in infectious disease research. Most of what you wrote is dangerous and inaccurate nonsense.

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

#964

Post by pagekicker »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #151

There's a lot of bad headline-writing on this subject today. Here's the NYT's headline: Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says And then the sub-head (or dek, if you want to sound like you're in the know): The conclusion, which was made with “low confidence,” came as America’s intelligence agencies remained divided over the origins of the coronavirus. So we have a conclusion: 'lab leak most likely cau…

More context on the Energy Department labs:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/02/27/...

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

#965

Post by smsm42 »

Shekelphile wrote: post #849
smsm42 wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lab leak and bio weapon are two completely different theories, and conflating them means you don't actually bother to learn the argument of the opposing side(s), before dismissing them as "crazies". I think if you attempt to have serious discussion the minimum you should do is to learn what the disagreement is about. If you don't bother to do even that, then what's the point in it? Just booing the outgroup one more t…

> Lab leak and bio weapon are two completely different theories No, they're not. The people who pushed the lab leak hoax originally (and as evidenced by several redcap troll accounts in this thread) all believed that covid-19 was engineered in a lab and released by the chinese government to harm them personally. Even if it ends up being a case where a natural virus was studied in a lab and accidentally released, it d…

"Even if it's proved we are wrong, we were right because bad people partially agreed with our opponents". Makes sense.

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

#966

Post by freejazz »

kilgnad wrote: post #676
Godel_unicode wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our ability to prove a theory or not is entirely dependent on our ability to gather evidence for or against. How many other theories can be thought of is totally irrelevant. Low confidence means inability to prove or disprove. That is it. Edit: extrapolating further about this is just a Rorschach test.

This is just vocabulary. If you can't find evidence to support a theory confidently... I call it a crap theory.

Would you prefer to communicate without using words? I'm confused.

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

#967

Post by stolsvik »

weaksauce wrote: post #686
yibg wrote: post #647

Earlier 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.

Source?

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

#968

Post by kerpotgh »

tenpies wrote: post #631
mwbajor wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the mental gymnastics to discredit the lab leak hypothesis. The fact that the lab and epicenter of the virus are in the same geographic area make it the likely scenario and warrants the most investigation. The efforts to look past this seem artificial.

A big problem was that Trump was into this theory early on: the Chinese virus, from Wuhan. Let's time travel back to May of 2020 for example: "Trump claims to have evidence coronavirus started in Chinese lab but offers no details" [1]. According to the Swamp, Trump cannot be right about anything ever, therefore the virus' origin is unknown and don't call it the Chinese flu because that's racist - even if the early Ch…

[dead]

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

#969

Post by 2devnull »

Lots of cringy posts here. It was obvious a lab leak was the most likely. It’s useful that so many people discredited their intelligence by making outlandish assertions to the contrary, often going so far as to accuse anyone who disagreed as being in various ways substandard persons. These people seem to want to double down. A foolish consistency is what I expected, but it’s still pretty funny to read these comments and see the mental gymnastics.

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

#970

Post by ragazzina »

bmer wrote: post #305
nostromo wrote: post #260

The timing of this is interesting, given that China is now considering giving weapons to Russia for use in Ukraine. It seemed that from 2020 until recently, the intelligence community was trying to lower tensions with China. That's shifted now with China's increasing support Russia's war in Ukraine and China's increasing pressure in Taiwan. It's now in the US's interests to try and isolate China geopolitically. So, w…

I don't think it's against US interests for China to sell weapons to Russia. Post-WW2, the traditional way in which powerful nation states test their conventional (non-nuclear) capabilities has been through proxy warfare. The US would probably love it if China sold some of their weapons to Russia, so that US/NATO equipment can be tested against it. Conversely, the Chinese would probably not mind testing their "on pap…

>The US would probably love it if China sold some of their weapons to Russia, so that US/NATO equipment can be tested against it.

I think the help from China would be in the form of helmets, gear, and 122mm rounds. Nothing really technologically advanced to test weapons against.

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