[HN Gopher] Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U....
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Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now
says
Author : cainxinth
Score : 485 points
Date : 2023-02-26 12:41 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| timcavel wrote:
| [dead]
| lsdflkwe wrote:
| [dead]
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Watering Can appositionist denies Cloud Theory.
| h2odragon wrote:
| [flagged]
| IngvarLynn wrote:
| My tangential hypothesis is: the virus was intentionally leaked
| prematurely to vaccinate humanity from real bio-weapon it would
| be developed into.
| h2odragon wrote:
| I like that one.
|
| I kinda figure Omicron was a developed "vaccination version"
| of COVID.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| It's not such a crazy idea because it had a large
| unexplained evolutionary gab in generic sequences from
| other variants that I believe is still pretty unexplained.
| The "conventional" theory is an immune suppressed HIV
| patient, but I've read that idea has a lot of holes in it.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| [flagged]
| hotpotamus wrote:
| And given the path of technology, what's to stop one future
| Harvard PhD virologist from developing his own viruses in an
| off-grid shack in the woods?
| ttul wrote:
| That may be a neat concept for a science fiction novel, but it
| seems more likely that someone at the Wuhan BSL4 was working
| with coronaviruses (as they do) and somehow contracted the
| virus themselves. They may have been working with lab animals,
| such as bats. The virus didn't have to come with a sinister
| intention.
|
| Looking at this another way, until today, the most common
| hypothesis was that the virus crossed into humans because of
| contact with wild animals. A lab leak probably also involved
| contact with wild animals. It's just now the Energy Dept. has
| gotten their hands on intelligence supporting this notion in
| particular.
| pelasaco wrote:
| I wonder how embarrassing should be to all media and people
| calling other names because they supported this theory since the
| day one..
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| Nothing seems certain at this point, but, let's say the pandemic
| was actually caused by a lab leak. That'll mean the world was
| brought to an economic standstill and millions of people died
| because of the errors and carelessness of some people...will
| there be consequences? What will be the assurance that such
| deadly mistake won't occur again?
|
| If it was actually a lab leak, then it'll definitely rank as the
| most costly and fatal mistake in the 21st Century. I can hardly
| wrap my head around it; human error causing damage on a mythical
| scale. Scary stuff.
| lsdflkwe wrote:
| [dead]
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I'd still say the Iraq War was most costly and fatal mistake in
| the 21st Century.
|
| Hard to compare, admittedly.
| dalemyers wrote:
| Based on what exactly? According to Wikipedia, the Iraq War
| produced a total death count of 25,071 and a total wounded
| count of 117,961. Also according to Wikipedia COVID-19 has
| produced a death count of 6,868,964 and an infection count of
| 674,809,997.
|
| I'm all for complaining about US tactics, but it's 100%
| incorrect to try and claim that the Iraq War was "worse" than
| COVID-19.
| r00fus wrote:
| Iraq only produced a death count of 25k? Do Iraqis not
| count?
|
| Also almost all of the violence post war should be somewhat
| attributable to the invasion; we broke the basket to secure
| oil rights (and some argue to also keep the petrodollar as
| the world reserve currency)
|
| The cost was way more than the cherry-picked stats you
| present
| glofish wrote:
| When it comes to the Iraq War, according to the Wikipedia,
| and let me quote it
|
| > "An estimated 151,000 to 1,033,000 Iraqis died in the
| first three to five years of conflict."
|
| Then that famous video of "Madeleine Albright Saying Iraqi
| Kids' Deaths 'Worth It'" talked about half million
| children.
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/watch-madeleine-albright-saying-
| ira...
| rngname22 wrote:
| There's a reasonably high chance that SARS-2 covid virus
| leads to a minor or moderate decrease in average lifespan
| (due to the effects on the vascular system and wreacking
| havoc on all sorts of organs) and that it will continue to
| circulate in humanity forever.
|
| If that's the case it'll just slowly outscale any singular
| event like the Iraq War over multiple human generations of
| deaths and damage.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| Let me play the game. If covid was caused by a lab leak, I
| think the right question to ask is: who benefits (did benefit)
| by the leak? And remember that number of dead people is
| something that governments don't care about (i.e., governments
| easily go into war every now and then: it's clear they couldn't
| care less about civilians).
| imnotreallynew wrote:
| > who benefits (did benefit) by the leak
|
| The worlds billionaires, combined, made more money in
| 2020-2022 than the previous 20 years _combined_. When there's
| that much money involved, one must be a little suspicious.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Another question you should ask: Who insisted it almost
| certainly wasn't a lab leak, and who possibly had motives to
| deny it?
| bee_rider wrote:
| I dunno actually, who has actually been arguing that it
| couldn't be a lab leak? I've generally seen people arguing
| the position: there's no evidence _for_ it having been a
| leak. This second hand story about a low-confidence
| classified report doesn't push me much in either direction.
| It is possible, though.
|
| What do we do if it leaked? Dangerous thing are handled in
| labs. We _should_ double check the handling protocols based
| on the unknown possibility that it was a leak, just to be
| safe. I bet there are more dangerous things than COVID in
| all sorts of labs.
| dmix wrote:
| Both the FBI and Energy Dept are saying it was an unintended
| leak.
| lmiao wrote:
| Even if we accepted the idea that "governments don't care",
| it's still made up of people that act out of self interest.
| How would they protect themselves and their loved ones from
| the same fate that they so callously cast upon the rest of
| us? I think Hanlon's Razor applies: "Never attribute to
| malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect"
| VagueMag wrote:
| > _How would they protect themselves and their loved ones
| from the same fate that they so callously cast upon the
| rest of us?_
|
| A good question, but worth noting that they do seem to have
| in fact done so. I struggle to think of a single-higher up
| of any significance who was felled by SARS-CoV-2, despite
| the fact so many of them are octogenarians. Colin Powell
| maybe, but his blood cancer was clearly the more proximate
| cause of his death. A few in Iran, but, well.
| aquarium87 wrote:
| It's simpler. Tools x labs x pathogens and funding x risk of
| escape = risk.
|
| ALL categories are going up. Ergo, risk is going up
| exponentially.
|
| No need for conspiracies. Just a proper parsing of the words
| "lab leak"
| VagueMag wrote:
| How do you embrace "lab leak" without also embracing a
| conspiracy to conceal the virus's origins after it escaped
| into the wild?
|
| Or has the term "conspiracy" just been fully redefined to
| mean "a thing that can't happen" at this point?
| vkou wrote:
| > That'll mean the world was brought to an economic standstill
| and millions of people died because of the errors and
| carelessness of some people...will there be consequences? What
| will be the assurance that such deadly mistake won't occur
| again?
|
| If history is any indicator, no, and there isn't any.
|
| But if you're interested in establishing precedent for reckless
| behaviour damaging the world economy, and the health of
| millions of people, I understand that would open the developed
| world to a mountain of liability in the arena of climate
| change.
| roarcher wrote:
| > it'll definitely rank as the most costly and fatal mistake in
| the 21st Century
|
| Ah, but the century is still young.
| aquarium87 wrote:
| Very astute! The First! Lab escape happened in 2021. CRISPr
| was invented in 2000-2005ish. CRISPr cas9 around 2014.
|
| BSL-4 labs have gone from 40 to 60ish in the last 25 years
| with another coming online almost every year.
|
| BSL-3 labs are virtually uncountable and are in the 13000ish
| range in the USA alone (sorry, can't Remeber source)
|
| Put it all together, and only an idiot STARTS with natural
| origin.
|
| Also, there will be many many more.
| giardini wrote:
| So the only solution is to build my own BSL-4 lab and live
| inside it. We now have a "BSL-4 lab gap":
|
| "We must not allow a mine-shaft gap!:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybSzoLCCX-Y
|
| [I miss Peter Sellers!]
| psychlops wrote:
| Based on what you suggest, there is every incentive for things
| to remain uncertain permanently. Any smoking gun will be hidden
| away and discredited.
| credit_guy wrote:
| The only reason to not say it was a lab leak is to avoid
| embarrassing those responsible, China first and America second.
|
| But little by little people will start accepting that.
|
| What should the consequences be? At the very least a tightening
| of the controls around labs doing bio research. Of course, this
| amounts to nothing if someone is allowed to outsource research
| to labs in countries that don't follow the stringent
| procedures. So, anybody who does such outsourcing shares the
| full responsibility if things go wrong.
|
| What about Covid itself? China and America need to provide
| reparations. How much? Clearly in the trillions, maybe double
| digit trillions.
|
| How about those who obstructed the investigations? I think they
| should face justice, and it's not unreasonable to expect that
| some would go to prison for their obstructions.
|
| Both in China and America? For sure in America, where the arm
| of justice has a long reach. In China, if Xi wants a well
| functioning Party, yes, he should sent those who obstructed to
| jail, for if he tolerates that, his Party will go in decay.
| survirtual wrote:
| This is what diplomacy is for.
|
| We need treaties tightly regulating all biolabs around the
| world. Any countries not agreeing with the treaties should be
| blacklisted from entering entering or exiting countries that
| are part of the treaty, perhaps even restricting trade as
| well.
|
| The decontamination protocols and entry / exit procedures for
| every biolab should be unified, worldwide, with strict and
| regular third-party circular auditing around the world. This
| allows labs to maintain their secrets; only the perimeter /
| filter are subject to this.
|
| That would be the sensible course of action as a matter of
| Earth defense.
| frankharv wrote:
| Why exactly would USA need to pay anybody anything.
|
| This thing slipped from a PLA Lab.
|
| Reparations? You must be from california.
|
| Sorry USA is not responsible for shit.
|
| Our public health system is now considered a pariah.
|
| Now when the real virus comes we will all scoff at the shot.
|
| CDC now is questionable to many people.
| bmikaili wrote:
| AND america? nah man China should pay reparations or face
| heavy sanctions and geopolitical isolation.
| credit_guy wrote:
| America founded research at the Wuhan lab [1], and more
| precisely exactly the research that lead to the virus
| outbreak. EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak
| have been working with Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the WIV
| [Wuhan Institute of Virology], for more than 15 years.
| Since 2014, an NIH grant has funded EcoHealth's research in
| China, which involves collecting faeces and other samples
| from bats, and blood samples from people at risk of
| infection from bat-origin viruses. Scientific studies
| suggest that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus most likely
| originated in bats, and research on the topic could be
| crucial to identifying other viruses that might cause
| future pandemics. The WIV is a subrecipient on the grant.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02473-4
| cld8483 wrote:
| > _What should the consequences be?_
|
| The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on them
| a hundred years. Allow the development of vaccines for extant
| viruses, but completely ban all Dr Frankenstein activities
| with viruses. No more _" invent a virus in a lab to beat
| nature to the punch"_ horse shit, with is flagrant weapons
| development under the cover of civilian research. As soon as
| the virus started circulating through the population, did
| these researchers share their knowledge and help develop a
| vaccine? No, they buried their involvement and covered up
| everything they knew. They were no help at all, and never
| intended to be. Burn their books which describe how it is
| done, and silence the people who already understand it with
| the threat of criminal imprisonment for sharing their
| knowledge. Encourage major religions to amend their rules
| with strong taboos against this research, and institute harsh
| economic sanctions against any nation that doesn't
| participate in this ban.
|
| Does this seem extreme? It shouldn't. This field of research
| has the power to kill billions _and no demonstrable upside_.
| It is even more dangerous than nuclear weapons; because at
| least a technician at a nuclear weapon production facility
| would be hard pressed to release his work on the global
| public of his own initiative. Smuggling a virus out of any
| lab is trivial, all it takes is a single madman 's
| willingness to sacrifice himself as patient zero.
|
| We're the villagers in an "evil wizard" scenario. The wizards
| have been meddling in dangerous forces beyond the
| understanding of common people, and it's getting people
| killed. The solution is to storm the wizard's tower and throw
| the wizards off the top of it.
| tripletao wrote:
| > The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on
| them a hundred years.
|
| This kind of sloppy hyperbole is tremendously damaging,
| feeding the false narrative that we must choose between the
| benefits of modern virology--smallpox wasn't eradicated
| until 1977!--and the catastrophic risks of experiments on
| novel potential pandemic pathogens.
|
| Almost all modern virological research involves either
| existing pathogens already present in humans, or novel
| pathogens in systems incapable of replicating in humans.
| The WIV's research was a narrow exception, and one that was
| controversial long before this pandemic. For example,
| here's David Relman asking Ralph Baric a question about
| those risks, back in 2014:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw-nR6-4kQQ&t=2466s
|
| That narrow area carries almost all the risk of a
| catastrophic research accident, and has yet to deliver any
| significant benefit. It could be banned with minimal impact
| on almost all modern virological research. That narrow
| regulation is what we need, and there are people (like the
| new NGO Protect Our Future) working to draft and enact it.
| Your conflation between modern virology in aggregate and
| that narrow area doesn't help them, and I hope you will
| stop.
| che_shirecat wrote:
| Hackernews now advocating for burning books, wow. This is
| the end result in allowing political ragebait threads
| instead of focusing on tech and startups.
| educaysean wrote:
| That's as dense as claiming we should punish the Cambridge
| Analytica incident by reverting the entire humanity's
| computing technology by a century. There are numerous
| perspectives in which you and I are the evil wizards simply
| because we're in this move-fast-and-break-things industry.
| Don't burn the field just to punish a few.
| tzs wrote:
| No one is going to pay any significant reparations for a
| couple.
|
| 1. Too many first world countries do not want to open up that
| can of worms because it might come back to bite them in the
| ass over the various things they have inflicted
| environmentally on the rest of the world.
|
| The US and Europe for example are responsible for the
| overwhelming majority of greenhouse gases currently in the
| atmosphere--yes some other countries are now emitting
| comparable amounts to current US/EU emissions, but because
| CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years the US/EU
| emissions from the past 200 years still massively dominate
| and will for a long time.
|
| 2. Calculating the reparations amount due to a given country
| would require an analysis of how much of their losses were
| due to their poor handling of COVID. There's too much risk
| that such analysis could conclude for many countries that
| their net losses were way higher than they would have been
| had the country handled it better.
|
| If you suffer $X loss but then only get say 1/10 $X in
| reparations because that analysis concluded that 90% of your
| loss could have been avoided if you'd handled it better, your
| citizens aren't going to be happy their government got the
| 1/10 $X in reparations. No, your citizens are going to be
| annoyed their government botched things making COVID 10 times
| worse than it had to be.
| heywhatupboys wrote:
| > China first and America second.
|
| wtf????????????? I have no idea what you are on about
| credit_guy wrote:
| The US was paying for the research that lead to the virus
| outbreak. Simple as that.
|
| [1]
| https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_R01AI110964_7529
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| "U.S. agency's revised assessment is based on new intelligence"
|
| What is that intel?
| fswd wrote:
| This appears to be the most censored hacker news comments section
| year to date.
| dang wrote:
| Not sure what you mean but it seems par for the course to me.
| fakethenews2022 wrote:
| What justification is dang using to censor?
| fswd wrote:
| I should clarify, I'm not suggesting you are censoring, or
| "site sponsored censorship", rather censorship from users via
| downvotes. They both accomplish the same thing I could
| understand why somebody might misunderstand me that you are
| censoring.
|
| The Nordstream 2 thread was also interesting, with tons of
| users trying to appeal to you specifically to do site censor
| the story, or tone policing. I remember you stuck to your
| guns.
| rocketbop wrote:
| It seems like more than a stretch to say downvoting is
| censoring, as the comments are still visible. Flagging,
| perhaps.
| joenot443 wrote:
| [flagged]
| mindslight wrote:
| The source of the problem is _all_ the terrible leaders,
| whether they be the media, politicians, etc. You 've focused
| solely on the "media", but a large part of the anti-science
| tribalism flowed from the infantile president trying to point
| the finger at anyone else, rather than accepting the existence
| of and dealing with the problem. When that much nonsense is
| being pumped into the zeitgeist, priors get massively screwed
| up - anything resembling the nonsense is dubious, so anything
| opposing the nonsense is duvious, and so on.
|
| Also it's not particularly appropriate to use the label
| "conservative" for those trying to buck societal institutions.
| The actually conservative position was to follow public health
| advice.
| hairofadog wrote:
| As an American progressive, here's how I feel about it. I have
| no doubt that others will have a different take.
|
| I don't think it was tribalized by _American media_ ; I think
| covid hit when much of the world, not least the US, was
| embroiled in tribalism. I wanted to know whether it had come
| from a lab leak, but at the time a lot of the lab-leak rhetoric
| was packaged along with racist and nationalist vitriol, to the
| point where people who appeared to be of Asian descent were
| being attacked in the street.
|
| So sensible people who suggested the virus may have come from a
| lab were out-shouted by people saying things like _The election
| was stolen, Jews will not replace us, China virus, execute
| Fauci, being asked to wear a mask in Starbucks is like the
| Holocaust_. I can forgive people for not wanting to try to pick
| out valid points from that particular torrent of bullshit. I
| think the resistance to the lab leak theory was less that
| people were dismissing science and more that the zone had been
| flooded and they were up to their neck in it.
| puffoflogic wrote:
| > anti-science tribalism
|
| I don't know what you mean by this. The Science said it wasn't
| a lab-leak, and we trust The Science, so it couldn't have been
| anti-science.
| michaelgrosner2 wrote:
| > American media
|
| Huh? The previous President of the US frequently called it the
| "China Virus".
|
| > GOP conspiracy to bring down Biden
|
| Biden wasn't President for the first year of the pandemic, not
| sure how that works out.
|
| > Are American progressives so fragile in their identity that
| they avoid agreeing with conservatives for fear of guilt by
| association?
|
| I personally don't care whether the virus was man-made or
| natural. It bares next to zero importance on my life. At the
| end of the day what are we really arguing about? Lab practices
| in China? The Chinese should be better about lab safety and wet
| markets. But there was a pandemic which has killed millions of
| people. It seems like the people most invested in this question
| are also the ones most invested in downplaying the pandemic,
| which is just evil.
| joenot443 wrote:
| >I personally don't care whether the virus was man-made or
| natural
|
| That's really surprising to me, because in my opinion the
| answer truly does matter, and sticking my head in the sand
| feels defeatist. I suppose that's a difference of opinions,
| though.
| kelipso wrote:
| I guess it's a natural human reaction when something
| reflects badly on you. I never cared about it anyway, it
| doesn't really matter, etc.
| gWPVhyxPHqvk wrote:
| How does it really matter though? What are in the Western
| world going to do in retaliation? Are we going to start a
| war with China over their bio-lab programs?
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| > How does it really matter though?
|
| I'm seriously baffled how people say this.
|
| It's it obvious that if true then BSL4 virology and gain
| of function work needs international supervision and
| agreement for humanity.
| crayboff wrote:
| To be fair in this instance, this is a wild story that does
| have all the hallmarks of a wacky conspiracy theory straight
| out of a Bond film. Some secret Chinese laboratory is doing
| some secret stuff with some super spreading disease and then
| whoops it gets leaked and shuts the entire world down.
|
| Also keep in mind where the info was coming from in the US: it
| was being introduced by Trump. This is someone who regularly
| spouses countless baseless conspiracies whenever he needs some
| sort of ammunition to blame a group he doesn't like. There is
| plenty of fair reasons to not have believed this story.
| ithkuil wrote:
| It's not some secret Chinese laboratory. It's a well known
| institute, a pretty famouse one in fact. It's the place that
| identified the source of the 2003 sars pandemic.
| zzzeek wrote:
| perhaps this is to pressure China into allowing the WHO
| investigation, which they have blocked [1], to proceed.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00283-y
| imiric wrote:
| Why does it even matter at this point?
|
| The WHO investigation in 2020, and subsequent report, was a
| complete sham. The CCP has the WHO in their back pocket.
| Nothing they say has any relevance in the matter.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| I thought it was xenophobic and dangerous to suggest that it was
| a lab leak? does this mean it's OK to talk about it?
|
| Sarcasm aside, this is ridiculously overdue. It was never
| xenophobic to want inquiry into Covid being a lab leak. The
| outrageous politicization of finding the source of the outbreak
| is shameful.
| imnotreallynew wrote:
| [flagged]
| puffoflogic wrote:
| The state religion reveres experts, who are by definition the
| people with conflicts of interest. It's normal.
| ethanbond wrote:
| You think it's weird that one of the top virologists in the
| world was responsible for finding virus research and for
| planning virus outbreak response?
| aquarium87 wrote:
| I find it wierd that he took money to STOP the next pandemic
| and ended up creating it.
| Zetice wrote:
| It would be weird, but that's not what happened at all!
| aquarium87 wrote:
| Incorrect. Lab leak is de facto default from now on in
| the world we live in. Even if you disagree, it will be in
| 5 years. The tech, the databases, the labs, the money.
| It's all increasing. Every single year the risk of a lab
| leak goes up, to the point where we are expecting a covid
| per decade out of the labs. But hopefully the rest of the
| world is more ethical than the chinese and their new and
| novel virus creation strategy and we get relatively
| harmless versions of the flu etc. Rather than pathogens
| with zero prior human cohabitation.
|
| Funny how all the datapoints, including new and novel to
| humans get ignored.......
| ethanbond wrote:
| 1) That's a big assumption you're making, _even if_ it was
| a lab leak (which is itself a big leap from what's known
| today)
|
| 2) It also wouldn't be "weird" at all. That's like saying
| you find it weird that a firefighter got burned or a
| nuclear safety researcher caused a nuclear safety incident.
| aquarium87 wrote:
| No it's not. Not at all. Everything risk is increasing
| exponentially. BSL-4 labs are expanding 1 per year, or
| around 2% extra risk. CRISPr and CRISPr cas9 are only 10
| and 20 years old. How much added risk is that per year?
| 10,000%?
|
| Then to send money to actively seek out bat viruses in
| the place thought to harbor the worse or most diverse
| viruses?
|
| And to do all that in partnership with a hostile enemy
| who most certainly isn't going to tell you all the extras
| they have planned above and beyond the controllable.
|
| No, I think you are dead wrong. The default assumption
| from now on is lab leak unless proven otherwise, because
| that's the risky world we live in. Period. No getting
| around it. And the risk gets higher every year.
|
| There are literally tens of thousands of BSL-3 labs in
| the world. They aren't sitting empty doing nothing. They
| are busy trying to "save us".
| ethanbond wrote:
| I can't really tell what position you're arguing against
| here. I personally find the risk of GoF research to
| probably net out to "not worth it," but that's an
| entirely different conversation than "did Fauci cause
| this."
|
| And no, it's nowhere near acceptable to just assume that
| every new virus is a lab leak. Especially when the
| subtext of this line of inquiry is usually that we're
| going to "hold 'them' accountable" somehow. Combine those
| two thoughts and you get something like, "anywhere that a
| novel virus appears in suddenly gets smacked by the
| international community," and I'm not sure you could
| create a stronger _disincentive_ to early pathogen
| detection and alerting if you tried.
|
| P.S. There's almost certainly not anywhere close to "tens
| of thousands" of BSL-3 labs. Probably in the few hundreds
| to _maybe_ thousand or two, but that 'd be a stretch, and
| "tens of thousands" is not supported by any data I can
| find: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/mapping-
| biosafety-le...
| carlivar wrote:
| How is "top" virologist measured? If it's simply by years of
| power, this is accurate I suppose. However I think "most
| powerful" is a better term than "top".
| ethanbond wrote:
| Like it or not this is how scientific output is usually
| measured. He is a prolific scientist in his field and has
| been for decades, well before COVID happened.
|
| > In a 2022 analysis of Google Scholar citations, Dr. Fauci
| ranked as the 44th most-cited living researcher. According
| to the Web of Science, Dr. Fauci ranked 9th out of 3.3
| million authors in the field of immunology by total
| citation count between 1980 and April 2022. During the same
| period, he ranked 22th out of 3.3 million authors in the
| field of research & experimental medicine, and 715th out of
| 1.4 million authors in the field of general & internal
| medicine.
|
| 2019 and _prior_ Google Scholar shows him cited about 8,000
| times per year. In 2020+ that only jumped to 10,000, so his
| ridiculous statistics here are not entirely (or even
| mostly) due to COVID related stardom.
| denotational wrote:
| Without meaning to take a position either way, as a non-American,
| why does the Energy Department have a position on this?
|
| I'm aware that the Energy Department has sone degree of
| responsibility for the US nuclear arsenal, but even taking that
| into account, it seems out of scope.
| porcoda wrote:
| The placement of the national labs in DOE is mostly a
| historical artifact of the time they were born. They cover most
| sciences these days and it isn't uncommon to hear people with
| DOE jokingly refer to it as the "department of everything".
| fidgewidge wrote:
| The US government is so large and sprawling that essentially
| every agency concerns itself with every possible topic.
| ttul wrote:
| Firstly, the DOE has expertise in areas such as biosecurity,
| biodefense, and biological threat reduction, and is responsible
| for managing national laboratories and supporting research in
| various scientific fields.
|
| Just one example of this is the HAMMER facility at Hanford, WA,
| where DOE can train people to deal with all manner of
| disasters. https://hammer.hanford.gov/
|
| Given the potential for a laboratory-originating virus to pose
| a significant threat to national security, the DOE may be
| interested in studying the origins of SARS-CoV-2 to better
| understand the risks associated with biosecurity and to inform
| its efforts to prevent and respond to biological threats.
|
| Secondly, the DOE has collaborated with other agencies, such as
| the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for
| Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in conducting research
| related to COVID-19. The origins of SARS-CoV-2 are an important
| aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic and understanding its origins
| can inform public health responses and the development of
| treatments and vaccines.
|
| Finally, the DOE has a stake in global scientific cooperation
| and the international research community. The origins of SARS-
| CoV-2 are an area of intense global interest, and understanding
| the virus's origins is important for future pandemic prevention
| efforts. By contributing to the scientific understanding of the
| virus's origins, the DOE can help to advance international
| collaboration and cooperation in addressing global health
| threats.
| wizofaus wrote:
| It's still not obvious why any of those functions are the
| remit of the Department of _Energy_ though. Defence I could
| understand.
| saboot wrote:
| If your point is that the department of energy is badly
| named, you are 100% correct. It's more like the "department
| of applied science towards security, energy, and nuclear
| bombs"
| photochemsyn wrote:
| DOE and the national labs have done extensive work with
| biological weapon detection systems and various forms of
| analysis related to delivery systems. E.g.
|
| https://web.ornl.gov/info/news/pulse/pulse_v270_08.html
|
| >"A team of scientists at DOE's Sandia National Laboratories
| recently revealed their involvement in the more than six-year
| investigation led by the FBI surrounding anthrax spores that
| killed five people in the fall of 2001. Their work, using
| transmission electron microscopy, was the first to link the
| spores from several of the letters as coming from the same
| source."
| bee_rider wrote:
| Actually as a side question, why does the reporting on this
| story in particular use the somewhat unusual phrase "US Energy
| Department?" It is the Department of Energy, right?
|
| I seems like a little nitpick, but there are lots of agencies
| in the US, sometimes there's a little nobody agency with a name
| similar to a big deal one... as a style thing, reporters should
| stick to the common names for big agencies, so we can be sure
| they aren't mixing things up.
| dekhn wrote:
| I wondered if WSJ must have a style guide that tells their
| writers to use this construction but there seems to be a mix
| of both (Energy Department and Department of Energy). Yes,
| DoE is the correct name, but I see ED used commonly in
| journalism.
| bink wrote:
| I think in cases where there are two large agencies that can
| be abbreviated to the same acronym people who work for those
| agencies tend to use names that don't lend themselves to that
| abbreviation. So in this case it's the Energy Dept and
| Education Dept rather than something that might be turned
| into the ambiguous DoE.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Interesting! I assumed the Department of Energy just got
| the initialism because they got there first.
| vitus wrote:
| Per the article, it looks like a supporting report came out of
| Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is funded by the
| DoE.
|
| While LLNL is primarily known for nuclear research, biosecurity
| is also apparently part of its mission:
| https://www.llnl.gov/missions/biosecurity
| nubinetwork wrote:
| They're also one of the few people with a massive
| "supercomputer cluster" to do simulations. (and part of the
| reason we have zfs on Linux now)
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| > Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel,
| still judge that it was likely the result of a natural
| transmission, and two are undecided.
|
| So each US government agency independently publishes their own
| conclusions...?
| fakethenews2022 wrote:
| [flagged]
| cainxinth wrote:
| https://archive.is/knkjg
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Thanks.
| lapcat wrote:
| > The Energy Department made its judgment with "low confidence,"
| according to people who have read the classified report.
| lsdflkwe wrote:
| [dead]
| charles_f wrote:
| This is such a politically loaded question that I doubt we'll
| ever know. Chinese government won't ever admit to it - even claim
| it came from somewhere else per the article - and other
| governments want to be able to pin it
| cookiengineer wrote:
| No 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 varying degrees of
| translations/"hacks" to avoid censorships, they wrote it in
| emojis and stuff to trick the censorship algorithm. All of them
| were referencing Ai Fen's video and photo of the diagnostics
| report of patient zero that she recorded and spread on WeChat to
| warn others.
|
| Maybe someone else has an archive link or screenshots or
| anything. Impossible to google the source due to the apparent
| emoji noise.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_Fen
| mherdeg wrote:
| Hmmm -- do you mean Li Wenliang?
| mbgerring wrote:
| Why is this story referring to the Department of Energy as the
| "Energy Department"? And why is that agency performing this
| investigation? This doesn't make a lot of sense.
| yazzku wrote:
| Where is the link to the DOE's publication? You'd think the
| goddamn newspapers would list their references.
| alphabetting wrote:
| The latest Sam Harris podcast with Alina Chan who wrote a book on
| the lab theory is fantastic.
| cosmotic wrote:
| Link: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-
| episodes/311...
| fakethenews2022 wrote:
| The big story is that Big Tech censored this analysis. Google and
| Facebook are censorship organs of US institutional power. It
| isn't an accident that their Trust & Safety orgs are filled with
| ex US security state and Democratic staffers.
| someuser54541 wrote:
| I'm fairly confident posts like these are artificially weighted
| to fall off the front page..that seems to happen when a COVID
| related post gets popular on HN. This post has more points and
| comments than the majority of stuff on the front page but it's
| currently on page 3.
|
| I've casually noticed something similar over the past ~18 months
| with posts related to COVID.
| lsdflkwe wrote:
| [dead]
| leereeves wrote:
| AIUI, comments count against a post's ranking on HN, in an
| attempt to cool the discussion of controversial topics.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| Many people flag these types of posts (including myself)
| because they get too toxic. I even flagged this one despite
| commenting on it.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| >> flag these types of posts (including myself) because they
| get too toxic
|
| Please do not do this.
|
| When you do this, it potentially prevents others from being
| able to to analyze it and form their own judgement.
|
| "Too toxic" is an opinion.
| Zetice wrote:
| Yeah, an opinion I share, and if enough people share that
| opinion, HN is designed to react.
|
| I'm not going to stop flagging this kind of content, and
| dang is here to overrule me/others when he feels the need
| to, which is also how HN is designed.
|
| The post is up, the system is working as intended. We all
| have roles to play here, no need to worry!
| alanfranz wrote:
| Is "because I think they become too toxic" a good reason to
| flag a post? I flag spam, shitposts, unsubstantiated or
| patently false articles. You, like other people, are abusing
| your flagging powers.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| ^^^ This summarizes the problem perfectly.
| 323 wrote:
| Toxic to whom? The scientists which are trying to bury this
| because it's putting their careers in danger?
| ttul wrote:
| I find it interesting that this story was picked up by the WSJ
| and has not yet hit the NYTimes. The WSJ editorial staff is
| well known to have a conservative bias, but their newsroom
| editors are considered to be quite centrist.
|
| That NYT doesn't think this story is newsworthy is itself
| newsworthy.
| hammock wrote:
| It's a WSJ exclusive, negotiated by the journal. You can read
| that fact in red above the headline. What it gave the deep
| state in return for the exclusive is unknown
| dang wrote:
| It was flagged by users. We sometimes reverse that and I've
| done so in this case.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Why? What's the thinking in that decision? This kind of post
| draws out the lowest quality comments and attracts accounts
| that comment only on this kind of post.
| dang wrote:
| It seems like significant new information on a major
| ongoing topic.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&s
| o...
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Thank you for the clarification.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Time once again to post Jon Stewart:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8
|
| I still don't understand how in 2020 people were branded as
| racist sinophobes for saying that the coronavirus that originated
| in Wuhan, _probably originated from the coronavirus research lab
| in Wuhan_. I know suspicion isn 't fact, but that should have
| always been the leading theory to be disproved. Instead, IIRC
| Twitter and FB were flagging any post that said "lab leak."
| ss108 wrote:
| Because we had a racist president who said stuff like "China
| virus" in a stupid and demeaning way--i.e. what may have been a
| valid and reasonable argument or position had its credibility
| ruined by being taken up by Trump and his ilk for their own
| ends.
| tzs wrote:
| > I know suspicion isn't fact, but that should have always been
| the leading theory to be disproved
|
| The leading theory should be the thing that has never happened
| before (lab leak causes epidemic or pandemic) instead of the
| thing that has happened dozens of times before (animal virus
| jumps to humans and causes epidemic or pandemic)?
| juve1996 wrote:
| This isn't consistent.
|
| We have several agencies in the US with differing POVs and
| varying confidence. To suggest this is settled truth is a
| fallacy. In any case, even if it is true, it wasn't ascertained
| to be true at the height of the pandemic.
|
| but the principal problem is that it became political.
| Eventually one side will be right. But people saying it was a
| lab leak said so for non-impactful reasons. they just wanted to
| blame China to help their election chances. The left, of
| course, couldn't agree with that as that would enable the other
| side. It's simply politics.
| csours wrote:
| That is the nature of a "dog whistle" - it has a legitimate
| meaning, and some people use the legitimate meaning. That
| legitimacy gives malicious people plausible deniability. Social
| media sites cannot tell the difference, and quite often it's
| very hard for people to tell the difference as well. Social
| media sprays weed killer on all the discussions because they
| don't want their app covered in weeds; not having flowers is
| too bad, but weeds are worse (not my personal view).
| snird wrote:
| As a non-American, the whole thing seems crazy to me.
|
| It seems like Trump said it from the start, and the media negated
| him based on political views, not facts. And now, only years
| later, there is a reconciliation with the facts.
|
| Now, I'm not that aware of the politics or the media in the US.
| But I think the way I see it may be the way many others saw this
| story roll.
|
| Whether or not it's true - it is a big reason that many people
| don't trust the media. And this may be the bigger story for us
| all going forward.
| CurtHagenlocher wrote:
| My impression is that Trump started calling it the "China
| virus" and then there was an increase in physical attacks on
| people of Asian-appearing ancestry in the United States and
| that's when and why the pushback started.
| Centigonal wrote:
| When Trump made accusations of a lab leak, there were few facts
| pointing to that conclusion. Furthermore, the statements he
| made were dangerous to Asian Americans in the US. Later, as
| more facts came to light, the lab-leak theory became more
| plausible.
|
| Guessing right in the absence of evidence shouldn't grant a
| person any kind of vindication in retrospect
| corbulo wrote:
| Where do you people get briefed? The guy was fucking
| President
| Zetice wrote:
| I love this reaction, because Trump, of all people, was
| getting some of the least useful briefings of any modern US
| president, due to his inability to pay attention.[0][1][2]
|
| So it's entirely possible that just watching the news
| casually would leave you better informed than the US
| president during the years of 2017 to 2021.
|
| [0] https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/29/politics/trump-
| intelligence-b...
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/29/donald-
| trump...
|
| [2] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-
| news/trump-fa...
| corbulo wrote:
| I'm always fascinated by the dichotomy of the evil hitler
| hyper-competent sub 100IQ billionaire who became
| president illustrated in every one of these types of
| comments.
|
| You could literally just read his executive orders to
| figure out what you said is false.
| 7speter wrote:
| Or someone at the briefings said there was a possibility
| that the origin of the virus was a lab leak and that was
| the only thing he actually heard and just said that the
| origin of the virus was a lab leak.
| philippejara wrote:
| No, it isn't entirely possible(any more than anything
| else is _technically_ possible). In the rolling stone
| article:
|
| > "Clapper agreed with Gistaro, telling Helgerson, "Trump
| doesn't read much; he likes bullets." Instead, during the
| Trump administration, the briefer would summarize aloud
| key points since the last briefing and provide three
| documents (none more than a page) about new developments
| abroad. This was all part of an effort to make the PDB
| "shorter and tighter, with declarative sentences and no
| feature-length pieces."
|
| > "Trump had his own way of receiving intelligence
| information--and a uniquely rough way of dealing publicly
| with the IC," Helgerson wrote, "but it was a system in
| which he digested the key points offered by the briefers,
| asked questions, engaged in discussion, made his own
| priority interests known, and used the information as a
| basis for discussions with his policy advisers.""
|
| > "These and other difficulties agencies encountered
| under Trump led Helgerson to conclude that, "The system
| worked, but it struggled.""
|
| He clearly had access to more information than any
| civilian, and was engaging with it.
| Centigonal wrote:
| As president, the guy said a lot of things that were
| outright untrue [1]. By 2020, he had lost any expectation
| of credulity just on the virtue of his being president in
| my eyes, and in those of many other Americans.
|
| Now, if he had claimed the virus originated as a Chinese
| lab leak, and the intelligence community came out
| supporting that contribution, then that would have been a
| different story. Information from these sources didn't
| start becoming public until 2021, and was still mixed at
| that point[2].
|
| [1]
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-
| fa...
|
| [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/us/politics/covid-
| origin-...
| corbulo wrote:
| Not everything a politician said was true, therefore if
| you read NYT and WaPo you're more well informed than the
| President. Amazing.
| vore wrote:
| lol isn't this the same guy who said injecting
| disinfectant was a good treatment for covid-19
| remarkEon wrote:
| I'll never understand this take.
|
| "The virus accidentally leaked from a highly sophisticated
| lab in China" is somehow racist and dangerous, but "Chinese
| people can't stop eating weird stuff at a wet market and the
| virus jumped to humans from there" isn't.
| wizofaus wrote:
| To be fair the lab leak theory implies those working at the
| lab knew what they were doing, had a decent idea of the
| risks, continued to do so anyway, then were incompetent
| enough to allow the leak to occur. Or worse, deliberately
| released it. Viruses spread from animals to humans with
| some regularity all over the world and such an occurrence
| doesn't imply incompetence among those who should know
| better etc.
| Centigonal wrote:
| Just clarifying my take (can't comment on what others
| think): I think the "Chinese people eat weird stuff"
| narrative is also racist and dangerous. It's not a
| dichotomy, and in the absence of evidence, I would rather
| avoid both.
|
| My personal belief over the last few years has been "it
| could be zoonotic transmission through food, it could be a
| lab leak, it could be something else. I don't know, so
| let's wait and see."
|
| Also, as a side note: non-Chinese people eat weird things
| too (and even worse - sometimes live with animals _inside
| their homes_ ). For example, the Black Death in Europe and
| the 1918 Flu pandemic which likely started in the US both
| had a significant zoonotic component.
| 7speter wrote:
| "People eating weird things" isn't the only alternative
| theory to "lab leak!!!"
|
| A farmer handling infected guano (which is used for
| fertilizer) could've been patient zero. A scientist
| studying bats in a cave could've been exposed, and I guess
| that could count as a lab leak, I guess, but it's not as
| sexy as "mad scientists were manually recombinating viruses
| for the interest of authoritarian regimes!"
| giantrobot wrote:
| > It seems like Trump said it from the start, and the media
| negated him based on political views, not facts.
|
| Trump's insinuations were that the virus was engineered as a
| bioweapon and _intentionally_ leaked from the lab in Wuhan.
| This is not the same as the virus being studied in the lab and
| leaking. Just because the statements involved the work "leak"
| doesn't make them equivalent.
| 323 wrote:
| > the media negated him based on political views
|
| No, the media negated it because all the notable scientists and
| publications (Nature, Lancet, ..) said it was a crazy
| conspiracy theory.
| locustous wrote:
| And all those with different opinions were cancelled...
| Doctors quickly learned to tow the line or you lost your job
| and license while the masses cheered. Hard to find "valid
| dissent" when you punish and disqualify everyone who tries.
| Zetice wrote:
| And yet, these people seemed to have conducted their
| research without trouble. Weird, how approaching a problem
| scientifically and not bombastically elicits a more
| measured response...
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| The fact that these science journals needlessly weighed in on
| something not falsifiable says more about the journals than
| anything.
| Paradigma11 wrote:
| Trump presented it as an intentional biological attack from
| China. This is why everyone was running as fast as possible
| from "lab leak". Nobody wanted to add WW3 to our problems with
| an unknown pandemic looming at the horizon.
| belltaco wrote:
| Trump said that not because he had some particular insight, but
| it was just a way to deflect blame, and that's why it was super
| amplified across the right wing, but lacking any sort of
| evidence or proof. Also back then there was a strong suggestion
| that it was bioengineered at Wuhan on purpose to tank the
| western economies.
|
| Note that he also said covid wasn't a serious thing several
| times. If that's the case even if there was a lab leak it
| wasn't a big deal? Note that both of those were to benefit his
| administration and deflect blame from his admin's response in
| Feb 2020 to not take covid seriously.
| trappist wrote:
| Trump was a stopped clock on this. I don't think that's
| paren't point. The point, to me, is that the entire
| establishment treated the lab leak hypothesis as
| misinformation for no better reason than that Trump had
| endorsed it. That is, on no better evidence. And then
| aggressively censored it.
| belltaco wrote:
| >The point, to me, is that the entire establishment
|
| And the Energy Department that the sole source behind this
| story isn't part of the so called establishment? Especially
| under the Biden admin which people who use words like 'the
| establishment' and 'deep state' consider the establishment.
|
| Looks like 'the establishment' wants to blame China now,
| hence the story must be fake and there was no lab leak?
|
| Where is actual evidence of the lab leak?
| snird wrote:
| This sounds reasonable. I'm not that into US politics and
| media, so it makes sense I got this "rough" image from social
| media.
|
| Unfortunately, it doesn't matter.
|
| It will lead to more people losing trust in the media and
| flocking into extreme social media silos.
|
| The problem is still here, even if the cause of the problem
| makes no sense.
| MKais wrote:
| I still don't understand why the expert's opinions are ignored on
| this issue. This one for example is a professor in virology,
| working in BSL-3 lab.
|
| Politics?
|
| https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/16299562794466918...
|
| https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/15519378265808240...
|
| I mean, if you have a toothache, you probably do see a dentist,
| not your butcher right?
|
| If we take a plane, we won't choose one of us to fly it, right?
| SvenGPo wrote:
| If you read the report, the statement was released with low
| confidence, meaning it's a possibility that it happened!
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It's a little perplexing to me that we're getting evaluations
| from spy agencies and the Department of Energy. I know the latter
| specializes in nuclear energy in particular, and this has
| experience with proliferation and adversarial information-
| gathering.
|
| They also supervise biological weapons laboratories (presumably
| for the same reason), but what they're being asked to do here is
| to validate a premise (natural or engineered?) whereas their
| actual expertise is in tracking pathogens already _known_ to be
| weaponized. This may be why they expressed their findings with
| "low confidence", which is mentioned in the WSJ report but given
| less weight than it deserves.
|
| A big problem in the pandemic response is that there are powerful
| strategic incentives for people to express a false degree of very
| high confidence about this , and indeed many other topics, so as
| to maximize insecurity and anxiety across a large population,
| which makes it easier to herd. This was an issue prior to the
| emergence of COVID-19, and strongly correlated with a drop in
| vaccine uptake and localized outbreaks of infectious diseases
| like measles that were previously considered easily managed under
| existing public health regimes.
|
| See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30138075/ for a quantitative
| treatment of this issue.
| extheat wrote:
| The DOE (as a research agency) does a lot of biological and
| genomic research and is well qualified to do this kind of
| research, as other comments here have pointed out. It's not
| uncommon for researchers in different agencies to collaborate
| with each other, all labs have different areas of expertise and
| it would be naive to say any one from one agency is more
| "qualified" than another. The moniker at the top is not so
| meaningful.
|
| The "low confidence" has a particular meaning in the world
| intelligence, and the DOE is also apart of the intelligence
| community given they run most of the US national research
| laboratories.
| educaysean wrote:
| Appreciate the context. There's so much jargons and different
| branches of departments that it's hard for a layperson to
| understand the significance of assessments such as these. I
| would have been in agreement with OP's reasoning had I not
| come across this.
| fithisux wrote:
| [flagged]
| kossTKR wrote:
| https://theintercept.com/2021/11/03/coronavirus-research-eco...
|
| Isn't this a very important part of the context? And shouldn't we
| be sceptical when it comes sources directly from the state or
| industrial complexes?
|
| We live in a realpolitical but PR narrated world.
| beaned wrote:
| Considering everything in the current US regime would be pushing
| against this to be the conclusion and it is still the finding, I
| suspect the "low confidence" is a managerial stamp based on high
| level skepticism of likely inscrutable work from lower analysts.
| nzealand wrote:
| I wonder how the classified intelligence report responds to the
| fact that the early cases clustered around the Huanan Market not
| the Wahun Institute of Virology...
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/03/03/1083751...
| Vecr wrote:
| The market was an early superspreading event (or actually
| multiple superspreading events), I don't know why people
| conflate spread at the market with a spillover at the market. I
| guess it made more sense when the virus was thought not to be
| airborne.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Do people typically gather in the parking lot of the WIV in
| large numbers? What was the reproductive rate of the initial
| version? What was the probability of an infection turning into
| a severe enough case to register to epidemiologists months
| later? For a relatively low reproductive rate or severity, you
| will need a lot of human contact to have detectable cases. The
| fact that the initial detectable cases are clustered within a
| nearby population center that manifests many close contacts
| should be expected.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| The market is not near the WIV. They're on opposite sides of
| a very large city.
| adrianb wrote:
| It's widely accepted that the Huanan market cases are an early
| super-spreader event and not the first human infections.
| Basically we don't know who and where the first infected humans
| were. We do know lots of people got infected at the market and
| that became the first time a new pneumonia was noticed in
| hospitals.
| fakethenews2022 wrote:
| Just waiting to get censored on Hacker News.
| fakethenews2022 wrote:
| The big story is that Big Tech censored this analysis.
| fakethenews2022 wrote:
| Google and Facebook are censorship organs of US institutional
| power.
| fakethenews2022 wrote:
| It isn't an accident that Google's and Facebook's Trust &
| Safety orgs are filled with ex US security state.
| fakethenews2022 wrote:
| It isn't an accident that Google's and Facebook's Trust &
| Safety orgs are filled with Democratic staffers.
| fullshark wrote:
| Next step: proving it was created via gain of function research.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| Sadly I doubt this will lead to any contrition, apologies,
| humility, self-reflection, or change among certain "experts",
| government officials, or the throngs of sheep and parrots who
| were led along by them.
| wnevets wrote:
| Why does the HN title say "US agency" but the NY Times headline
| says "Energy Department"? Did the NY Times change their title or
| was the OP trying to obscure the Energy Department part?
| [deleted]
| chmod600 wrote:
| Labeling something as "misinformation" is asymmetric: being right
| 90% or even 99% isn't good enough.
|
| Being wrong about a misinformation label, even if there's nuance
| about confidence levels, or even moving from "misinformation" to
| "probably wrong, but maybe" does more damage than all help done
| by all of the other correct labelings.
| Fabeltjeskrant wrote:
| So much fake news and propaganda out there, who knows what to
| believe.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Lab leak of what even? There is nothing magical about virological
| labs. They don't create new virus out of nothing. Most of the
| time there is a "lab leak" the virus already had all the
| potential it had before. In all the cases I can remember, the
| only reason the "lab leak" was even a significant event (as
| opposed to a bucket spilling into the ocean) is when the lab was
| geographically distinct from the endemic occurrence or the virus
| had been largely eradicated before.
|
| The main problem with "lab leak hypotheses" is that they aren't
| clear about what went into that supposed lab and what came out of
| it. Was there an obscure bat virus? Was there something already
| infectious to Humans (but somehow undetected by other
| scientists)? Are we alleging genetic editing? "Gain of Function"
| (which is easier said then done)? That Sars-CoV-2 genome which
| first hit Wuhan was already a finely tuned killing machine, much
| more finely tuned than anything a lab could produce
| intentionally. All of this makes speculation about the Virus
| having passed through a laboratory somewhere incredibly
| pointless, except for trying to undermine scientific consensus.
| rleigh wrote:
| 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 primers you need
| and get them a couple of days later.
|
| Just take a look through the first few links here:
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lentivirus+expression
|
| That's just one type of technology that can be used with ease.
| There are many others. Baculovirus and adenovirus systems are
| in common use. Making a custom system for a different virus
| isn't hard, it just takes a bit more time and effort. I was
| taught multiple techniques to do this in the late '90s and they
| weren't new even then. Genetic modification started in viruses
| --the M13 bacteriophage. It's only got easier and more
| sophisticated since then. The Wuhan researchers already have
| multiple papers published which involved making modified
| viruses, and were specifically funded to perform Gain of
| Function research. You seem to be claiming this is out of the
| question, but this seems counter to what is possible, their
| existing track record, and the grants they were working under
| at the time.
|
| Why are you underplaying what went on here, and maybe wilfully
| misdirecting? A lot of this stuff is already well documented,
| since it's been going on for many years. You can find their
| papers with a few searches, and they have already been reported
| on multiple times over the last couple of years.
| raitchev1 wrote:
| [flagged]
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| There has been SO much lost faith in media and authorities
| because of the coverage, laws and regulations re this, it's so so
| bad... People not vaccinating their young children with vaccines
| we know to work and have no side effects for 30+ years.
|
| Locking young children inside for years and stumping their social
| growth. Or teenagers and adults too, leading to unmeasurable
| mental health problems.
| philistine wrote:
| Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy
| action.
|
| If a novel virus once again originates in China from a city with
| a BSL4 lab, I think we ought to skip the twice is coincidence.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't do this here.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| I would like to see that evidence.
|
| I'm not particularly surprised by the accusation, but I am a
| surprised they dug up more evidence so long after the fact.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Don't get me started on how stupid and racist "wet market" ALWAYS
| was.
|
| The question would be "why now?" There have been markets like
| this for, what, thousands of years? Why was this one special
| (unless, you know, it was near the lab where they made the
| viruses)
|
| 100% percent plays on "lololol look at the backwards bat eaters."
| So _dumb._
| padjo wrote:
| While I agree with the sentiment that the term wet market is
| quite pejorative, the sequence of events is very common and is
| what happened with the first SARS. New viruses make the leap to
| humans all the time. It's evolution baby.
| skissane wrote:
| I don't know what the truth is here, and I don't know if I'll
| ever know. Ultimately, I don't think it is that important.
|
| What concerns me much more, is that this issue has become overly
| politicised - not just out of concern for the possible
| geopolitical implications, or a desire to not offend Beijing, but
| also by being tied up with US domestic political divides.
| ttul wrote:
| The This Week In Virology podcast has been talking about the lab
| leak concept since the early days of the pandemic, with various
| experts opining on the likelihood. In [1], the expert discusses
| how the virus itself does not seem engineered; it's most likely a
| naturally created virus.
|
| However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at the
| BSL4 lab in Wuhan, quite legitimately - and they produce good
| science from this work. But because this is China, if a lab
| accident happened, it won't be getting reported in the media.
| It's a state secret.
|
| The Energy Department gave a low probability to their assessment,
| but this is still a bombshell. Imagine the legal liability for
| China in international courts if the evidence is solid enough for
| litigation.
|
| 1. https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/tag/lab-leak-hypothesis/
| lamontcg wrote:
| > However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at
| the BSL4 lab in Wuhan
|
| No it isn't. The were studying SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1.
|
| They sequenced RaTG13 but that is too far away from SARS-CoV-2
| with a thousand random mutations across its genome. And there's
| no evidence that they ever recovered culturable virus from
| RaTG13 or were able to culture it--there's a vast gap between
| sequencing a virus and culturing it.
|
| We also know about their SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1 work because they
| published it. Before the pandemic they had no reason to keep
| work on RaTG13 secret.
|
| This is a case of Schrodinger's BSL4 lab. We know they built
| chimeras of other viruses because they told the world about
| that, we know they sequenced RaTG13 because they published that
| sequence, but there's a SARS-CoV-2 progenitor backbone that
| they found, which for some reason they picked to be the
| backbone in a new set of experiments, which they had perfect
| secrecy over and nobody has ever found any evidence of it.
| kevinpet wrote:
| If you are not a native English speaker, you may want to know
| that you are pretty drastically misreading parents comment.
| He is not saying "I know this specific virus is present" but
| "the lab studied SARS related coronaviruses" which you in
| fact seem to agree with.
| lamontcg wrote:
| They're not related enough to matter.
|
| I've lived in the United States all my life, you're just
| missing the point.
| kranke155 wrote:
| What about the request to use gain of function research to
| add furin sites to coronaviruses? That seems to me the
| smoking gun, since this lab asked for funding to do exactly
| that.
|
| It's a bit like Jaime Meitzl (sp?) said - for the first time
| in history you find a unicorn (furin binding site in a
| coronavirus) next to a lab that asked for funding to make
| regular horses into unicorns. But the lab says it's "natural
| origin".
| lamontcg wrote:
| The PRRAR FCS not a known FCS prior to the pandemic so it
| is unlikely the lab would have genetically engineered it
| and they would have used something like RRXRR instead.
|
| Other coronaviruses have an FCS and they have evolved
| multiple different times, independently:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S18735061
| 2...
|
| The fact that we knew that adding an FCS to a virus would
| likely enhance its ability to produce a pandemic really
| isn't a smoking gun that we actually did it, because we're
| just studying and copying what nature is already doing (who
| is actually a much better geneticist than we are, with
| vastly greater tools).
|
| And since you want to talk about suspicious "unicorns" how
| about the idea that a lab worker was infected in the lab,
| and then the only thing that they did was visit the wet
| market. They didn't infect anyone they lived with, or go to
| any restaurants, or go visit grandma and this Typhoid
| Mary/Mike has no existence outside of working in the lab
| and visiting the wet market. And this idea gets worse if
| you include more workers in WIV having supposedly been
| exposed.
|
| What fits with the facts better is that they genetically
| engineered the virus in perfect secrecy and deliberately
| let it loose in the wet market, which is just insanity--
| nobody gains anything from doing that, but it is also
| impossible to argue against.
| Natsu wrote:
| See also:
|
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fviro.2022.834
| 8...
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| The argument "they would have used a published backbone and
| reverse genetics system" is wishful thinking.
|
| You might interested in this paper:
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2
|
| "Discovery of a novel merbecovirus DNA clone contaminating
| agricultural rice sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China"
|
| MERS is really nasty, this is clearly evidence of
| engineering, and guess what the system is unpublished.
|
| Personally I suspect this paper (which came out a while ago
| but got "boosted" recently) could be the reason for DOE
| "confidence update".
|
| Media have not reported on this and "the usual" zoonosis
| advocates have been remarkably silent about it.
| lamontcg wrote:
| HKU4 contamination in agricultural samples in the Country
| that HKU4 was discovered in does not pose a particularly
| controversial question as to how it got there.
|
| While it is in the same group of beta coronaviruses that
| MERS is in, the HKU4 virus was first found in Kowloon and
| the "HK" stands for "Hong Kong" (although it would be a
| mistake to assume that says much more than where it was
| found and not what its range is throughout China)
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111821/
|
| And coronaviruses undergo recombination (XBB.1.5 is a
| recombinant which is all over the news) and that produces
| "Chimeric" viruses in nature. Finding evidence of "gene
| splicing" in samples and determining it must be humans
| ignores the fact that nature does it better than we do, and
| really points at how politically biased that article is.
|
| They want you to believe that WIV imported MERS-like
| viruses from Saudi Arabia and were fucking around with them
| in the lab, and not that those viruses are found all over
| China naturally and nature fucks around them constantly in
| much higher volume than we can.
| audunw wrote:
| Earlier in the pandemic I read a report talking about the
| possibility of the virus being something they sampled, and
| that it leaked when they accessed the sample presumably to
| start sequencing/analyzing it.
|
| The theory was that it was a virus they'd have sampled from
| immunocompromised miners working in the same caves that the
| bats with the most closely related viruses inhabit. They had
| some references to a report with something like that
| happening some time prior.
|
| It's so far the only theory I've read that seems to match the
| evidence.
|
| The evidence doesn't seem to indicate that it was engineered,
| or that it was a product of gain of function research on
| animals. I think there would have been more solid evidence
| pointing in that direction by now, if that was the case. They
| would have published something related to it, or non-Chinese
| researchers connected to the lab would have known something.
|
| Yet there's no evidence of any related animal resorvoir, and
| the virus was very well adapted to humans from the very
| start. And everything points to the virus passing through the
| lab _somehow_. Those things put together seems to point at
| them having sampled a virus that already made the jump to
| humans, and that somehow during the sampling, or retrieving
| the sample from storage, the virus escaped.
| lamontcg wrote:
| There's many thousands more contact between bats and humans
| involved in mining (literally how RaTG13 and the Mojiang
| mine, bat guano collection for farming and just tourism:
|
| https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/33905/20211012/china-
| r...
|
| There's a lot of economic activity in China that is close
| to bat habitats and there's evidence that cross reactivity
| to sarbecoviruses exists in a significant amount in rural
| china.
|
| The researchers collecting samples were a very tiny slice
| of the human-to-bat-virus exposure that is going on in
| China all the time.
|
| And we know that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't last very long on
| surfaces, it isn't transmitted by fomites. It needs to be
| aerosolized and breathed in. It isn't likely that the
| researchers were collecting live viable virus in the
| samples that they brought back to the lab. What they were
| sequencing was overwhelmingly going to be "dead" mRNA.
|
| The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid
| Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because
| it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble
| EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak
| happened. They didn't start spreading it around their
| apartment building, they didn't infect people in
| restaurants, didn't infect elderly relatives who wound up
| in the hospital, etc.
|
| It makes "more" sense that they deliberately genetically
| engineered the virus and released it in the wet market
| entirely on purpose.
| tripletao wrote:
| > The idea that the lab researchers were the initial
| Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not
| believable because it requires one to believe that they
| lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet
| market where the outbreak happened.
|
| Except that SARS-CoV-2's epidemiological dynamics are
| well-known to be overdispersed? Almost all lineages die
| out, and a few explode due to repeated super-spreader
| events. It's therefore unlikely that the first cluster
| will be discovered at the site of introduction. For
| example, SARS-CoV-2 was presumably first introduced to
| other continents at airports and seaports; but that's not
| where the first clusters were found.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Explain the coincidence of why it happened to be in a wet
| market and not a restaurant or other gathering where
| people congregate. Just happened to be the one place to
| make it look exactly like zoonosis and extraordinarily
| similar to SARS-1.
| smsm42 wrote:
| The obvious solution for this conundrum is that they did
| study it, but didn't publish it because the screw-up happened
| and all evidence was promptly destroyed. In a totalitarian
| state, the secrecy is the default mode. You can get
| exceptions and publish stuff, sure, but only once you asked
| and received permission. If you didn't - or in the period
| between you asking and permission being issued something
| happened - no evidence will be seen by anybody.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Perfect, then it's unfalsifiable.
| smsm42 wrote:
| Unfortunately, unless whoever destroyed evidence screwed
| up (happens all the time, security services have enough
| idiots and slackers), or somebody kept some evidence and
| then will defect, yes, it is likely we'll never have the
| proof. That's why they do it.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Well then we don't need to look anymore - its 100% solved
| regardless of any new evidence to the contrary.
| lamontcg wrote:
| The effort required to culture virus like this is fairly
| large, and it requires them to keep it secret in 2019
| before there was any need to keep it secret. Nobody talked
| about it to collaborators, no sequences were leaked out,
| etc.
|
| They somehow had tighter controls than Apple developing a
| new iPhone, before they had any reason to.
| smsm42 wrote:
| Again, you think keeping something secret needs a reason.
| That's not how totalitarian state works. In such state,
| not keeping something secret needs a reason. Everything
| else is secret by default. And the standard mode of
| action on any disaster is to deny it, lie and hide the
| evidence. It's not special for pandemic, it happens every
| time. Yes they absolutely have tighter controls than
| Apple, and the reason is they live in a totalitarian
| state and Apple doesn't.
| gregw2 wrote:
| It's weird you mention BSL4 and use present tense about Wuhan
| when discussing covid origins.
|
| The Coronavirus work at Wuhan was done in BSL2 environment; the
| BSL4 lab was still being built at that time.
| [deleted]
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| the interesting question isn't why China would try to cover up
| a lab leak because that is obvious. the questions is - why does
| the US actively support this cover up?
| swatcoder wrote:
| > why does the US actively support this cover up?
|
| Sometimes, answers are more clear when questions are more
| clear.
|
| "Why is the US waiting to secure a convincing case that
| produces useful diplomatic leverage instead of indulging
| public speculation by making an early call that wastes the
| opportunity?"
|
| There's a lot to lose by making a case that other nations can
| dismiss, and a lot to gain by having a case that they can't.
| If there was a culpable lab leak, the game comes down to
| China making it easy for its partners to plausibly deny while
| others try to collect thorough enough evidence that they
| can't. The tidbits that feed conspiracy circles might be 100%
| right and very convincing to individuals, but are too thin to
| put world leaders on the spot. For now.
| mwbajor wrote:
| In my opinion, its more likely wallstreet that doesn't want
| to loose their cheap Chinese sweatshop labor.
| petre wrote:
| Maybe they don't have enough evidence to support the lab leak
| hypothesis. Or maybe they want to prevent China from
| supplying weapons to Russia for the time being and they're
| playing the cautios stance while they don't have enough
| evidence. We will find out eventually in five to ten years or
| so. The lab leak hypothesis is quite probable.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Didn't Trump literally call it the "China virus" for over a
| year? Almost from the start? I know he got a lot of pushback
| from the DNC over that.
| barbazoo wrote:
| It didn't seem to be based on evidence at the time rather
| than a simple minded and racist bit to cover up that he had
| no idea what he was doing.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| As a thought experiment, who would have access to the
| most information in the world outside of the sitting
| POTUS? The richest man in the world? Surely Trump of all
| people would be the most qualified to make such a claim.
| sampo wrote:
| > why does the US actively support this cover up?
|
| If it was a lab leak from Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV),
| it was likely from a research program partially funded by
| USA.
|
| https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-
| theory-...
|
| _" a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S.
| government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting
| gain-of-function research--among them the WIV itself."_
| wrycoder wrote:
| Here's a 2015 paper on successful gain of function work done
| at the University of North Carolina under the leadership of
| Ralph Baric. The work involved characterizing a synthetically
| constructed chimeric virus comprising a SARS-CoV backbone and
| a bat SARS virus spike.
|
| It received special permission to continue despite a
| prohibition on gain-of-function research (Refer to the
| section: Biosafety and Security).[0]
|
| Quoting:
|
| _Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus,
| SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese
| horseshoe bat populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse
| genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric
| virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a
| mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone._
|
| And from the footnote describing author contributions:
|
| _[SHI Zhengli] provided SHC014 spike sequences and plasmids_
|
| As everyone knows by now, Shi is the director of the Center
| for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of
| Virology.[1]
|
| It's pretty clear that Shi subsequently continued that gain-
| of-function work at Wuhan.
|
| My question is, what is the correlation between the spike
| sequence Shi supplied for the 2015 paper and that of the
| early variants of SARS-CoV-2?
|
| [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Zhengli
|
| There is also a 2013 paper, written by Peter Dazak and Shi
| Zhengli, "Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like
| coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor".[2] Peter Daszak has
| been centrally involved in the US funding of the Wuhan
| Institute, in his capacity as president of the EcoHealth
| Alliance of New York.[3]
|
| [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24172901/
|
| [3] https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-
| following-th...
| GreedClarifies wrote:
| [flagged]
| Zetice wrote:
| You're commenting on a report that the (US Government's) DoE
| is saying it _was_ lab _leaked_ , so... the US isn't actively
| supporting any cover up, or they're doing a profoundly
| terrible job.
| drewrv wrote:
| Just to clarify, because the nuance is getting lost, they
| are not suggesting it was lab made. A naturally occurring
| virus can be studied and then accidentally leaked from a
| lab.
|
| But yes, there's no indication that the US is trying to
| cover anything up. And China is secretive about all sorts
| of things, they're an authoritarian government.
| Zetice wrote:
| Good point I will edit.
| pgodzin wrote:
| not lab made, leaked from a lab
| r053bud wrote:
| Because what good does it do to actually dealing with the
| outbreak? I assume the government just made a decision that
| it was politically less desirable to do for a number of
| reasons. Mainly, probably the continuing attempts at thawing
| of relations with China.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| that's not all there is to it. there are deeper relations
| between the NIH and Wuhan.
| TearsInTheRain wrote:
| If China is engaged in a behavior that lead to a global
| pandemic, we have to know everything about what they were
| doing so that we can stop this from ever happening again.
| Who gives a crap about thawed relations after the
| extraordinary amount of damage this pandemic has done to
| the world
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| If USA is engaged in a behavior that lead to a global
| pandemic, we have to know everything about what they were
| doing so that we can stop this from ever happening again.
| Who gives a crap about thawed relations after the
| extraordinary amount of damage this pandemic has done to
| the world
|
| The money for WIV risky reasearch mostly came from the
| USA.
| celticninja wrote:
| What they were doing was downplaying the severity of the
| problem until it was sufficiently widespread that it was
| not just a China problem. I'm not saying that was the
| plan from the start, but it definitely morphed into that.
| Joeri wrote:
| The genie is more or less out of the bottle on that one.
| If it is a lab leak there is no stopping it from
| happening again and China is not doing anything special.
| There are hundreds of these labs all over the world, they
| have containment breaches all the time [1], and given the
| way of international politics it is effectively
| impossible to shut them all down. Probably undesirable as
| well given that labs like those are the reason we had the
| medical knowledge to create a vaccine.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_bi
| osecuri...
| wrycoder wrote:
| "At this point, what difference does it make?"
|
| -- famous politician, responding to a question on a
| different issue
| smsm42 wrote:
| That lying about pandemic origins is the best course of
| dealing with the pandemic is an exceptionally bold
| statement.
| cld8483 wrote:
| America funded it, and it was probably the idea of American
| researchers in the first place. China got used, and is now
| embarrassed about that so they're participating in the
| coverup.
| smsm42 wrote:
| [flagged]
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| You are being downvoted... Bit this is too important to let
| skip.
|
| I distinctly remember long stretches of time where it was a
| platform bannable offense and socially unacceptable to 'go
| against the science' and suggest this theory was feasible.
|
| For too long bad, politically motivated 'science', drove
| narratives, and our society needs to be more open in
| discussing this so we can not fall for the same tricks next
| time
| smsm42 wrote:
| Everybody remembers it. Some try to crimestop it, but
| everybody knows it happened. The right thing would be to
| admit the screw up, apologize to people who were
| unjustifiably accused and suppressed, and try to do
| better next time. But I don't see much readiness to do
| this, unfortunately.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| > However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at
| the BSL4 lab in Wuhan, quite legitimately
|
| Bat coronavirus work including chimera creation was done at WIV
| at BSL-2, not BSL-4.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Governments cannot be sued in foreign courts, so there's no
| liability.
| tiahura wrote:
| _they produce good science from this work._
|
| Other than securing more funding for more research, and trivia
| for virologists, what good science has come from this lab?
| ttul wrote:
| I'd have to re-listen to numerous TWiV podcasts, but here is
| a WaPo article discussing the quality of research at WIV: htt
| ps://archive.ph/2020.01.31-185716/https://www.washingtonp...
|
| The Wuhan institute was celebrated as an improvement over the
| facilities at which dangerous viruses had previously been
| studied in China. The 2004 SARS outbreak originated in a lab:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/
| fidgewidge wrote:
| That WaPo article isn't about the quality of research at
| the WIV, it's an attempted (failed) debunking of the
| "fringe theory" that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab. It has
| nothing to say on what good science they produced, perhaps
| because there wasn't any. Virology appears to spend its
| time fiddling with viruses based on the claim that doing so
| will help create vaccines, except, their work doesn't seem
| to have contributed to any vaccine development.
| j_crick wrote:
| > their work doesn't seem to have contributed to any
| vaccine development.
|
| On the contrary, look at covid aftermath -- it quite did!
| /s
| fidgewidge wrote:
| Touche!
| cld8483 wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| mikem170 wrote:
| > The 2004 SARS outbreak originated in a lab
|
| This is news to me. The article you referenced opens by
| saying [0]:
|
| > The World Health Organization has confirmed that breaches
| of safety procedures on at least two occasions at one of
| Beijing's top virology laboratories were the probable cause
| of the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)
| there last month, which infected nine people, one of whom
| died.
|
| This seems to be saying they traced the illness in nine
| people there at the lab back to two leaks at the lab, not
| that the entire disease outbreak originated in a lab.
|
| There a lot of other studies, referenced in this wikipedia
| article [1], which explain that the first SARS virus
| originated in bats:
|
| > Phylogenetic analysis of these viruses indicated a high
| probability that SARS coronavirus originated in bats and
| spread to humans either directly or through animals held in
| Chinese markets.
|
| > In 2004, scientists from the Chinese Center for Disease
| Control and Prevention of the University of Hong Kong and
| the Guangzhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention
| established a genetic link between the SARS coronavirus
| appearing in civets and humans, confirming claims that the
| virus might have transmitted from the animal species to
| humans.
|
| In the last 15 years people have fallen ill of the plague,
| cowpox, meningococcus, h5n1, anthrax, and zika due to lab
| leaks in the Unites States [2]. These are just the leaks
| where people got sick and/or died, all lab workers I
| believe. There were others affecting animals, and others
| where nobody got sick. None of that means these labs
| originated these diseases. The origin of a disease is
| separate from a localized outbreak.
|
| [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-
| CoV-1#Origin_and_evolutio...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosec
| urity...
| csours wrote:
| I have extremely low confidence that we will ever be satisfied
| about the pathway that led to the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic.
|
| I feel strongly that it was not tied to malicious intent, but
| other than that, I don't have strong feelings. Malicious intent
| would require significant actual evidence to convince me.
| EGreg wrote:
| Publishing this with "low confidence".
|
| Glad our official experts are on the case! Next we will find out
| whether Assad gassed his own people, and who blew up the
| Nordstream pipelines.
|
| (Just kidding. Maybe years later we finally find things out after
| they get declassified:
| https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/how-jimmy-carter-...)
| bediger4000 wrote:
| How is this lab leak theory anything more than an attempt to
| excuse Trump from any blame for his pandemic response failure?
| lsdflkwe wrote:
| [dead]
| ttul wrote:
| The Energy Department is no longer a Trump organ. I don't see
| why the senior bureaucrat who oversees it - who is a Biden
| appointee - would be doing anything to help out Trump here.
|
| "Jennifer M. Granholm was sworn in as the 16th Secretary of
| Energy on February 25, 2021."
|
| https://www.energy.gov/leadership
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Biden admin might strategically decide to do the lab leak
| investigation as part of their anti-China plan. That would be
| a balance decision, but I could see it coming down on lab
| leak investigation.
| jokoon wrote:
| I've read that some american scientists were working or were
| distantly involved in research projects at this lab.
|
| I still entertain the conspiracy theory that Trump, since he
| hated China, could have had the capacity to ask the CIA to "cause
| problems in China", and this lab would have been one way to do
| harm.
|
| Of course the US would not be really held responsible as long as
| chinese lab workers were pushed to be negligent, for example to
| manipulate virus in lower security lab settings, and no scientist
| was really able to know it would cause a pandemic.
|
| Of course it's impossible to prove, which is why it's a
| conspiracy theory. Of course the cause was negligence. I'm just
| ashamed to have this theory in my head, but there are still
| legitimate scientists who have unanswered questions. It is still
| quite puzzling, when you read about the subject, to read that
| they searched for "gain of function", because there was nothing
| really good to learn, and it was always a pandora box which was
| very risky to explore.
|
| I guess governments could ask China for financial reparations for
| this negligence, but I don't think it is worth the drama.
| rejectfinite wrote:
| Not unplausible at all.
|
| Has happened before
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
| ttul wrote:
| And this is precisely why BSL4 labs exist. And accidents also
| happen at BSL4 labs. But in the west, at least we have
| reasonably transparent and trustworthy governments, with some
| notion of accountability for enforcing rules.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Some accounts I've read suggest the Wuhan lab was operated
| under conditions more akin to BSL1. Think your High School
| biology lab or your dentist.
| ttul wrote:
| My source of information is the hundreds of hours of This
| Week in Virology episodes I have listened to since March
| 2020, so with that in mind as my bias: Reputable western
| scientists who have worked with Wuhan virologists
| professionally have a lot of respect for the Chinese
| scientists and the Wuhan lab generally.
|
| But the fact that many virologists have professional
| friends at the Wuhan lab does not rule out that the lab was
| being poorly managed or that an error might have been swept
| under the rug by the CCP.
|
| My personal opinion synthesizing all that I have read and
| heard on this topic for three years is that the lab leak is
| plausible because China is an autocracy and does not have
| the rule of law. It's in the CCP's interests and within
| their capabilities to hide a lab leak quite successfully.
| notahacker wrote:
| > It's in the CCP's interests and within their
| capabilities to hide a lab leak quite successfully.
|
| tbh the general impression given by China's known
| attempts to cover anything up tend to give the opposite
| impression, precisely because of their default to
| autocracy. This is a government party that generally
| covers up stuff by banning it from being talked about,
| regards "she regrets making that comment and wants to
| stay at her home and not play tennis or talk to the media
| any more" as a reasonable coverup, and made such a clumsy
| attempt to silence the doctor first raising the alarm
| COVID symptoms that be became a hero inside China and the
| officials responsible got their wrists slapped. Allowing
| lab staff to communicate with the outside world and
| release papers on COVID origins considered plausible by
| uninvolved overseas virologists would be an
| uncharacteristic way for the Chinese government to act if
| they suspected there was something to be uncovered...
| rleigh wrote:
| Forget the government. Do we have transparent and trustworthy
| lab staff?
|
| After working in a BSL3 lab, I've seen some fairly poor
| working practices including someone infecting themselves,
| presumably due to sloppy working practices. There is a reason
| why lab leaks are common, if not vastly less consequential
| than the lab leak under discussion. It's because people are
| people, and they make mistakes, whether that's accidental or
| deliberately breaking the rules. It does make one question
| whether we can work on dangerous pathogens safely. I'd have
| to say, after direct experience of work on multiple diseases
| of varying types, that for many of them I have serious
| doubts. When it comes to Gain of Function, I think it should
| be banned worldwide. We aren't capable of working to the
| required level of stringency to guarantee safety.
|
| To provide a concrete example, look at the German researcher
| who infected herself with Ebola. In a BSL4 facility. Not even
| involving GoF research, just the regular virus. Even top
| researchers slip up. This one made the news due to the
| severity, but how many are quietly buried, or not even
| reported within the organisation at all for fear of the
| consequences. It happens, and I've seen it first-hand.
| kklisura wrote:
| Nothing will breed more conspiracy theorists than the way how the
| scientific community dealt with Covid-19 pandemic.
| seydor wrote:
| They did act like a global cabal in a bubble and told people of
| power what they wanted to be told
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This is not a surprising conclusion given the way things have
| gone. The collapse of the natural origin theory (which was based
| on various schemes involving co-infection of bats, pangolins,
| civets with various wild-type viruses which didn't pan out) and
| the refusal of the Wuhan Institute of Virology to have an open
| investigation, along with the fairly shady behavior of the
| Ecohealth Alliance partnership that was partially funding the WIV
| (not disclosing conflicts of interests in those early Nature and
| Lancet letters claiming a natural origin), all result in a 'so
| what else could it be but a lab leak' circumstantial conclusion,
| even if positive evidence remains hidden.
|
| What kind of lab leak is an interesting and important question,
| however. There may be four scenarios:
|
| 1) Collection of a wild-type virus that somehow evolved in a bat
| species, followed by accidental infection of a lab worker. This
| seems the least likely, as the viral lineages of the
| betacoronaviruses that would have had to fuse in the wild to form
| Sars-CoV-2 (sarbecovirus w/o furin site and marbecovirus w/ furin
| site) infect different bat species from different regions;
|
| 2) Collection of a multitude of wild-type viruses as well as a
| variety of bat species, then having accidental genetic fusions
| due to coinfection of the laboratory bats with a variety of
| different viruses (like what seems to happen on pig farms with
| avian / human / swine flu), which might be more plausible, though
| would indicate incredibly sloppy lab management;
|
| 3) 'Natural' mutational pressure via deliberately cultivating
| wild-type bat viruses in human cell cultures or in mice etc.
| expressing human genes, and looking for rare mutations that arose
| and gained the ability to infect human cells (things like this
| were done in the Soviet bioweapons program according to defector
| Kanatjan Alibekov, see "Biohazard") or to become more infectious
| than it already was;
|
| 4) Direct gene manipulation of wild-type (or possibly mutated)
| viruses using CRISPR technology, in which parts of the wild-type
| template virus are excised and replaced with specifically
| synthesized new sequences designed to bind to human receptor
| sites to facilitate entry to human cells by the virus. It'd be
| likely they synthesized a variety of such chimeric viruses and
| then ran them through human cell cultures to see which were the
| most infectious. They were doing this kind of work at Wuhan,
| based on prior CRISPR-based work done in the USA c.2015, and it
| seems most likely that a lab worker got infected then passed it
| to the local community, then onto the trains and airplanes.
|
| Notably, 2-4 all could be called 'gain of function' research,
| which is a sloppy term that nobody in the field seems to use.
| It's all pretty reckless and poorly justified research, and
| people have been warning for about a decade since these precise
| gene swapping technologies became widely available that this kind
| of outcome was likely if not inevitable. It's also basically
| indistinguishable from offensive biowarfare research, even if
| that wasn't the goal (claims that this was deliberate are
| nonsensical, it looks like a "oopsie, we caused > $10 trillion in
| economic damage and killed millions of people by accident"
| event).
|
| International collaborations to fight infectious disease should
| still be supported however, that's how smallpox was eradicated.
| Just not this kind of thing, please.
| nostromo wrote:
| 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, we're shooting down balloons and blaming them
| for Covid, rather than turning a blind eye.
| bmer wrote:
| 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 paper" capabilities "in the
| field". The caveat here being that the US can probably
| upgrade/adapt to whatever is learned about Chinese equipment.
|
| In other words, there is no substitute for actual operational
| experience, and both sides benefit from selling weapons to the
| various parties in Ukraine, in order to get said experience.
| dilap wrote:
| How would the US fare if China cut off exports? Seems like it
| would at best be extremely disruptive. So how much leverage
| does US really have to "isolate" China?
| acheron wrote:
| [flagged]
| ttul wrote:
| What will make this information dangerous is if people
| misconstrue "lab leak" to mean "human designed". The report
| specifically says it was not from a bioweapons program. I'm
| sure they took pains to verify that because the implications of
| THAT conclusion would be explosive.
| fidgewidge wrote:
| No, that's not the most dangerous interpretation.
|
| The most dangerous interpretation of "lab leak" is the one
| backed by the most evidence - that they were artificially
| enhancing viruses so they could develop vaccines against
| them. The Pfizer guy who got caught on camera by Project
| Veritas said they were considering doing the same thing.
|
| Selling people vaccines for viruses the scientists created
| specifically to create vaccines for, is about the worst
| conflict of interest you can imagine and one with global
| implications, not just for US/China relations.
| ttul wrote:
| Gain-of-function research serves a legitimate purpose, but
| if this lean stemmed from GoF work, that is not apparent
| from the SARA CoV-2 genome. See my link elsewhere in the
| comments to a TWiV podcast episode that discusses the lab
| leak hypothesis, and the analysis of the genome sequence
| suggesting it is not the result of human engineering work.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| ,, Gain-of-function research serves a legitimate
| purpose''
|
| While this is true, at this point we have evidence that
| even the highest level security lab can have lab leak
| with devastating results.
|
| The main problem is not that, but that people can't
| really talk about it publicly, as the rules should be
| stricter (for example an international body should be
| checking the procedures of other countries...the problem
| is not with the rules, but not enough verification of
| keeping the rules).
| fidgewidge wrote:
| Lots of very well informed people disagree with you;
| you'd also have to consider all the other evidence beyond
| the genome.
| ethanbond wrote:
| You're already seeing that exact type of confusion strewn
| about this comment section.
|
| Some people interpreting "lab leak" to mean deliberately
| designed, others to mean deliberately _released_ , others to
| mean an accident involving a natural research virus.
|
| So yeah this whole conversation will continue to go nowhere
| because in reality it _is_ full of conspiracy theorists who
| make the conversation impossible to have.
| cld8483 wrote:
| The research out of this lab didn't help develop the
| vaccine, so what were they doing in the first place?
| Weapons research, it's as simple as that. As soon as the
| virus started circulating through the public, that was
| their chance to shine! They could have released everything
| they knew and jump-started vaccine development.. but they
| didn't. They covered it up, because _fighting_ bugs was
| never their interest in the first place.
|
| Why should anybody believe otherwise? Principle of charity?
| Please.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Even if I were to accept the (ridiculous) premise, it's
| still wrong.
|
| Wuhan Institute of Virology did actively contribute to
| the development of the Vero vaccine by Sinopharm.
|
| Regarding the premise, there's no reason to believe that
| a lab working on coronaviruses (quite common) that did
| not happen to contribute directly to a successful vaccine
| development effort (profoundly uncommon) was necessarily
| working on a bioweapon.
|
| FWIW, there are ~59 operational BSL-4 labs in the world,
| and only a BSL-3 is necessary to work on potentially
| airborne diseases like coronaviruses. According to this
| study[1] of published research papers, there are probably
| about 150 BSL-3 labs _in the United States alone_. Are
| those all bioweapon programs because they didn 't
| contribute to the vax development programs?
|
| [1]: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/mapping-
| biosafety-le...
| groot2581 wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
| emj wrote:
| The discussion during the pandemic only lead to the "human
| designed" blame game, so the similarities are striking. It
| is a view that everyone can share, regardless of political
| affiliations, a perfect way to get a mob going. It is
| interesting to discuss how the views on this has changed
| though.
| groot2581 wrote:
| The human designed blame game is different from the "bio
| weapons" blame game mentioned in the parent. I get people
| are discussing human designed but that's different from
| bioweapon.
| emj wrote:
| I am not very good at bio, so I equate the three to some
| part. The lab leak story is really bad in itself on a
| political level, I do not know how we can have a sane
| discussion about it.
| drusepth wrote:
| As an off-topic side note, I saw this trending on Twitter and
| just assumed it was the latest conspiracy on the site. Seeing it
| on HN lends it a lot more credibility.
|
| I used to watch Twitter for a source of breaking news. It's a
| shame that it seems like 90% of trending stories there need
| verified with a second source now, and that the nuance you get
| from doing so (for example, the "low confidence" expressed by the
| US) seem to still be entirely missing from Twitter's trending
| discourse.
| Zetice wrote:
| Why is this a WSJ exclusive, why was it leaked, why is this only
| coming out now, why are various government agencies disagreeing
| with one another, why "low" confidence...
|
| This ratchets up the credibility of the claim for me, but there
| are a lot of strangely unanswered questions that leave me
| skeptical, still.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| It's credible to you because you want it to believe. The
| article doesn't say what the department of energy thinks went
| into that supposed lab and what came out of it. Which is a
| major piece of the puzzle I'd say.
| Zetice wrote:
| Er, it's credible to me because it's the Department of
| Energy.
|
| I don't "want" to believe it, and generally believe folks who
| were touting it as fact up to this point were cranks. Even
| now it's still extremely murky, and as I said, there are a
| lot of unanswered questions.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| why is it credible to you when you can as easily find
| contrary positions from other us govt agencies? what makes
| a "low confidence" doe take more credible than the other
| agencies to you
| Zetice wrote:
| Hm, so the way I'm using "credible" here is as, "able to
| be believed". So I find the DoE and therefore the _idea_
| credible. It doesn 't mean I _do_ believe it, or that I
| find other, contradicting positions "uncredible"
| (incredible? lol).
|
| The DoE is just an institution I trust, and if they're
| willing to publish this, I'm willing to listen to what
| they have to say.
| djkivi wrote:
| Huh. I thought that theory was debunked a long time ago.
|
| https://www.nationalreview.com/news/washington-post-corrects...
| goolulusaurs wrote:
| 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 really prevent the virus
| spreading from people bringing it into the country but obviously
| wild animals would still be spreading it. Yet the Chinese
| government claimed that their lockdowns did work. How is that at
| all compatible with the virus being from wild animals and not
| being a lab leak? It doesn't make any sense.
| unicornmama wrote:
| Lockdowns serve a purpose: to slow the spread of the virus.
| jcadam wrote:
| I will never comply with any sort of lockdown ever again. I
| regret taking this COVID BS seriously the first couple of
| months back in 2020.
| psychlops wrote:
| Lockdowns serve many purposes, not simply the stated one.
| They also have many side effects.
| Gigachad wrote:
| That's not what china was doing though. They were attempting
| total elimination.
| boxed wrote:
| Of course there's a reservoir. That's why there was a lab in
| the first place. There are many more viruses in those caves.
| Many many. And tourists literally pay money to go into such
| caves, and look up to the ceiling to look at the bats. Bats
| that may at any time shit into their eye with one of these new
| viruses. And then on top of that people catch them and sell
| them live to slaughter them at home to eat.
|
| Again, this is all well known and the reason the lab was there
| in the first place. That's why the techs go into these caves
| wearing full haz mat. Unlike the tourists who are oblivious.
|
| Not saying it's not a lab leak. But you seem confused about
| some basics facts...
| mwbajor wrote:
| So if a tech from the Wuhan lab on one of these expeditions,
| does that count as a leak?
| skellington wrote:
| No there isn't. More than 50K animals tested an no animal
| reservoir for C19.
|
| Are there really reddit-ors who still think C19 was natural
| when ALL of the current evidence including genetic markers
| points to lab leak?
|
| Yes, we can't say with absolute certainty, but the case for
| lab leak is MUCH stronger than for natural. Plus, why has
| China still not released the nature and details of the
| experiments that were conducted in that lab? You know why.
|
| Anyone who doesn't see that lab leak is the most likely
| source is just being contrarian for their own ego or
| political reasons.
| alevskaya wrote:
| This is a dumb argument. Sick animals were probably culled
| immediately by the farms to avoid getting blamed.
|
| As a 2-decade genetic engineer: there are no genetic
| "markers" pointing to a lab leak, there's really no sign of
| unnatural manipulation in the sequence.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Indeed, the government cracked down on wild animal
| farming at the beginning of the pandemic.
|
| When you hear that "X thousand animals were tested," it's
| not the types of wild animals that are the likely
| culprit. It's cows, pigs, sheep and the like. It's a
| complete red herring.
| naasking wrote:
| Passage through humanized mice wouldn't leave signs of
| unnatural manipulation. It's still pretty suspicious that
| COVID was so transmissible between people from the
| outset, and no evidence of it circulating in local
| populations was found.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| You are arguing different things. There's a reservoir of
| coronaviruses, but not exactly c19.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Evolutionary theory SUGGESTS it is a lab leak. When a virus
| "makes the jump" from animals to humans, it tends not to be
| very good at first. Then, over time, the virus would evolve
| to get better and better at spreading among humans. You'd
| have likely years of the virus spreading fairly slowly. You
| know how each progressive strain has become more capable of
| spreading but less deadly compared to the generation before
| it? One would expect to have seen strains prior to alpha
| which would have been significantly less infectious.
|
| Covid, conversely, was EXTREMELY good at spreading among
| humans right from the start. This experience coincides with
| the exact category of experiments we know were funded in
| Wuhan, which include using directed evolution to get bat
| corona viruses to be able to infect human cells. They
| literally trained these corona viruses to be able to infect
| human cells.
|
| Is this definitive? Of course not, nothing is definitive.
|
| If you're interested in how these types of coverups play out
| in the real world, I recommend investigating the 1977
| influenza pandemic. 700,00 people died due to a Russian lab
| leak and the entire scientific community kept it a secret
| from the public because they didn't want to embarrass Russia
| during the cold war. It took 30 years for the scientific
| community to come clean.
| [deleted]
| goolulusaurs wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| From a quick Google search, it seems that with highly
| mutating viruses like Covid, it's generally difficult to
| find a reservoir -- that waves of infections are highly
| transitory and you really need to get lucky to find the
| right animal in the right group of animals in the right
| species at the right time.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _But if there is an animal reservoir of the virus in China,
| then how could the Chinese government ever expect a lockdown to
| work?_
|
| Because if people avoid contact with the animals and it's a
| rare type of human-animal interaction to begin with, then it
| doesn't spread. And if you catch it again, you lock down
| instantly locally again.
|
| I'm not taking any side on the source of the virus, but I don't
| think the Chinese government behavior makes either option more
| likely. Once vaccines had been developed, the Chinese lockdown
| went on for way longer than reason could ever have dictated,
| since Covid had turned endemic in the rest of the world. The
| extreme lockdown was never a good example of rational health
| policy in _any_ scenario, post-vaccine.
| monetus wrote:
| > _...then it doesn 't spread. And if you catch it again, you
| lock down instantly locally again._
|
| I dont know much about Ebola, but that is essentially what
| has been happening right?
| Glyptodon wrote:
| What annoys me is how many people seem to think "lab leak" is the
| same as "man made virus." Though maybe I'm reading too much into
| things people say on social media.
| macinjosh wrote:
| Why? It's a distinction without a difference. It is a man made
| pandemic whether they "made" the virus themselves or not. It is
| of very little consequence at this point if it was engineered
| or not.
| unity1001 wrote:
| Speaking of lab leaks...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/health/germs-fort-detrick...
| chewbacha wrote:
| The US agency making the assertion is the department of energy.
| Obviously the foremost thought leaders in virology and
| epidemiology.
| dekhn wrote:
| The DOE runs national labs with research into biology. In fact,
| they funded the human genome project earlier than the NIH (who
| later swooped in after realizing they were missing out). They
| also have labs that work on biosafety. Lots of scientists.
| paganel wrote:
| This was considered "fake news" and heavily reprimanded all
| throughout the pandemic in the media attached to the Western
| consensus, hilarious how they're starting to do a 180 on it (next
| is doing a 360, I guess).
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| It's always been a possibility although other explanations are
| more likely. I'd be interested in the evidence.
| UKR_anon wrote:
| [flagged]
| lockhouse wrote:
| Why are other explanations _more_ likely? I 'd be interested
| in your evidence for that.
| [deleted]
| zzzeek wrote:
| citation needed
| UKR_anon wrote:
| Genuine question. Why this gaslighting? Have you been living
| under a rock in 2020? You don't care at all about a source,
| the only thing you want to to spread confusion.
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| Someone linked me this website last year https://peterdaszak.com/
| . I thought it must have been run by a crazy person at first, but
| it's turning out to be more and more correct. I'm not sure of the
| whole Nazi angle, however.
| b3nji wrote:
| To think, numerous respected scientists we mocked, ridiculed and
| canceled when they pointed this out this was likely, years ago.
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| The fucking article says the DoE has low confidence in the
| report.
| extheat wrote:
| Look at the other intelligence community reports are rated as
| and what "low confidence" means in intelligence community
| assessments. The fact that the DOE is taking the time to revise
| their previous stance is a very big deal in our quest to
| understand the origins of the new coronavirus.
| ironyman wrote:
| I strongly suspect that the three-letter agencies have good intel
| to conclusively show that this is the case, but they have decided
| to hold back on it for the sake of US-China relations.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/us-intelligence-releases-repor...
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| considering the Snowden leaks, the 3 letter agencies probably
| have enough intel to solve about 90% of every unsolved felony
| in the US and Europe.
| ttul wrote:
| One of those agencies - the FBI - has long held that Covid-19
| is the result of a lab leak: "The FBI previously came to the
| conclusion that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab
| leak in 2021 with "moderate confi-dence" and still holds to
| this view." (from the WSJ article)
| michaelgrosner2 wrote:
| I'm not sure what world you're living in but we've been
| shooting missiles at Chinese military objects and restricting
| their access to semiconductors. I have little doubt that if the
| CIA or FBI had information it was actually a Chinese plot they
| would have released it by now.
| cld8483 wrote:
| > _I 'm not sure what world you're living in but we've been
| shooting missiles at Chinese military objects_
|
| Only after several days of failing to resolve the balloon
| matter diplomatically. Shooting it down was not their first
| resort, and that's probably because diplomatic considerations
| with China were being weighed against the domestic political
| situation. When the diplomatic situation can be kept
| relatively smooth and normal by keeping the public in the
| dark, that's the 'rational' choice.
| aquarium87 wrote:
| Naw. Nobody wins from increased instability. Seems to me the
| playbook is obvious. You see in politics all the time.
| Everyone knows the truth but pretends otherwise until the
| proper time when things have settled down and the truth can
| be allowed to be free.
|
| We are coming to the time when people are forgetting what
| lockdown were like and just want to move on with live. The
| near future is when the lab leak hypothesis can become the de
| facto default of scientists and intel agencies.
|
| Same applies for the vaccines. 4 months of study for top
| level review of vaccines as a metastudy. 6 months of journal
| review for meta analysis of existing papers. 6 months of
| journal review, 4 months to parse the data.
|
| Already, before the narrative can change, 20 months need to
| pass since the end of the dataset. If you want relevent data
| on covid and vaccine outcomes, then it's Jan 2021-Dec 2022.
|
| First two years of preliminary data won't be finalized and
| combined and analyzed to a sufficient degree to potentially
| flip the narrative until about September 2024.
|
| Want real data on covid and the vaccine? 5 years worth? You
| can have it in September 2027.
|
| Why bother having the CIA release shit when you can just have
| the scientists do your dirty for you and time slide relevent
| information into 2024+?
|
| Its all coming out. Just a matter of timing.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| How would that improve anything for the US, though? Shooting
| down balloons helps us because it gets rid of spy equipment
| in our skies (and lets us get our hands on it). Restricting
| access to semiconductors keeps us on better technological
| footing than China.
|
| If they release evidence of a lab leak, China will deny it
| and relations will deteriorate. How do either of those things
| help the US? It's not going to make China a pariah in the
| world (and even if it did, that may or may not be a good
| thing) - the world is already very clear on their profound
| human rights abuses of Uyghurs, but nothing happens because
| they're too economically important.
|
| We'd maybe gain some theoretical moral high ground, but that
| doesn't make the world safer or better.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Not unless you were using it for leverage ?
| 323 wrote:
| And now that China is thinking of helping Russia militarily it
| suddenly surfaces...
| cc101 wrote:
| How can they tell the difference between a lab leak and a
| deliberate release to explore the world's reaction to a viral
| weapon?
| cld8483 wrote:
| You can tell the difference by looking to see if any of their
| research helped in developing the vaccine (it did not.)
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| That's not definitive because you're assuming motivation, it
| could be that someone didn't want a vaccine, and you're
| assuming all research was publicized to us. This was the
| fastest vaccine ever developed in human history, it's worth
| noting.
| this_user wrote:
| Because deliberately releasing a virus that is so infectious
| that it will cause a global pandemic and will inevitably hit
| your own country is a bloody stupid thing to do. Everyone
| loses, unless you already have a vaccine that you can sell.
|
| And if you are trying to insinuate that it might have been the
| Chinese that released it, it becomes even more bloody stupid,
| because you would obviously never release it on your own soil
| right outside your own biolab which would immediately be under
| suspicion of being the source. You'd release it at NY Grand
| Central Station or the Atlanta International, and no one will
| be able to figure out what happened.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| Its not a stupid thing to do when:
|
| 1) You're facing a demographic crisis due to your aging
| population and your next closest rival has a population of
| which half are under 30,
|
| 2) the virus primarily kills the elderly,
|
| 3) your approach to increasing influence and power is to
| increase your relative position and your relative position is
| decreasing after decades of increasing, and
|
| 4) you can cause an economic crisis for your rivals when they
| shut public life, and consequently their economies, down, and
| thus increase your relative position in the world.
|
| I won't comment on any western motivations for going along
| with it.
| gadders wrote:
| Alina Chan and Matt Ridley feeling vindicated right now.
| ThePhantom wrote:
| The lab leak hypothesis makes the most sense. The lab in Wuhan
| which researches coronaviruses conducts experiences on animals,
| including bats. Like other labs, there are dedicated personnel
| for hydrating and feeding the experimental animals. Notably,
| there are "wet markets" in Wuhan where live animals are sold,
| including bats, which harbor coronaviruses. Someone who is
| working in the facility in charge of maintenance of experimental
| animals has a choice of either sacrificing the animals as per
| protocol, or selling them to a wet market to make extra money.
| The most likely scenario was that someone sold the animal, most
| likely a bat, to a wet market, which happened to contain a
| virulent coronavirus strain that then infected humans.
| mwbajor wrote:
| 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.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| 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.
| ecf wrote:
| It's really the most likely hypothesis and why the true
| origin of Covid-19 has been kept a secret. Humanity hasn't
| been hit with something like this in over a century and it's
| unreasonable to assume it's all because a freak mutation with
| some bats.
|
| Covid-19 was bred in a Chinese lab. It escaped. And the world
| shut down for years.
|
| This would cause a world war if it came to light so our
| "leaders" are doing everything they can to obfuscate the
| origin.
| [deleted]
| cycrutchfield wrote:
| There were no bats being sold in the Wuhan wet markets.
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2
| dqpb wrote:
| This is the stupidest theory I've ever heard.
| stubybubs wrote:
| I don't know if it does make the most sense. Some context:
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html
|
| 75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. How many
| of those do we have start to finish routes from animals to
| humans? And if we don't have that route, how many of those are
| we suspecting of being lab leaks?
|
| If they wrote in their conclusion that it was "low confidence"
| I think they have good reason for saying that.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| > 75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. How
| many of those do we have start to finish routes from animals
| to humans? And if we don't have that route, how many of those
| are we suspecting of being lab leaks?
|
| None, as far as I know. Nor should it be particularly
| surprising that no animal origin for COVID-19 has yet been
| found. The animal origin for SARS was only discovered in
| 2017: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9 The
| first outbreak was in 2002. We're less than 4 years away from
| the first known outbreak of COVID-19, so dismissing a wild
| animal origin at this point is extremely premature at best.
| lvl102 wrote:
| Deleted
| swatcoder wrote:
| Release a plague you can't control through the wet market
| next to your virology lab, knowing that it will spread among
| your own people and those of your allies first, and then also
| probably circle back, hoping that it will be worse for the
| other guys, sure (somehow) that the war that you started out
| of nowhere is to your own net benefit.
|
| Interesting strategy!
| ineedasername wrote:
| I doubt it. It was almost immediately clear that the world's
| reliance on China for some things was a problem. I think this
| was a pretty clear outcome, because before COVID there were
| people already harping on that single point of failure.
|
| This is going to hurt China's long term influence. Countries
| are diversifying their strategic supply chains, on shoring
| capacity for thinks like chip fabs. This weakens China's
| geopolitical clout because they won't be able to control the
| bottleneck.
| ss108 wrote:
| Well, as the poster said, it backfired on them lol
|
| (I do not believe in the intentional malicious leak theory,
| to be clear)
| theRealMe wrote:
| It's so fascinating to me to see someone formulate a
| hypothesis based on nothing "I think they did[purposely leak
| a global pandemic-causing virus]", and then immediately turn
| around and relish in China's failure at the thing you claimed
| they did. Like, do I do this too, and I'm just not aware of
| it?
| mistermann wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34927481
| rocketbop wrote:
| > I think they did thinking the West wouldn't have developed
| a vaccine so fast.
|
| I'm curious. What motivation for purposefully leaking such a
| virus would 'they' have?
| salawat wrote:
| Note: Wuhan was closed to interprovincial traffic very early
| on. The International Airport, however, was left open.
|
| There's a hanful of ways you can look at that:
|
| Wuhan International couldn't be closed without consent from
| Beijing.
|
| Beijing didn't grant it because
|
| A) Poor information propagation Or B) Someone made a weighty
| geopolitical decision that in order to best serve China's
| interests, it was time to make this everyone's problem,
| leaving the International Airport open as a result. Or C)
| some combo of the two.
|
| I don't know your particular balance in regards to the actual
| Overton Window as extended to humanity as a whole, but I damn
| well know where it registers on mine.
| seadan83 wrote:
| > Beijing didn't grant it
|
| If we recall, initially China downplayed how widespread the
| virus was and made it out as if it were contained. Perhaps
| they did not know how widespread the issue was either.
| Further, at that time there was complete uncertainty
| regarding Covid-19's virulence (it was after all, a
| completely brand new virus; and there was a ton of
| uncertainty around in January 2020).
|
| Regarding to the communication from the US government of
| how contained the issue was, as a reference, the president
| at the time wrote:
|
| "Jan. 24, Twitter:
|
| "China has been working very hard to contain the
| Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their
| efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In
| particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to
| thank President Xi!""
|
| - https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/15/trump-china-
| coronav...
|
| Basically, the entire world needed to start quarantine in
| early January of 2020 to effectively nip this in the bud
| (shutting down international travel, regional travel, etc).
| Perhaps that needed to have even started in December. I
| would suggest then that Beijing didn't shut down
| international travel at that time for the same reasons that
| the rest of the international community did not. In part
| they were still downplaying it as was the public oration
| from the US government was downplaying it as well. It
| wasn't until late February and into March that it became
| well known publicly that this was a new pandemic.
|
| Hence, by March China was fully shut down, and at that
| point there is no hiding the issue (why is all of China
| locked down?), and at that time it was everyone's problem.
|
| > A) Poor information propagation
|
| There was some info released that the CIA assessed the
| virulence opportunity to easily be a pandemic as early as
| November 2019. That poor information propagation wasn't
| necessarily just a problem with the Chinese government.
|
| Citation: "Intelligence report warned of coronavirus crisis
| as early as November: Sources" -
| https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-
| warned-c...
| NegativeK wrote:
| > It spectacularly backfired on them.
|
| Because it's a virus that doesn't discriminate based on race
| or geography? Yeah, I have doubts (to put it mildly.)
| cdolan wrote:
| Did I just read this correctly? "janitor steals a highly
| modified and virulent bat and sells it for $10 in a wet market"
|
| Why reach so hard to link this to a Wuhan wet market vs a
| generic leak? They didn't sell bats at the market as far as I
| have read, and what's the difference? Lab leak is a lab leak.
| awb wrote:
| > Lab leak is a lab leak.
|
| It's an interesting question though. Working off of a lab
| leak theory, how did the first known cases all come from the
| wet market?
|
| Is it just coincidence that an infected scientist traveled to
| the outdoor market and infected others?
|
| With human to human transmission, you'd think it would have
| spread more rapidly among a scientist's friends & family in
| an indoor setting.
|
| When the US was doing contact tracing early on, I think the
| number of outdoor transmissions was extremely low.
| dmix wrote:
| Indeed, you don't need such a complicated theory. 3 doctors
| researching a coronavirus end up in a regional hospital, but
| before they get ID'd with a virus they interact with others
| in the local community helping it quietly spread among people
| with stronger immune systems.
|
| It's a 45min drive between the Hunan market <> WIV building:
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/dir/30%C2%B022%E2%80%B235%E2%80%.
| ..
| awb wrote:
| It's definitely plausible, but then wouldn't you expect
| multiple outbreak sites?
|
| * In and around WIV
|
| * In and around the scientist's homes, families and
| neighborhoods
|
| From the news I've seen all of the initial known cases were
| traced back to the market.
| MarcoZavala wrote:
| [dead]
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| 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 cause,' and a
| confidence score: 'low'.
|
| The NYT goes on to say:
|
| _Some officials briefed on the intelligence said that it was
| relatively weak and that the Energy Department's conclusion was
| made with "low confidence," suggesting its level of certainty was
| not high. While the department shared the information with other
| agencies, none of them changed their conclusions, officials
| said._
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/us/politics/china-lab-lea...
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Also article mentions FBI has "moderate" confidence it was lab
| leak. I find that very interesting given it wouldn't be so much
| based on scientific analysis but some intelligence collection
| the FBI has.
| teawrecks wrote:
| Science is the collecting and processing of empirical data
| using peer reviewed methods to reach a conclusion. Which part
| do you think the FBI is not doing which separates their
| process from science?
| kranke155 wrote:
| Doesn't the FBI also have a large biological analysis team?
| For bio terror ?
| orlp wrote:
| I think if anything COVID has shown us that biological
| warfare makes as much sense as nuclear: none. In our
| globally connected world it's mutually assured destruction,
| and that's without even the need for your enemy to maintain
| stockpiles of weapons. The virus will find itself within
| your own borders soon enough.
| tomp wrote:
| Only bad viruses. Good viruses will be genetically coded
| to only harm a particular subgroup.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| I was thinking that actually gives the United States a
| distinct advantage in such (hypothetical) biological
| warfare, it has the most diverse gene pool on the planet.
| scotteric wrote:
| It still makes sense for things like anthrax that aren't
| easily communicable. Or botulinum toxin.
| orlp wrote:
| Fair enough, I meant viral biowarfare.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I should point out that some viruses are not easily
| transmissible either.
| nradov wrote:
| Terrorists motivated by religion or ideology sometimes
| use tactics and weapons that make no sense to rational
| people. The Aum Shinrikyo cult was developing biological
| weapons.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > The Aum Shinrikyo cult was developing biological
| weapons.
|
| Sarin would be classed as chemical, not biological.
|
| It's also worth illustrating that their primary terrorist
| act killed 15 people, after releasing sarin on 5
| different trains during Tokyo's busy rush hour. You would
| have been more effective just lobbing a single grenade.
| nradov wrote:
| The cult used a chemical weapon. They were also
| developing biological weapons based on botulism and
| anthrax at the same time but fortunately didn't get a
| chance to use those.
| ffssffss wrote:
| And the WSJ piece says the CIA is undecided! I wonder what
| explains the different assessments.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Probably they still aren't sharing all the information they
| have with each other. I had thought that was supposed to be
| much improved post 9-11.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Or they are coming to different conclusions given the
| same ambiguous/incomplete information. It could simply be
| disagreement, or just lack of a standard metric here to
| compare notes easily.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| It probably just means the correct aggregate conclusion
| is "we don't know, go ask China".
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| They improved the _ability_ to share info (fusion centers
| and whatnot), but the _desire_ to do so remains under the
| auspices of humans.
| kashunstva wrote:
| Or there aren't objective standards for what "low,
| medium, and high confidence" actually mean, thereby
| allowing one agency to look at the evidence and say it's
| of low confidence and another to look at the same data
| and say it's moderate confidence.
| Bjartr wrote:
| Interestingly, the CIA has published a paper on exactly
| this subject:
|
| Words of Estimative Probability (PDF)
| https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-
| intelligence/ar...
| cameldrv wrote:
| Moderate and Low are Words of Analytic Confidence [1].
| This has more to do with the quality of the sourcing than
| a numeric probability number.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_confidence
| tzs wrote:
| I read that they did massively increase sharing after
| 9/11, but there was a reassessment after the Manning
| leaks. Manning had access to way more information than
| someone at their level needed for their job, and they
| concluded this came about from going a bit too far on the
| post 9/11 sharing and so they dialed it back a bit.
| atoav wrote:
| I have not been inside the CIA, but that could just mean
| they haven't done any research on that or that their
| research is ongoing.
|
| An _institution_ will not have assessments on _everything_
| at any point in time. Two different institutions might have
| didferent assessments for a billion reasons, e.g. they
| could have done the research at different points in time,
| the underlying evisence could differ, the interviewed
| experts could have said different things and so on.
|
| Two different instutions reaching different conclusions is
| not as surprising as it seems.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Organizations like the CIA don't make factual statements,
| they make strategic statements. Any connection with reality
| is purely coincidental.
|
| If the CIA came out tomorrow and said they were 100%
| confident it was a lab leak from China we would have no way
| of knowing if that's based on facts or political
| propaganda.
|
| Maybe, in 40-50 years we'll get an answer. Until then, it's
| too politically and strategically useful to keep it up in
| the air. At least one goal is for people to be arguing
| about it.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| This is exactly why I can't give this article, or any of
| those multiple intelligence agency assessments any real
| credence. I don't have access to any of the data that went
| into those assessments. What I do have access to doesn't
| point very strongly at a lab leak origin, despite its
| plausibility.
| colechristensen wrote:
| What the CIA says publicly and what is happening internally
| are often very different things. The FBI has less of a
| global political agenda.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| I'm sure that the undecidedness is not about the origin but
| about the geopolitical impact such an official statement
| would have.
| djkivi wrote:
| Well, when all 17 intelligence agencies agree on something,
| you know they must be right then.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| I don't know... I think when they all agree it's also
| likely that they are wrong. (It indicates some
| possibility of motivated reasoning.)
| matwood wrote:
| > Well, when all 17 intelligence agencies agree on
| something, you know they must be right then.
|
| Then you _know_ they are lying.
| ashwagary wrote:
| If you repeat a lie often enough, even the at first reluctant
| will start to believe it. That's how the propaganda machine
| typically works.
|
| The more these claims based on minimal new evidence are
| repeated, the more it seems the virus may have potentially
| been released by nefarious actors as an attack on the
| population.
|
| It's not implausable for an entity with knowledge and access
| to a virus being studied, to release a copy of it in the
| environment surrounding the lab while maintaining a high
| degree of deniability.
|
| If it is so, then the question that remains is, much like in
| the case of Nordstream, which nation state has the most
| incentive to carry it out?
| baja_blast wrote:
| While I won't discount the possibility that the outbreak
| could be a nefarious plot to plant a virus.I feel the US's
| response to the pandemic and the massive mistakes made make
| it less likely. The most likely would be just an accident
| where a researcher unknowingly got infected while
| conducting research in a BSL2 lab where they were testing
| wild SARS like viruses and inserting FCS to gauge the
| viruses potential threat level
| taw567890 wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| bigfudge wrote:
| I'm wary of engaging, but this just makes no sense to me.
| Perhaps you can explain and actually make explicit some of
| the implied connections.
|
| Previously the 'big lie' was that it was not from a lab.
| Now that it's assessed to be likely from a lab the new lie
| is the contention that it was done deliberately? Whose
| propaganda machine is at work here anyway? The Chinese govt
| or the US one? Or are they in cahoots now?
| taw567890 wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| belorn wrote:
| If all the other origin theories has "very low" as confidence
| score, then a lab leak is still the most likely origin with a
| "low" confidence score.
|
| It would be nice to see the confidence score as a numerical
| number in order to understand how much lead this theory has to
| the second most likely origin theory.
| nradov wrote:
| There is way to actually quantify such estimates. Any numbers
| would just be made up. A qualitative confidence rating like
| "low" really is the best way to convey intelligence
| information to policy makers.
| MilnerRoute wrote:
| Four U.S. agencies say "market origins" - as does the U.S.
| National Intelligence Council. Two more agencies -- including
| the CIA -- are undecided. And then there's the "low
| confidence" Energy Department opinion, and one from the FBI.
|
| So it ultimately depends on how you weight the 75% of groups
| that don't think there's evidence that it leaked from a lab.
| boopmaster wrote:
| This. Low confidence still significant in that it could have
| been "low confidence transmission from wet market game", but
| that's not the direction this landed on. It's likely a lab
| leak, says the report, but there's too many gaps to support
| higher certainty.
| abduhl wrote:
| What is the substantive difference between "Lab leak most
| likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says" and
| "Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says"? The
| only difference I see is that one notes the pandemic
| ("Covid-19") while the other notes the agency ("Energy Dept.").
|
| Or is your comment more broadly that both headlines are bad? If
| so, then I'd disagree. Both headlines give the most important
| part of the story: a US agency currently believes that the
| pandemic was caused by a lab leak.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I think the criticism is that saying something is 'most
| likely' implies a sense of it being pretty likely. When the
| reality is that they are very uncertain.
|
| Both headlines are clickbait compared to the content of the
| article.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure what the better headline would be. "Lab leak
| possible origin?" Well, yes, in that they haven't ruled it
| out. But that's not really the same thing as saying that
| something is "most likely" even if, as the subhead notes,
| they wouldn't bet the farm on it.
| stevehawk wrote:
| > Both headlines give the most important part of the story: a
| US agency currently believes that the pandemic was caused by
| a lab leak.
|
| seems to me you're still leaving out a very important part of
| the news, which is that the confidence level is "low".
|
| so right now the US government has multiple theories, none of
| which it is confident. it's just that of the reports that is
| not confident in, it might be the least not confident in the
| lab leak idea.
|
| but the WSJ has decided to throw integrity aside and ignore
| that part in their headline.
| abduhl wrote:
| The confidence level for the Covid-19 vaccine being
| sterilizing was low, but we still ran headlines saying as
| much. The confidence level for cloth masks being effective
| was low, but we still ran headlines saying as much. The
| confidence level for everything when it comes to Covid-19
| is low.
|
| The media gave up on integrity a long time ago, especially
| with respect to the pandemic. You're just noticing it now?
| mwbajor wrote:
| You know you're right. Remember when Saddam closed his labs
| to us? The ones that never had WMDs? What was the
| "confidence" threshold for invading iraq? I also bet its
| the same exact people now telling us about more
| "confidence" levels.
|
| Confidence, high, low, whatever, it means nothing. No one
| trusts the govt. or media anymore and no one should.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| For what it's worth - FBI arrived at the same conclusion in
| 2021 with "moderate confidence."
|
| Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-
| leak-807...
| another_story wrote:
| Feels like we should assume it's a lab leak and push for
| caution anyways. If it wasn't a lab leak then all we've done is
| help better prevent that from happening in the future.
| tomComb wrote:
| It's hard enough to get a good objective analysis done
| without saying it should be bent to political considerations.
| fakethenews2022 wrote:
| [flagged]
| dqpb wrote:
| Sure, but the real news is it used to be taboo to say this -
| Sinophobic even. A lot of people are owed a serious apology.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Context, as always, is key:
| https://www.npr.org/2021/08/12/1027236499/anti-asian-hate-
| cr...
|
| Are these people who are owed a serious apology the ones who
| actually attacked Asian-Americans? Or simply the ones who
| stoked racial animus prompting others to attack them?
| dqpb wrote:
| The people who are owed an apology are the people who did
| nothing more than to believe that the wuhan coronavirus
| outbreak originated from the wuhan coronavirus research
| lab.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| That was situated in a region known for coronaviruses
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| I wonder if the timing of these _" bad headlines"_ is connected
| to this
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/chinas-top-diplomat-expects-ne...
| ramraj07 wrote:
| They always softball these bombshells like this so any
| confidence in official terms is something that pretty much
| solidifies this as the source of the virus for me.
|
| I'm trying to think of anyone involved had a conscience if they
| would be tallying themselves to be one of the most prolific
| murderers in history but then that likely wouldn't happen since
| first unofficial hazing ritual you do when entering academia is
| to develop an air of "that's not me" attitude about things like
| this.
| andai wrote:
| > In 2015, an international team including two scientists from
| the institute published successful research on whether a bat
| coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#SA...
|
| Do we have the genetic sequences from these experiments? Has
| anyone compared them to the sequences from the pandemic?
|
| I'm not entirely up to speed but I recall hearing something
| about the US government funding them (without its own
| knowledge..?), so perhaps that info is not only in China's
| hands.
|
| (And while we're on the subject, did anything come of the thing
| about Pfizer engineering the virus, ostensibly for vaccine
| research purposes?)
| Izkata wrote:
| > Do we have the genetic sequences from these experiments?
| Has anyone compared them to the sequences from the pandemic?
|
| I don't know about those specifically, but one of the
| earliest genetic matches we had is a natural virus called
| RaTG13 and was studied in the Wuhan lab. I think a closer
| match has since been found though.
|
| > I'm not entirely up to speed but I recall hearing something
| about the US government funding them (without its own
| knowledge..?), so perhaps that info is not only in China's
| hands.
|
| Yes, indirectly through EcoHealth Alliance, hence the
| "without its own knowledge" part.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Yes we have the sequences and no they're nothing like
| SarsCov2
| chitowneats wrote:
| True. And yet, it shows that there is a large scientific
| community & apparatus willing to experiment with this.
|
| Circumstantial evidence is not proof of wrongdoing, but it
| is reason to ask more questions. Why were those questions
| censored? Why were they ruled unacceptable
| "misinformation"? It seems to me that we were asleep at the
| switch.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| The counter to that is that the experts in coronaviruses
| knew they were the likely next epidemic and that they
| were doing their best to characterize the threat as best
| possible but unfortunately failed before the spillover
| came. The scientific community knew how close we came
| between SARS and MERS, a small mutation of either
| could've been much more virulent and pathogenic, so of
| course they were trying to research.
| chitowneats wrote:
| The question is not whether the research was worth it
| overall. They denied there was even a possibility that
| lab leak was the cause of the pandemic.
|
| I'm more than happy to entertain the idea that the
| research is and was worth it. But we need to have an
| accurate accounting of recent events. They tried to
| completely shut that down. Thankfully, lately it seems
| that they failed.
| dmix wrote:
| > Thankfully, lately it seems that they failed.
|
| I still get the impression the 'selectively silence
| misinformation' crowd is still as emboldened as ever,
| even in the pursuit of science. Despite it repeatedly
| failing and backfiring.
|
| COVID helped give Reddit-style control of discourse a
| glean of urgency/respectability and "it's okay because we
| had good-intentions" continues to be the go-to
| justification.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| There's an immense benefit to being specific with both
| what you mean by lab leak (natural virus leaked or
| modified one did) and by "they" when you're talking about
| coverups because it gets weirdly racist and
| conspiratorial in a hurry otherwise.
| chitowneats wrote:
| Unfortunately, you seem fundamentally confused about the
| position of people who are skeptical of zoonotic origin.
|
| Please explain to me how position A) is more racist than
| position B)
|
| A) Scientists all over the world, including Chinese,
| Americans, and others, made a fundamental misjudgement
| about the safety of the Wuhan virology lab, or perhaps
| viral experimentation generally, and the result was a
| global pandemic
|
| Versus
|
| B) Chinese people eating & trading wild and exotic meat
| unintentionally caused a global pandemic due to their
| consumption
|
| Of course, neither theory is racist. That's a word that
| used to mean something (and I wish it still did!), but is
| mostly used today to shut down debate in Western
| countries.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| I'd rather just leave you to your false dichotomy. Thanks
| though.
| baja_blast wrote:
| No we do not have the sequences, the lab has so far refused
| to share the sequences in their public database taken down
| down September of 2019. Plus recently people have
| discovered through BLAST searches an unreported Chimera
| virus that got accidentally got sequenced via contaminated
| agricultural rice sequencing dataset. Which means they had
| viruses that have not been previously reported. And this
| makes sense researchers do not publish viruses until they
| themselves can publish them in a journal. https://www.biorx
| iv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2....
| mikeyouse wrote:
| It was available well into 2020 if you read past the
| shitty early headlines.
| tripletao wrote:
| I guess you're referring here to Flo Debarre's misleading
| tweet, which you linked to four months ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33247997
|
| As I noted in my reply at that time, everyone has always
| agreed that the overall server remained intermittently
| accessible until Feb 2020. The particular database "was
| not accessed from outside of the WIV after 12 September
| 2019", though.
| colechristensen wrote:
| The evidence there is not that that particular group created
| covid, but that there is a clear history of engineering
| viruses in exactly the way a lab leak scenario would play
| out.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| I don't pretend to know, as I can't, it's impossible to know
| for sure one way or the other, without trusting one entity over
| another, or going with my 'gut'.
|
| However, a thought experiment, what if their zero-covid program
| was a test pilot to see a pandemic could be averted on a local
| scale through govt intervention, so if they unleashed something
| much more deadly, it'd be contained in the country, but hit
| other countries worse.
|
| I mean it seems reasonable that if you wanted to launch
| biological warfare you'd want to be sure there was either a
| cure, or you could contain it outside the country, from getting
| into the population. I could also see some despot thinking he
| was doing a good thing for humanity by unleashing a virus with
| a 50% kill rate, because of the impact on global warming alone.
| Scary, that one person could decide to do that, and nobody
| could stop it, if they did.
| colechristensen wrote:
| This supposes way too much intention that can much more
| easily be explained by incompetence.
|
| A lab doing questionable work with inadequate safety measures
| hiding a major leak to save face makes way more sense than a
| supervillain story.
| baja_blast wrote:
| And when you add in the fact that virology work on unknown
| wild SARS like viruses were scheduled for only BSL2. And
| the vast majority of research published on sampled SARS
| like viruses was conducted in BSL2 labs it very easy to
| imagine a researcher unwittingly getting infected from a
| human mice model carrying a wild virus with a human
| optimized FCS inserted.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Good luck getting 95% of the American populace to understand
| any of that nuance.
|
| After seeing lots of Twitter threads about Nate Silver,
| condemning his lack of "certainty" in his predictions ("It's
| such a cop out! Since he never says yes or no one way or the
| other he always has an out when he's wrong!"), I'm even more
| convinced not just that people don't understand statistics, but
| they willfully don't want to.
| tharne wrote:
| > After seeing lots of Twitter threads about Nate Silver,
| condemning his lack of "certainty" in his predictions ("It's
| such a cop out! Since he never says yes or no one way or the
| other he always has an out when he's wrong!"), I'm even more
| convinced not just that people don't understand statistics,
| but they willfully don't want to.
|
| As someone who does understand statistics, it's made me
| dislike Nate Silver even more than if I didn't. It's been sad
| to watch his metamorphoses over the years from an interesting
| numbers guy with nuanced discussions on polling and models,
| to becoming the exact kind of pundit and talking head he used
| to make fun of. There's still a little bit of statistics on
| his site, but the overwhelming majority of content is the
| same trite punditry you'll find on pretty much any political
| blog.
| mrangle wrote:
| Part of the problem might be that commentators are going to
| want to willfully conflate intelligence "confidence" with a
| more pseudo science-y sounding "confidence score" that sounds
| like a bastard hybrid of research critique and statistics.
|
| One wouldn't predict that to be the case with all of the
| scientists here. But given that it is, perhaps we can't fault
| the American people if they don't understand the nuance.
|
| The truth is that "low confidence" is only meaningful in the
| context of COVID's origin if it is possible that a conclusion
| can be made with "high confidence". That doesn't seem to be
| possible.
|
| Certainly not in the other direction if some agencies are
| concluding at this stage, even with "low confidence", that
| COVID was lab leaked. Further, certainly "low confidence"
| doesn't imply that the inverse conclusion is likely true.
|
| The NYT's choice to over-emphasize the relatively meaningless
| "confidence score" is understandable given its prior
| investment in other views.
|
| Rigid historical narratives have been built on less than low
| confidence intelligence conclusions. A conclusion is the
| conclusion when one has to be made regardless.
|
| In the case of COVID, a conclusion as to its origin has to be
| made and yet the scientific evidence isn't likely to get
| better for either possibility. Short of confessions.
| mwbajor wrote:
| Doesn't matter if they understand the nuance. The lab leak
| theory takes a back seat for the following reason:
|
| Lets say it is found out with definite proof that it was a
| lab leak. Then what? Grandma's dead, china killed her and
| there is nothing you can do. We are not going to let this
| ruin trade relations even more ($$$ LOL) so you're just going
| to have to forget about it.
|
| Every American touched by covid knows this in the back of
| their head.
|
| The first stage of grief is denial.
| brookst wrote:
| Are you suggesting that a more correct course of action
| would be some kind of punitive retribution so those of us
| who survived suffer in the hopes that those most
| responsible suffer a little more than we do?
|
| The idea that we would hurt our own economic future out of
| grief/vengeance is bizarre. So yes, everyone does know what
| you suggest, and we're all OK with it.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Every American touched by covid knows this in the back of
| their head.
|
| only Americans were touched by covid I guess...
|
| > The first stage of grief is denial.
|
| At least a leak is not intentional like killing hundreds of
| thousand of innocent people by bombing their homes.
|
| Leak doesn't mean engineering a disease to kill some
| specific target, anyway, if China did it to kill Americans,
| it wouldn't be as bad as the Opium wars and the American
| invasion of China in 1900
|
| _The first U.S. multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, made
| part of his fortune smuggling opium into China._
| mwbajor wrote:
| no one is going to care if the deaths were "intentional"
| or negligent.
| B8MGHCBekDuRi wrote:
| not Americans.
|
| They always need someone to blame.
|
| Remember when they went to war with Iraq on fabricated
| evidence?
|
| Remember when they wen to war with Afghanistan after
| 9/11, but Afghanistan had no responsibility whatsoever
| (again!) and 10 years later they handed the country back
| to Talibans?
|
| Can we consider 9/11 an accident?
|
| Would it be the same to you?
|
| You know when really nobody talks about it?
|
| When it's the US killing people out of negligence and
| incompetence and sheer arrogance.
|
| Are you aware of this?
|
| Do they talk about it in USA?
|
| They never apologized.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
|
| ***
|
| can we also talk about this?
|
| I'm quite sure how these poor people died makes a lot of
| difference for the families of the victims.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/18/us/airstri
| kes...
|
| ***
|
| It's not China fault if during covid in USA Trump was
| President and people really believed that covid wasn't
| real and a lot of Americans died with a rate double than
| my Country which was already hit very hard BTW.
|
| China handled it much better anyway.
| chitowneats wrote:
| How about ethnic genocide? I guess we won't let that end
| the relationship either? We totally should though. I'm
| ready to vote for any candidate that furthers this goal.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| then nobody should talk to US
| conception wrote:
| The world has always been joyfully ok with a country
| killing its own people.
| chitowneats wrote:
| Muslims in Xinjiang are not Han Chinese. You're buying
| into the propaganda. In any case, the world should not be
| okay with this.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| If you want the US to care, it's probably better not to
| mention that they're Muslims though. I've noticed they
| just call them Uyghurs and suspect that's the reason.
| trilbyglens wrote:
| Right since covid only effected western countries. If it
| were "ethnic genocide" it was a pretty shitty one.
| tharne wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the person referencing "ethnic genocide"
| was referring to China's internment and genocide of their
| Muslim population in western China, not COVID.
|
| I think their point is that if genocide wasn't enough to
| motivate us to change our relationship with China, then a
| revelation about COVID originating from a Chinese lab
| probably isn't going to do much to move the needle
| either.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| A lot of people seem to think the lab leak premise is the
| same as the "engineered biological weapon" premise so if
| that become popular it'll probably only drive a perception
| of "weak government that betrays the citizens" even more
| than we've already got...
| kodah wrote:
| Lab leak involves bio-engineering because it involves
| gain of function research. Bio-engineering can be used in
| a testing setting but it could also be used to make a
| weapon. I highly doubt China was stupid enough to make a
| bioweapon and not immunize its citizens first.
|
| The significance of getting people to investigate, and if
| all things are true, confirm lab leak is that it puts an
| impetus on the importance of controls and second is a
| corrective measure for all the people who colluded to
| suppress lab leak being discussed. I am _very_ interested
| in seeing those people held accountable in very direct
| ways, even if they were under false impressions at the
| time. That starts with all the names on that infamous
| open letter.
| BearOso wrote:
| Yeah, instead it was sheer incompetence and arrogance.
| They screwed up because they poorly handled the virus
| while doing something they should never have been doing:
| gain-of-function research. We need to stop that research,
| and we can't let them defend it with any nonsense
| excuses.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Yeah, instead it was sheer incompetence and arrogance.
| They screwed up because they poorly handled the virus
|
| allegedly, with a very low confidence.
|
| now let's check how Americans handle their military
| bases.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/06/military-
| bas...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/23/us-
| soldiers-...
|
| https://gijn.org/2022/08/22/investigating-toxic-military-
| bas...
|
| https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/11/09/cdc-
| conduct-h...
|
| https://www.eenews.net/articles/high-levels-of-forever-
| chemi...
| officialjunk wrote:
| let's remember that the US helped fund this research too
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-
| of-...
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| If lab leak is confirmed the correct course of action is to
| design new systems and protocols to prevent such a thing
| from happening again in the future. Failure to do so will
| result in more issues down the line. It's basic
| engineering.
|
| If this kind of research is so important then maybe the
| nations of the world should buy a cruise ship and implement
| extreme isolation protocols between interactions, if that's
| the only way to safely perform that kind of research. Just
| as an example.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| The US isn't capable of preventing its own citizens from
| acquiring weapons and performing terrorist attacks with
| them. The idea that we'll be able to enforce controls on
| labs in foreign countries seems pretty far fetched given
| that. And as the tech advances, I suspect it will
| democratize like any other technology so that a lone
| enthusiast can design their own viruses in a home lab.
| I'm not particularly an optimist about what it portends.
| baja_blast wrote:
| But it is in the best interest of all countries. Unlike
| nuclear weapons where the damage can be isolated to one
| area, highly contagious weapons are impossible to control
| and will end up hurting themselves as well.
| monetus wrote:
| When it scales down to individual bio-hackers though, I
| feel like that virus is bound to be made.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| And this is (one reason) why so many are keen to believe
| Lab Leak - because then it was done by 'bad humans' and
| so can be fixed, instead of being (another) consequence
| of our encroachment on the natural world and indeed
| something that often just happens. Much easier to believe
| the 'baddies' have been found and 'brought to justice'
| than having to face up to the world we live in and our
| effect on it.
| mwbajor wrote:
| I agree but also disagree. There are too many conflicting
| interests and I don't think you will ever get a straight
| answer. People also can't look at the lab leak with a
| critical eye because they think it makes them look like
| trump lovers. I standby my original assertion that a
| country in grief will collectively go through the stages
| of grief of which denial is the first. Similar to 9/11
| when we convinced ourselves that our foreign policy had
| nothing to do with terrorist attacks and 2008 when we
| convinced ourselves bailing out failing industries was a
| good idea. 20 and 10 years later and we changed our tunes
| on those things. In 2033 we will finally accept that a
| lab-leak was most likely but only after the other 6
| stages...
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| In 2008 we _had_ to bail out the banks, otherwise
| everything would have gone under. Indeed, I believe that
| a defining moment of the GW Bush presidency was when he
| told the head of the Federal Reserve (I think?) to do
| whatever was necessary, with GWB providing political
| cover, and thus 'saved the world'. Where we screwed up
| was in not bringing to account (i.e. prison) many of the
| people responsible for letting things get as far as they
| did. We also used monetary policy too much when fiscal
| policy (i.e. bailing out Main Street) would have been
| better.
|
| My understanding is that it took a while before the
| (natural) emergence of SARS and MERS was understood, and
| so for COVID most probably.
| Supermancho wrote:
| >> We are not going to let this ruin trade relations even
| more ($$$ LOL) so you're just going to have to forget
| about it.
|
| > If lab leak is confirmed the correct course of action
| is to design new systems and protocols to prevent such a
| thing from happening again in the future
|
| I'm not sure why people choose to assume their simple
| solutions are somehow insightful. You aren't going to be
| able to reach into most countries to intervene in any
| other way than simple sanctions _at best_. The protocol
| of "asking country X please knock it off" is not
| productive, as it's not going to result in any specific
| change, it hurts trade, and every country is doing it to
| some degree despite previous agreements on the world
| stage (basic Game Theory).
|
| This is what the GP described, yet someone still thinks
| that nobody involved, understands "basic engineering".
| Very smart people do this kind of work with money and
| lives at stake. Let's give a little rope to people with
| big responsibilities, to try to understand the
| motivations rather than assume they are ignorant.
| mwbajor wrote:
| I know, basic engineering, so simple and straightforward
| right? And when a country says "no", I assume we issue a
| series of stronger and stronger worded warning letters to
| them right?
| ss108 wrote:
| Yeah. In 2016 when people were like "hurr durr experts suck,
| they predicted Hillary would win and she lost", it was
| exasperating. If a model predicted an outcome with 60-70%
| certainty, and the less likely scenario happens, model wasn't
| necessarily bad. That'd be true even if it was a 90/10 split.
| nradov wrote:
| The model wasn't _bad_ , just useless.
| ss108 wrote:
| Why useless? People have to attempt to predict the
| outcomes of elections, and have to do their best.
| afiori wrote:
| I would guess that the vast majority of the population do
| not take meaningful actions based on election prediction
| (other than "I might [not] need to actually vote").
|
| There are good reasons to have polls and predictions but
| they are far from necessary.
| ss108 wrote:
| People who work for political campaigns need to know,
| businesses and investors might like to plan, etc.
| hermiod wrote:
| Just because something isn't useful to everyone, doesn't
| mean it isn't useful to someone.
|
| The original claim was that election prediction is
| useless -- are you willing to concede that election
| prediction isn't useless?
| pickovven wrote:
| Worse than useless. It likely impacts election outcomes.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Highly disagree that it was "useless":
|
| 1. First, when many pundits were basically saying there
| was no chance that Trump would win, Silver was
| particularly highlighting not just that it was in the
| realm of possibility, but would not even be very
| surprising if Trump won (e.g. I think Nate does a good
| job with his "same probability of a team down by 3 points
| at the beginning of the 4th quarter coming back to win"
| to clarify to a lay person that this isn't unusual).
|
| 2. When making political predictions based on polling
| that turn out to be "wrong" (i.e. end up going the way of
| the < 50% option), it's helpful to think of why this
| might happen. In Trump's case, it was pretty obvious he
| was a very different type of politician than what came
| before, so it's worth thinking whether that difference
| might result in widespread error in some polls. Also,
| whenever a race is very close, it's obvious that any
| small movements one way or the other can affect the
| outcome. In 2016 Trump lost the popular vote by a
| substantial margin but won the electoral collage by a
| significant but not huge amount. In fact, the "all or
| nothing" way the US electoral college system works has
| the effect of amplifying smaller differences into larger
| vote outcomes.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| It isn't always a lack of will. Sometimes it is lacking a
| worldview that continually perceives through the lenses of
| statistical probabilities because most of the time,
| heuristics are Good Enough. Constantly evaluating upon an
| ever-shifting, -updating net of probabilities is relatively
| more cognitively demanding.
|
| Those who do reflexively apply probability assessments
| however, would do well to also perceive when to accept
| heuristic Good Enough solutions.
| SMAAART wrote:
| > Good luck getting 95% of the American populace to
| understand any of that nuance.
|
| And that's why media use these headlines (dark patterns?) and
| politicians keep making fake promises and get reelected.
|
| #SAD
| smsm42 wrote:
| It's not like any other options have high confidence. All
| theories are low confidence right now because there is no
| conclusive proof for either. But if you support some, you are
| the defender of science, and if you support another, you are
| a filthy conspirologist and get banned from social media. Try
| explaining that to 95% of the American populace.
| brookst wrote:
| I think it has more to do with the fact that one opinion is
| supported by more conspiracy nuts. Doesn't mean it isn't
| the right answer, but having lots of crazies insisting it
| is the only possible answer makes more grounded people less
| credible in the eyes of others.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Do we know why it is the Department of Energy that works on
| that? I would have expected a branch of government that's more
| related to health, granted, I know very little about US gvmt
| structure.
| mort96 wrote:
| I don't know the answer to your question, but the DoE does _a
| lot_ more than just energy. In addition to overseeing energy
| policy, they oversee the R &D of nuclear weapons and the
| nuclear weapons program, they oversee the National
| Laboratories which does a lot of research and development in
| the areas of technology, health, physics, climate/environment
| and energy, they started the Human Genome Project, etc.
|
| Here's their overview of some of the stuff their National
| Laboratories have done:
| https://www.energy.gov/articles/75-breakthroughs-americas-
| na...
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| I remember when, not even three years ago, merely suggesting this
| would get you shouted down as a RAYCIST!!1! in polite society in
| the U.S.
| downrightmike wrote:
| And there seems to be a lot of traditional sabotage using
| infectious agents in farming, like how triads were infecting pig
| farms with African swine fever in 2019 (1). Maybe they didn't
| just use African Swine fever and thought they found something
| better. There was an explosion of pig farming this century(2),
| and underhanded tactics should be suspected. (1)
| https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3042122/chi...
| (2) https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aca16b
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Ridiculous. First of all, those triads would be stupid, if they
| had done that with Sars-CoV-2, knowing it will hit them, too
| and wreck all their earning potential.
|
| Secondly, bioterrorism (or whatever you want to call this)
| using a pandemical Virus is really hard. You have to find a
| virus that is able to cause a pandemic, and they are really
| really rare, but never did so (otherwise it can't do that
| because of the immunity). Sars-Cov-2 was only so dangerous
| because it was novel. So those triads would have found this
| needle in a haystack, and they aren't exactly known for running
| world-class virus finding operations. It's easy to find and
| smuggle some infectious ASV material. Maybe slightly harder to
| do so for EBV or the like. Much harder to find a completely
| novel virus.
| bradgranath wrote:
| Why is the Department of Energy making this announcement? What
| does the CDC think?
| Giorgi wrote:
| [flagged]
| Zetice wrote:
| I would hate to live in a world where, when people randomly
| guess something correctly, they feel vindicated and emboldened
| to say other random guesses that are as completely unfounded as
| the one they happened to get correct.
| coolestguy wrote:
| >when people randomly guess something correctly
|
| Or an educated guess where labs in the area were studying
| this exact type of virus
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| Well you live in that world, and it's always been that way.
| This propensity is the fundamental cause of gbling addiction
| and superstitious behavior.
|
| But I'd point out, this wasn't a random guess. There has been
| a whole lot of circumstantial evidence for a long time, it's
| not quite a smoking gun but better than a guess for sure.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Annoying that early on even suggesting this as a possibility
| labeled you as a crazy, racist, conspiracy freak.
|
| Hopefully in the years to come people are more open minded.
| lucb1e wrote:
| It may not be that we now love conspiracy freaks (as you put
| it) because they're so open minded, but that now it doesn't
| matter anymore to sidetrack the conversation from "how can we
| fix it" to "whodunnit". Different period in the pandemic,
| rather than a shift in mindset from whether pointing fingers
| without evidence is helpful.
| darkhorn wrote:
| This article is from 2015.
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787 "Engineered bat
| virus stirs debate over risky research"
| seydor wrote:
| Even for the people that have always thought so, this must be
| uncomfortable. This is only the 1st engineered virus which
| brought the world upside down. We may be living in a biological
| war already, or at least some potential for weaponization.
| ajross wrote:
| No one is claiming this was an "engineered virus" (and the
| evidence for is _really_ thin, FWIW). The finding in the linked
| article is only that a lab leak is the most probably origin of
| the pandemic.
|
| That's the problem with this discourse. Everyone has gone full
| absolutist and views even relatively sane, nuanced positions as
| evidence for nonsense like "we may be living in a biological
| war already". The fact that those of us in the "it's probably a
| natural virus" camp may have been wrong about WIV involvement
| doesn't validate your favorite conspiracy theory!
| seydor wrote:
| The article does not say it's not an engineered virus either.
|
| What's the hypothesis here, that the virus naturally arose
| only inside the lab where it infected one person? Or if it
| occured naturally in the wild, how come that it infected only
| one person inside the lab , since it's easy to infect
| isaacremuant wrote:
| This has been written about many times, in 2020, very
| convincingly in 2021 by Nicholas Wade
| (https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...)
| and now.
|
| It will always be dismissed by those who have a political
| interest in seeing things differently.
|
| Authortiarianism and coordinated censorship between govs, big
| health and big tech made it so that anything countering the
| mandated narratives was heavily supressed and punished.
|
| That's why the online world and the real one varied, no matter
| how many names and attacks the "mono narrative" mob used against
| those of us who dissented.
|
| There will be no acknowledgement of the atrocities and human
| right abuses in the name of covid. No admission of guilt or bad
| faith. Just pretende that "we were wrong for the right reasons"
| and anyone who was right, if it's even admitted, "did so for the
| wrong reasons"
| kakadu wrote:
| Odd timing to announce this, in the eve of the Chinese siding
| with the Russians.
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