[HN Gopher] Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid
___________________________________________________________________
Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid
Author : ricksunny
Score : 324 points
Date : 2023-06-10 23:13 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thetimes.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thetimes.co.uk)
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| fuckyah wrote:
| [dead]
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Did you read TA? It summarizes existing known info, but it also
| includes new, original research.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| yawnxyz wrote:
| I love how people who don't read the article ask "did you
| read the article". Agree there's nothing new here, and most
| things presented as new are mostly conjecture or hear say
| pcrh wrote:
| I read the article, it fails to correctly summarize, and also
| misrepresents existing known info.
| mannyv wrote:
| If there is any truth to this it'll come out once the regime
| changes...and the new regime will use this info to discredit the
| old regime.
| pcrh wrote:
| After a quick read of the article, it presents no new data, and
| is replete with innuendo pointing at the Wuhan lab, rather than
| any direct evidence.
|
| Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs
| researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all
| there is no incentive to research benign viruses. So the fact
| that the Wuhan lab worked on coronaviruses is not in itself an
| indication of any ill-intent. Additionally, the closest relative
| to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave
| in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence
| that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab. Further, genetic
| clocks show that RaTG13 and SARSCoV2 diverged almost 50 years
| ago.
|
| The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early
| cases clustered around the market not the lab [0]. Furthermore,
| several different isolates were found in the market, indicating
| that SARSCoV2 had been circulating _before_ the epidemic took
| off.
|
| [0] The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early
| epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
| Biorealism wrote:
| The thing with Wuhan Institute of Virology is they were
| particularly studying the spillover risk of SARS-related
| coronaviruses. The nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in
| Yunnan and Laos. One clear link with Wuhan is the fact Wuhan
| Institute of Virology sampled both locations.
|
| You can't read much into the early case data that David Relman
| described as "hopelessly impoverished". There were likely much
| earlier cases based on excess mortality data (a key reason WHO
| haven't accepted market origin). Also, there is a clear
| sampling bias in the cases in the article cited above.
| https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23
| [deleted]
| randomperson01 wrote:
| There is no reason to suspect Ill intent. Accidents happen. It
| is well known the WIV were doing gain of function research on
| SARS-related CoVs. It is also known that the WIV were partners
| in a proposal to insert human specific cleavage sites into
| SARS+related CoVs
| https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
|
| The probability that a novel SARS-related CoV would emerge
| naturally in the city in China that was used as a
| seropositivity control -and the location of the worlds largest
| SARS-related related research lab, and which had very low
| wildlife consumption compared to Southern coastal cities is <
| 1/1000
|
| There is no evidence for any infected animals at the Huanan
| market
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.25.538336v2
|
| There was a known ascertainment bias towards reporting
| associated with the market
| https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23
|
| The modelling by Pekar et al inferring multiple spillovers at
| the market was flawed
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1
|
| Prior to the pandemic, the State department literally warned
| the US govt. a SARS-related accident was a real risk at the WIV
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
| ratg13 wrote:
| _> Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been
| identified (RaTG13)_
|
| As of 2022, this is no longer true.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaTG13
| eganp wrote:
| IIRC, this is still true if you exclude the spike protein and
| use a higher similarity threshold.
|
| Why would one do that? Well, two reasons. First, the spike
| more variable as it is subject to greater evolutionary
| pressure as the major component of the viral surface. Second,
| in coronavirus reverse genetics typically the virus is
| segmented into multiple pieces, most of which compose the
| non-spike backbone and a subset which compose the spike
| protein. This is intentional to enable the swapping of spike
| proteins. So, if SARS-CoV-2 is spike-swap or spike variant
| assembly, a RaTG13-like virus could be the "backbone" of
| SARS-CoV-2.
|
| Moreover, a hypothetical SARS-CoV-2 backbone could exist in
| the viral sequences list the WIV took down in Sept. 2019.
| They sequenced RaTG13 a few years prior. The lab's raison
| d'etre is collecting and sequencing coronaviruses poised for
| spillover. And, with modern DNA synthesis technology, it's
| not difficult to print out arbitrary backbone contigs for a
| viral assembly.
| zosima wrote:
| And crucially, researchers from the Wuhan lab were studying
| bat virus samples from Laos, before covid.
|
| https://www.business-standard.com/amp/article/current-
| affair...
| pcrh wrote:
| Those viruses are _slightly_ more related to SARSCoV2 than
| RaTG13, however note 1) that they were found even further
| away from Wuhan than was RaTG13 and 2) that they still
| remain too different from SARSCoV2 to be its direct
| ancestor.
|
| One of the things we know for sure is that that about 50
| years of evolutionary changes separate RaTG13 and BANAL-52
| from SARSCoV2, so they are not its direct ancestors.
| dotandgtfo wrote:
| >50 years of evolutionary changes separate RaTG13 and
| BANAL-52 from SARSCoV2
|
| Do you have a source for this?
|
| Also, I'm no biologist, but is comparing the base rate of
| evolutionary changes still relevant if SARSCoV2 wasn't of
| natural origins? E.g. through creating chimeras or
| 'serial passaging' as described in this article? Wouldn't
| that create an environment where 50 years could pass in a
| way shorter timeframe?
| pcrh wrote:
| This is the study I alluded to:
|
| >Evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 sarbecovirus
| lineage responsible for the COVID- 19 pandemic
|
| >Divergence dates between SARS-CoV-2 and the bat
| sarbecovirus reservoir were estimated as 1948 (95%
| highest posterior density (HPD): 1879-1999), 1969 (95%
| HPD: 1930-2000) and 1982 (95% HPD: 1948-2009), indicating
| that the lineage giving rise to SARS-CoV-2 has been
| circulating unnoticed in bats for decades.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4
|
| You should also know that SARSCoV2 1) is not a chimeric
| virus, and 2) that the present study includes viruses
| linked to RaTGP13 but more distant from SARSCoV2, i.e. it
| includes evidence from viruses unassociated with the
| pandemic.
| Vecr wrote:
| What about Ralph Baric's method for splicing viruses?
| It's apparently really hard or impossible to detect, and
| that's plausibly something that could be used to make a
| chimeric coronavirus.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| The distance from Wuhan of the discovery site of RaTG13
| is irrelevant, if (as the article implies) a senior team
| at the Wuhan lab were working on RaTG13.
|
| The article is not suggesting that Covid19 evolved from
| RaTG13; it is suggesting that Covid19 is a chimaera made
| with RaTG13.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| That's a bold thing to say in a non scientific paper with
| no sources except they aren't asserting anything like
| that as a provable fact, though.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| The NYT is a reputable organ, known for checking it's
| sources. Unlike Wikipedia, newspapers don't generally
| cite their sources; but if a reliable source states
| something like that as fact, they've probably checked.
| You're right: they haven't said they can prove it.
|
| [Of course, it could be propaganda, government or
| otherwise; or it could be a damned lie concocted by the
| reporter or editor. They've said they have sources, they
| haven't named them, so it's not unreasonable to suppose
| they have sources that don't want to be named.]
| zosima wrote:
| There may have been brought even closer relatives of
| covid-19 to Wuhan by lab personnel.
|
| We don't know as for unknown reasons the database of
| specimens collected by the Wuhan lab was taken down in
| September 2019.
|
| The distance in years between two viral strains you
| mention makes no sense at all, as the mutation rate is
| extremely dependent on environment.
| epups wrote:
| I don't understand this line of argument. The facts are
| that 1) the virus outbreak was in Wuhan, 2) that there ws
| a local lab working on virus samples that come from all
| over the world and 3) as far as we know, the particular
| strain that affected Wuhan is not local. Altogether, this
| should add confidence to the lab leak theory, not detract
| from it.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| The causality also supports that dangerous viruses spill
| into the human population in this area, so put a lab
| there to try to catch them.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| A particular city center?
| epups wrote:
| Ok but in that scenario, a natural emergence would have
| come from a strain from Wuhan, while the lab leak theory
| explains why a virus from relatively far away had an
| outbreak in Wuhan.
| Biorealism wrote:
| The nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan
| and Laos. Both areas WIV sampled prior to the pandemic
| and they haven't shared their records with WHO or the
| NIH.
| Biorealism wrote:
| Yes, the article suggests they had a closer precursor.
| The nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan
| and Laos. They are both areas WIV sampled in studying the
| spillover risk of SARS-related coronaviruses. They
| haven't shared their records with WHO or the NIH.
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| BryantD wrote:
| What a terrible article.
|
| "Thirty-five-year-old scientists don't get very sick with
| influenza."
|
| The rate of hospitalization among 18-49 year olds with flu in
| the US was 54.1 per 100K in 2019-20. It's rare, sure, but that
| kind of absolute statement from an anonymous researcher doesn't
| instill confidence.
| jakear wrote:
| [flagged]
| BryantD wrote:
| That point is inaccurate. I quoted the stats; they are what
| they are.
| jakear wrote:
| Stats say nothing of relative severity, why do you think
| they're relevant in any way?
|
| Edit: is your argument seriously "uhm actually, event X
| happens 0.054% of the time, so when you said {more rare
| version of X} doesn't happen you're wrong"
| BryantD wrote:
| Um, those are the numbers for hospitalization. So yes,
| there's information about severity there.
|
| And yep, that's my argument! The frequency of deadly
| viruses escaping from a bio lab is even _lower_ , so if
| we're going to eliminate possibilities based on
| percentages there are a few others that should get thrown
| out.
|
| It's a minor point but, as I said, it's sloppy reasoning.
| If the anonymous researcher had said "low probability" I
| wouldn't care. Instead, this reads like someone who's
| willing to hand wave specifics for the sake of rhetoric.
| jakear wrote:
| Hospitalization doesn't mean severity. It has more to do
| with your confidence in your immune system and health
| insurance than anything else, though the hospital's extra
| capacity and desire to make a buck off you is up there
| too.
|
| But if you're here to be put off by the smallest use of
| rhetoric, sure pop off on that.
| BryantD wrote:
| If I reversed it and said "this can't be a lab leak
| because lab leaks never happen," would that be okay?
| They're certainly rarer than serious cases of flu among
| adults in the age range.
|
| It's a contentious, difficult debate. I do actually think
| it's bad to dismiss arguments you disagree with with
| casual rhetoric.
| jakear wrote:
| If that rhetorical device led me to research and discover
| reputable data suggesting the frequency of such
| occurrences was indeed so minuscule as to be disregarded
| entirely, I'd welcome it upsetting my preconceived
| notions.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > The point is the young and healthy don't get very sick.
| You get it, have the sniffles for a day or two, and move on
| with your life. Same for covid. We could have just embraced
| that blessing and let children continue to go to school and
| not experience massive declines in intelligence. But here
| we are. "Think of the really old people" was truly
| hilarious. Indeed, all we could do was "think" when my
| grandpa died alone because visiting the nursing home was
| banned.
|
| One thing to consider is not so much an individual's health
| and risk of getting serious ill, but rather that as the
| numbers grow geometrically, health care systems like
| hospitals can (and in fact, did) become severely
| overwhelmed.
|
| Even with measures in place, here in Los Angeles we were at
| a point where for example if you had a heart attack at
| home, an ambulance / hospital couldn't deal with you.m
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/05/us/los-angeles-county-
| califor...
| jakear wrote:
| What really happened, as stated in the very source you
| gave, was that if you had a heart attack at home an
| ambulance _would_ come to "deal with you" (because of
| course they would), but if they attempted to resuscitate
| you for 20 minutes and you still didn't recover they
| wouldn't then take you to the hospital.
|
| You should know the survival rate of a heart attack is
| far far lower than most expect, _especially_ after 20
| minutes of failed active attempts to resuscitate. The
| only real reason to take someone into a hospital after
| that is if they're hypothermic or just so you can say "we
| did everything we could".
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-cpr-
| expectations-i...
| andsoitis wrote:
| > What really happened.... an ambulance would come to
| "deal with you"
|
| At one point, LA had to resort to Fire Trucks because
| ambulances were unavailable.
|
| If you don't think health care services were severely
| stretched, in some cases beyond breaking point (incl.
| staff unavailability because they themselves were sick),
| I really don't know what to say. This happened in New
| York as well.
|
| Of course there are also other places where that wasn't
| the case, so there you could be less conservative with
| restrictions, but you may not know the risk in advance.
| jakear wrote:
| Fire trucks and ambulances both feature staff trained as
| EMT's. The provisioning of the vehicles might be slightly
| different, but the medical training is the same. And I'm
| sure the provisioning could be adjusted based on the
| circumstances.
|
| Staff being unavailable because they're sick is quite
| literally "normal day to day operations" that _every_
| company must be able to account for, not "beyond the
| breaking point".
|
| But if you "don't know what to say" beyond vague
| emotional appeals unsupported by the very sources you
| claim to cite, I'm glad we agree on that at least.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| There are many [1] many [2] many [3] many [4] many [5]
| many [6] many [7] examples of people who died as a result
| of our hospital systems being overloaded and being forced
| to ration care. This is what was meant by the geometric
| growth of hospital patients and how many hospital systems
| were close to outright breaking. You are ultimately
| factually wrong and extremely unaware of how much stress
| this put on our hospital systems and how many people died
| because of what you were suggesting. Now imagine how much
| worse it would've been if we did nothing.
|
| [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-
| updates/2021/0...
|
| [2] https://www.politico.com/news/agenda/2021/10/26/lack-
| hospita...
|
| [3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-us-hospital-icu-
| bed-short...
|
| [4] https://www.whsv.com/2021/08/27/man-dies-waiting-icu-
| bed-fam...
|
| [5] https://www.businessinsider.com/man-covid-dead-
| doctors-icu-b...
|
| [6] https://www.ketv.com/article/auburn-man-dies-in-des-
| moines-h...
|
| [7] https://www.newsweek.com/kansas-man-dies-after-
| waiting-icu-b...
| lifelong wrote:
| > What a terrible article.
|
| > "Thirty-five-year-old scientists don't get very sick with
| influenza."
|
| > It's rare, sure
|
| Then what makes an article terrible when you agree with the
| statement?
| th0ma5 wrote:
| They did not agree with the statement.
| Natsu wrote:
| It really shouldn't be phrased as an absolute. But read
| charitably, when you have low N combined with rates that
| low, to expect that you wouldn't see noticeable illness in
| a small group of young, healthy people.
| pbreit wrote:
| "not in itself an indication of any ill-intent"
|
| Was that even insinuated?
|
| "no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab"
|
| Wut?
|
| "Between 1 July and 1 October 2012, we received 13 serum
| samples collected from 4 patients"
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9744119/
| willyt wrote:
| The Times is not a great source. It's just tabloid style
| journalism targeted at a higher 'reading age'. Can't remember
| the exact figures but something like 16 compared to 'The Sun'
| which targets 10. A better source would be The Telegraph, if
| you like your opinion pieces right leaning. The Economist, The
| Financial Time and The Guardian are also good sources if we're
| talking about British newspapers here.
| barneygale wrote:
| The Telegraph published a supplement written by the Chinese
| government until April 2020:
| https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/apr/14/daily-
| telegrap...
| inciampati wrote:
| No, not all labs working on viruses do research on dangerous
| viruses. Bacteriophages for instance, are a deep research
| topic, and (aside from potential effects on our microbiome) are
| completely benign to humans. That's just one of many
| counterexamples.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| inciampati wrote:
| They prefaced the statement with "most importantly" so it
| seems they thought it was their key point.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| What secure labs don't work on dangerous viruses? I guess
| I now wonder about your correction heh.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| [flagged]
| asynchronous wrote:
| [flagged]
| foldr wrote:
| These coincidences can happen. For example, Russian
| disinformation exploited the coincidental location of the
| Salisbury poisonings (near Porton Down).
| andsoitis wrote:
| > what ended up leaking from the lab was a coronavirus
|
| Did a coronavirus leak from the lab?
| himinlomax wrote:
| The problem with Wuhan lab is that the Chinese dictatorship
| blocks any independent inquiry into it. If they had nothing to
| hide, they wouldn't be hiding everything. If that was a
| criminal case, this kind of behavior would be taken as a
| evidence of guilt.
| sgift wrote:
| > If they had nothing to hide, they wouldn't be hiding
| everything. If that was a criminal case, this kind of
| behavior would be taken as a evidence of guilt.
|
| No, it would not. First, dictatorships hide things all the
| time, whether there is something or nothing. It's just how
| they operate. (Many democratic governments do to btw. How
| often do we need freedom of information requests just to find
| out that it was totally benign, the government just stone-
| walled because they could).
|
| Second, not saying anything is _not_ evidence of guilt in any
| criminal case in the civilized world. Everyone has the right
| to silence.
| Ithnolog wrote:
| Governments aren't people. They don't have rights. Same for
| corporations.
| himinlomax wrote:
| "Your honor, you can't blame my client for messing the
| victim's body, he's a known necrophiliac, and since the
| evidence is tainted you can't prove he was the murderer."
|
| Top notch defense right there.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Pretty gross, but yeah a defense like that would lower
| charges to manslaughter.
| Biorealism wrote:
| They have witheld records from the NIH which funded some of
| their SARS-related coronaviruses spillover research. They
| eventually terminated their subaward last year as a result.
| WHO has also been asking for lab data. Given the nearest
| relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos where
| the WIV sampled it seems fairly clear what happened here.
|
| https://thebulletin.org/2022/08/nih-to-terminate-
| ecohealth-a...
| zosima wrote:
| The Huanan Seafood market paper has been heavily critized.
|
| Especially the fact that covid was not found in a single animal
| sample does make the evidence rather weak.
|
| In addition it seems that the lack of sampling from outside the
| market and the fact that the market is a busy place in the
| center of the city where the virus would likely be once it's
| spreading from person to person , does not really lend support
| to the conclusions in the paper at all.
| pcrh wrote:
| >The Origins of Covid-19 -- Why It Matters (and Why It
| Doesn't)
|
| >More than half of the earliest Covid-19 cases were connected
| to the Huanan market, and epidemiologic mapping revealed that
| the concentration of cases was centered there. In January
| 2020, Chinese officials cleared the market without testing
| live animals, but positive environmental samples, including
| those from an animal cage and a hair-and-feather-removal
| machine, indicated the presence of both SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-
| susceptible animals.5 Recently released findings included
| raccoon dog DNA, pointing to a possible SARS-CoV-2
| progenitor.
|
| https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMp2305081
| reuben_scratton wrote:
| [flagged]
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Saying something is obvious doesn't make it true.
| [deleted]
| toast0 wrote:
| > Humans brought the virus to the market. It's
| screamingly obvious and always has been.
|
| Well of course, the racoon dogs et al all come in via
| human transport.
|
| Testing infrastructure was poor, and maybe it still is.
| Chinese government interest was not in finding facts, but
| in taking action to 'solve the problem'. It's hard to
| find facts when the people with power just want the
| problem to go away. IMHO, that doesn't weigh in favor of
| either explaination. The wuhan local government and the
| chinese national government would have likely taken the
| same actions regardless of the source, because they're
| both not very interested in facts.
|
| US health authorities pushing on the market theory are
| just doing their typical behavior of taking what little
| information is available and pushing it with no nuance. I
| enjoyed seeing the cdc stickers telling me not to use a
| mask out in public areas when the cdc was requiring them;
| the congitive dissonance was so palpable.
| lamontcg wrote:
| They found racoon dog DNA, along with other susceptible
| animals, comingled with SARS-CoV-2 in samples from the
| market:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/21/science/covid-raccoon-
| dog...
|
| And the behavior of China behind that whole story looks very
| much like China tried to cover up the existence of
| susceptible animals at the market.
| Biorealism wrote:
| That was written before Jesse Bloom reanalyzed the data and
| found a negative correlation with raccoon dogs.
|
| https://news.yahoo.com/raccoon-dogs-did-not-start-
| covid-19-n...
| BryantD wrote:
| Just to be clear, there weren't animal samples available for
| testing. It's not that they tested a bunch of animals and
| didn't find covid. I know that's what you meant but not
| everyone is familiar with the paper and it's important to be
| meticulous here.
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
| giarc wrote:
| I don't actually think that is what they meant. If there
| are no animals to even sample, you don't describe that as
| "that covid was not found in a single animal sample". No
| one would phrase it that way.
| BryantD wrote:
| Easier on my general well-being to just assume positive
| intent. (As is obvious from my comment history I don't
| always succeed there, but I do try.)
| HWR_14 wrote:
| That you have been able to maintain assuming positive
| intent with regard to COVID comments for this long is
| kind of amazing.
| smohare wrote:
| [dead]
| revelio wrote:
| The article is only facts and direct evidence. Where is the
| innuendo? It covers specific experiments they were doing, in
| order and in detail, complete with specific biological
| information and funding sources. It also provides extensive
| evidence of constant coverups by the lab, like this one:
|
| _There was also no mention of the mouse deaths in the grant
| renewal application Daszak filed to the NIH later that year. In
| this account, he said the mice had experienced "mild Sars-like
| clinical signs" when they were infected with the mutant virus.
| It had actually killed six of the eight infected humanised
| mice. Daszak eventually provided details of the experiment's
| deadly results to the US authorities in a report after the
| Covid-19 pandemic. He now says his 2018 statement about the
| "mild" illness was based on preliminary results -- even though
| the experiment in which the mice died had taken place several
| months before he issued the statement_
|
| So these people are all known liars. The US Government banned
| GoF research, they got around it by claiming their work was
| urgent and safe, they ignored reporting requirements, when they
| finally did report what they said was a lie, and now they're
| still lying to try and cover previous lies.
|
| So when these people say they want to insert furin cleavage
| sites into coronaviruses, a coronavirus appears right next door
| that has a FCS - the first one ever seen - and they say, oh
| well we changed our minds and never did it, well, with
| overwhelming probability they're lying again.
| chihuahua wrote:
| And of course Daszak is known for loudly proclaiming that no
| one is allowed to even think about whether Covid-19 could
| have been leaked from a lab. His credibility is reduced, to
| put it mildly.
| amoss wrote:
| The map showing the clustering around the lab is not labelled
| in the article. It looks like the map from the senate report
| which used internet search history. I recall that their point
| in the original report was that there was a cluster of internet
| searches for flu-like symptoms clustered around the institute,
| rather than the market.
|
| There is no new direct evidence in the article, simply the
| weight of existing indirect evidence synthesized together.
| There does not seem to be another hypothosis for how the virus
| emerged that has as much indirect evidence pointing towards it?
|
| The main gist of the article is:
|
| * The institute applied for funding for a specific piece of
| research (inserting a furin cleavage site).
|
| * The institute claims it did not perform the research.
|
| * Covid is what we would expect if somebody did perform that
| research.
|
| * The research would have been performed at the time and place
| where covid emerged.
|
| It is not direct evidence, but under a weaker burden of proof
| (e.g. balance of probabilities) it is fairly convincing.
| ricksunny wrote:
| Chief among key _new_ assertions the parent article makes,
|
| https://twitter.com/BlockedVirology/status/16676623250907463.
| ..
|
| * WIV added FCS's to coronavirus(es?) exactly as described in
| DEFUSE, according to a US lab collaborator.
|
| * Zhou Yusen "fell" off the roof of the WIV in May 2020
|
| * WIV was working on a 'closer [than published] unpublished
| variant'
|
| * Of all caves/mines, only scholarly attempts to access the
| Mojiang mine made touched off access denial and confiscation
| of samples from other mines from the authorities. While
| alluded to in the past, (https://apnews.com/article/united-
| nations-coronavirus-pandem... ) this is the first time to my
| awareness that the Mojiang mine has been uniquely &
| unequivocally associated with the authorities' clamp-down
| efforts, that too with attribution to Alice C Hughes, PhD
| samspenc wrote:
| > Zhou Yusen "fell" off the roof of the WIV in May 2020
|
| I mean, this is a pretty significant and concerning new
| finding right? Someone associated with the lab researching
| COVID early on just mysteriously disappearing in China?
| ricksunny wrote:
| * an item covered that isn't strictly _new_ but is probably
| unfamiliar to many even so, is: Of the researchers who the
| Jan 2021 State Dep Fact Sheet described as having fell sick
| with 'Covid-like symptoms' in Nov 2019 * they were taken
| to hospital, desoite being in their 30's and 40's (age) *
| one of their relatives died * they were working on advanced
| coronavirus research in the laboratory
|
| The WaPo journalist Josh Rogin who is known for maintainibg
| quality confidential sources in DC, had long ago tweeted
| the above. While some aspects may have been covered in
| intervening press, this is the first time to my knowledge
| all of tbese items are asserted explicitly with a quote
| attributed to one of the anonymous investigators.
|
| --- my take fwiw: While intriguing, vis-a-vis a seasonal
| illness null hypothesis, it's never been discussed whether
| they were unique cases at that time with such symptoms
| (more likely covid), or if many others both in and out of
| the WIV had similar symtoms at the time (more likely
| seasonal illness)
| thevagrant wrote:
| Research applications, in particular to obtain funding.
|
| It is common for researchers to apply to grants/funding for
| work they are already doing. They tweak the research
| application to meet whatever the funding criteria is using
| knowledge they have from existing experiments.
| pera wrote:
| The map in the senate report comes from this paper:
|
| https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/9/6/402
|
| if I understand correctly it concludes that the cluster
| correlates with population density and a concentration of
| elderly population in that area.
|
| Unfortunately that wasn't mentioned in the senate report (nor
| in the news article)
| lamontcg wrote:
| > It is not direct evidence, but under a weaker burden of
| proof (e.g. balance of probabilities) it is fairly
| convincing.
|
| - We have a bunch of evidence of WIV engineering SARS-1-like
| viruses because they talked about it before the pandemic.
|
| - We have zero evidence of them ever doing experiments on
| live SARS-2-like virus
|
| - We have zero evidence of the existence of a SARS-2-like
| progenitor virus
|
| - Before the pandemic they had no reason to be more secretive
| of any SARS-2-like work than their SARS-1-like work
|
| - The spread of SARS-CoV-2 looks exactly like it originated
| in the Seafood market.
|
| - If it was transported to the seafood market by someone who
| worked at the lab that is highly coincidental that the place
| they infected first just happened to be the most likely place
| for zoonotic spillover
|
| - The hypothetical infected labworker didn't spread it all
| over their residence or create any other superspreading
| incidents clustered elsewhere around Wuhan
|
| On the balance of probabilities I'm going with zoonotic
| spillover. The coincidence that the lab happened to be in the
| city is much less of a coincidence than the lab causing a
| leak of a virus that there's zero evidence the lab ever had,
| causing a pandemic that looks exactly like it came from
| zoonotic spillover.
| Biorealism wrote:
| The nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and
| Laos. The only known link to Wuhan is the Wuhan Institute
| of Virology sampled both areas.
|
| They refuse to share their records with WHO or the NIH.
| That's a crucial caveat when saying there is no evidence
| they held a precursor. We don't know as they have refused
| to share their database.
|
| The Times article is interesting as it suggests the work in
| DEFUSE to add furin cleavage sites went ahead and they
| passaged the virus in humanized mice. This would explain
| the furin site not seen in other sarbecoviruses and why
| humans topped the list for binding affinity from the
| outset.
|
| Note the cases near the market are based on what David
| Relman described as "hopelessly impoverished" early case
| data. There was also sampling bias in retrospectively
| counting cases as market link was often required. WHO
| hasn't accepted market origin in part as there were likely
| much earlier cases than those in December linked to the
| market where no animals tested positive.
| inciampati wrote:
| > why humans topped the list for binding affinity from
| the outset
|
| This is an unbelievable coincidence that makes the
| zoonotic spillover hypothesis laughable. To a biologist,
| the likelihood of this happening by chance is clear:
| virtually 0. But explaining the size of the space of
| optimal solutions to a given binding problem versus the
| space of good solutions to the general public, well,
| that's really hard too. So an obvious and completely non-
| circumstantial piece of evidence is the last one in the
| public's mind. And we are still acting like there is a
| question of where the virus came from, and we will be for
| decades, or at least until the average level of biology
| education is raised by a few sharp degrees.
| randomperson01 wrote:
| [dead]
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| sokoloff wrote:
| > If it was transported to the seafood market by someone
| who worked at the lab that is highly coincidental that the
| place they infected first just happened to be the most
| likely place for zoonotic spillover
|
| If we're going with highly coincidental pairings, it seems
| like we can't ignore "the disease originated in the only
| city in China to have an institute that specializes in
| virology, viral pathology and virus technology."
|
| I'm not convinced of any particular conclusion as to
| COVID's origin, but I don't down-weight the coincidence of
| the city of origin hosting WIV nearly as much as you appear
| to.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Some janitor or whatever sold an infected animal to the market.
| Clubber wrote:
| It could be as simple as someone got infected in the lab and
| went to the market.
| Pigalowda wrote:
| Right? As if any handling or safety gear and equipment is
| 100% perfect. Never any needle stick or glove failures.
| Respirators and protective clothing always 100% perfect.
| Everyone perfectly followed all lab safety precautions with
| no absent minded failures. Just perfect all the time
| forever.
|
| I've always thought it was a handling contamination that
| got into community spread. It's a very parsimonious
| explanation.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses
|
| There should be more attention on this. We're busy worrying
| about AI that can troll at a college level, while scientists
| are _still_ busy making frankenviruses after a pandemic
| plausibly caused by a lab leak.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| The article implies (but doesn't state) that RaTG13, although
| discovered in the Mojiang cave, was worked on in the Wuhan lab.
| It does state that it was being worked-on by Shi Zhengli
| ("Batwoman") and her team at the lab.
| onethought wrote:
| Exactly. The lab leak theory is a story of cherry picking
| evidence to match your conclusion.
|
| Why was the wet market on the other side of the city the only
| identified outbreak site if it came from the lab? There
| were/are many markets on the other side of the river that would
| be much more relevant to residents living and working on that
| side.
|
| People looking up flu symptoms in the middle of winter is not
| evidence of anything abnormal.
|
| I don't understand the intellectual effort going into the lab
| leak theory... it feels like some kind of state run propaganda
| piece, I assume to just keep a negative view on China in
| people's minds. It's crazy given that whatever the truth there
| is no consequence... literally an inconsequential endeavour
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I assume to just keep a negative view on China in people's
| minds.
|
| America was involved with that lab, too. It should really be
| the rest of the world with a negative view of America and
| China.
| adh636 wrote:
| Trying to better under the origins of a global pandemic is
| not an inconsequential endeavor.
| onethought wrote:
| That's not what people are doing, they are trying to prove
| a lab leak theory, else all this effort would be in "how'd
| it get to that wet market" if you can't answer that, then
| you do not have a logical chain to its true origin lab leak
| or not.
| darkerside wrote:
| > The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early
| cases clustered around the market not the lab
|
| Is this a case of yet another heat map being a population
| density map? I assume the wet market is a popular local
| destination and gathering place, while the lab is not. You
| would expect there to be more cases where there are more
| people.
|
| I speculate in ignorance of the actual social dynamics in the
| city of Wuhan.
| beebmam wrote:
| It is excusable for a lab to accidentally leak a contaminant.
| It is not excusable to cover it up and prevent a full
| investigation, like China has done.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| Biorealism wrote:
| The NIH terminated the Wuhan Institute of Virology's
| subaward for continued refusal to share records last year.
| WHO is still pleading with the PRC to share data on both
| the animal trade and Wuhan labs.
|
| https://thebulletin.org/2022/08/nih-to-terminate-
| ecohealth-a...
| jesusofnazarath wrote:
| [dead]
| HardlyCurious wrote:
| Actually, the closest natural viruses to covid were sent to
| Wuhan for study. I mean, that is what the Wuhan institute of
| coronaviruses was built to do right?
|
| The indirect evidence of a lab leak theory is overwhelming
| frankly. And it doesn't require any malice. No one credible is
| saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with
| the intention of building a weapon.
|
| Gain of function research is real, scientists intentionally
| make viruses which _could_ start a pandemic. They do this for
| the purposes of knowledge and preparedness for the inevitable
| natural spillover events that will happen. It isn 't nefarious.
|
| But it is risky, and there many people now and before who
| thought it was a practice that should be curtailed because of
| the risk.
| makmanalp wrote:
| > Actually, the closest natural viruses to covid were sent to
| Wuhan for study
|
| Please don't "actually" something with an uncited statement
| without backing it up with any sort of detail. A news
| article? Anything, honestly.
|
| > that is what the Wuhan institute of coronaviruses was built
| to do right?
|
| Really? It's "Wuhan institute of virology". Not
| "coronaviruses". Right?
|
| I have no specific horse in this race but I feel like I'm
| losing my mind every time I read any discussion on this
| subject because there's always folks throwing around random
| statements as if they're established fact and I feel like at
| this point, on this specific subject, on this website, we
| should know better, geez.
| godelski wrote:
| > No one credible is saying china intentionally released the
| virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon.
|
| To add to this, most countries have turned away from
| infectious biological weapons because they are near
| impossible to control. The the release of them might harm
| your enemies, but at a serious cost to yourself. It is like
| trying to cut off your enemy's leg by cutting off your own
| arm. It ends up kinda being like MAD except you're also the
| aggressor. The threat of a infectious weapon is not from
| other nations, but from a terrorist organization (which of
| course dramatically reduces risk). Not to say that this can't
| happen, but it is well known enough that were a contagious
| disease to get out, it would be more likely accidental. It
| would also be odd to release the disease into your own
| community first. I'm not saying it was or wasn't a lab leak
| or bioweapon, but if we're discussing weapon vs accident,
| there's good reason to believe a weapon is unlikely. Gain of
| research has significant value outside weapons and this also
| shows you why the weapon arguments against GoF aren't of high
| concern to those that are close to the work. Contagion
| weapons are the weapons of those with nothing left to lose
| (which aren't big/rich countries, even in dire
| circumstances).
| nextos wrote:
| I think it is also worth adding that there is good evidence
| of some lab leaks that caused pandemics in the past.
|
| See for example:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-
| and-m...
|
| In my opinion, gain of function is too dangerous with current
| security measures, and we should consider a moratorium. Lab
| biocontainment is exceptionally hard.
| arcticbull wrote:
| More specifically there were a few lab escapes of
| coronaviruses (SARS) in China that Beijing copped to in the
| early 2000s [1]. It happens to everyone, way more than it
| should. Yes, including America. [2]
|
| [edit] To be clear, I'm not saying this definitely did or
| did not happen, I don't know. I'm saying if it came out
| later that it did, I wouldn't be surprised.
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7096887/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosec
| urity...
| whyenot wrote:
| In the mid 1960s, my mom worked in an infectious disease
| lab. One day, her and her colleagues were tasked with
| cleaning out a freezer full of samples. Shortly thereafter
| her and everyone else in the lab got a flu-like illness
| that did not clear up for many days.
|
| It really makes me wonder how many lab leaks may have
| happened during this time period when we started collecting
| and storing samples but we didn't yet have the ability to
| track diseases like we do today.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| I saw an interview with a virologist, but I don't remember
| where (somewhere on YouTube). He said that there _is_ a
| moratorium on gain of function research, but that it's a
| joke because virology is pretty much about studying gain of
| function.
| nextos wrote:
| There was a NIH moratorium, but it was lifted in 2017.
|
| I don't agree about the point of virology being just
| about studying gain of function. There are tons of things
| you can study in virology without needing to create novel
| viruses.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| Fair enough, I know almost nothing about it.
| [deleted]
| prepend wrote:
| > indication of any ill-intent
|
| I don't think ill-intent is the accusation, I think the
| argument is that the lab has poor safety protocols and made
| errors. I haven't studied the "lab leak theory" extensively,
| but everything I read seems to be about lab failures resulting
| in a leak, not anything purposeful or ill-intentioned.
| kcplate wrote:
| This is the straw man that people who want to argue against
| the possibility lab leak use to try and ad hominem the person
| arguing for the possibility.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| The article claims that Chinese army researchers were at the
| lab researching viral weapons. That sounds like ill-intent to
| me.
|
| It also states that Covid-19 is the only Coronavirus
| discovered with a furin cleavage site on the spike, and that
| the lab had applied for funding to research the insertion of
| such a site.
|
| I don't think anyone is suggesting that the lab deliberately
| launched a pandemic by deliberately releasing the pathogen
| _on its own doorstep_.
| Ireallyapart wrote:
| > The article claims that Chinese army researchers were at
| the lab researching viral weapons. That sounds like ill-
| intent to me.
|
| The US does weapons research it does not mean ill intent.
| The Chinese does weapons research for the same reason the
| US does it.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Well, no one knowledgeable about the field. I have,
| unfortunately, heard otherwise intelligent people saying
| that the Chinese government doesn't mind sacrificing it's
| own people, and did launch it in its own city on purpose
| (which is, to be clear, ridiculous).
|
| "Never ascribe to conspiracy, what is adequately explained
| by incompetence".
|
| I think the evidence is pretty clear that at least the
| Chinese government believes that the covid-19 virus came
| from their lab (they could, of course, be mistaken about
| that).
| staunton wrote:
| > I think the evidence is pretty clear that at least the
| Chinese government believes that the covid-19 virus came
| from their lab
|
| What evidence are you referring to?
| revelio wrote:
| Unfortunately, the article states explicitly that there was
| ill intent and extensive PLA involvement with the lab.
|
| _The military was also given positions of responsibility in
| the Wuhan institute, according to a US Senate report. A book
| published in 2015 by the military academy discusses how Sars
| viruses represent a "new era of genetic weapons" that can be
| "artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease
| virus, then weaponised and unleashed".
|
| The authors are PLA researchers, and one of the book's
| editors has collaborated on numerous scientific papers with
| Wuhan scientists. They discuss how Sars can be weaponised by
| fusing it with other viruses and "serial passaging" the
| resulting mutant to make it more dangerous.
|
| The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an
| interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they
| could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could
| inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it
| might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power._
| bostonsre wrote:
| If true, it's probably good that they were incompetent in
| leaking the virus and incompetent in making a vaccine to
| front run the virus. Wonder if that would have started
| world war 3 of they successfully vaccinated their
| population then either accidentally or on purpose released
| the virus.
| Amezarak wrote:
| > Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been
| identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in
| Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever
| studied in the Wuhan lab.
|
| Maybe I'm deeply confused, but the Wuhan lab was reported by
| NYMag to be the one that _discovered_ RaTG13.
|
| https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
|
| > How Did It Get Out? 1. The Tongguan Mine Shaft in Mojiang,
| Yunnan, where, in 2013, fragments of RaTG13, the closest known
| relative of SARSCoV-2, were recovered and transported to the
| Wuhan Institute of Virology; 2. The Wuhan Institute of
| Virology, where Shi Zhengli's team brought the RaTG13 sample,
| sequenced its genome, then took it out of the freezer several
| times in recent years;
| jug wrote:
| Also, before one draws conclusions based on the _kind_ of virus
| that is researched, coronaviruses aren't even uncommon. So
| better evidence is clearly necessary than innuendo.
| Biorealism wrote:
| It's not just a coronavirus, it's a sarbecovirus with a furin
| cleavage site never seen before in sarbecoviruses. The
| nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos.
| The only link with Wuhan is WIV's sampling in both locations.
|
| In 2018, WIV was part of a proposal with EcoHealth Alliance
| and UNC to add furin cleavage sites into novel SARS-related
| bat coronaviruses. DARPA declined to fund it. This
| investigation suggests the work went ahead. Something Nick
| Patterson suggested often occurs even when funding is
| declined. WIV had both NIAID and CAS grants to study
| spillover risk of SARS-related coronaviruses. They were also
| doing classified work with the PLA from 2017.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| I'm sure most of this is true or at least true-ish but to be
| appropriately skeptical, all evidence which has a Chinese
| source here should be considered as potentially made up.
|
| Regardless of whether or not there was a coverup, the Chinese
| government has certainly _acted like_ it was covering something
| up.
|
| The circumstantial evidence is sort of ridiculous here though.
| An institute with weak safety controls experimenting with
| creating novel pathogens has an outbreak of a novel pathogen
| next door? No no, it's because of climate change (an actual
| argument I have seen).
| lamontcg wrote:
| > the Chinese government has certainly acted like it was
| covering something up.
|
| Yes, they covered up the existence of racoon dogs and other
| susceptible animals at the market.
| oneshtein wrote:
| They may cover up something completely orthogonal to Covid.
| For example, they may cover up a corruption scheme, to steal
| money granted for research, or they acted as proxy for
| Russians, to spy at USA, or they mismanaged facility and
| leaked virus from the lab in Wuhan second time, AFTER the
| initial outbreak (1.5-2.5 month of delay between projected
| start of epidemic in mid-September-mid-October and start of
| epidemic in Wuhan in December must be explained somehow),
| etc.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| The "circumstantial evidence" is only novel if the event in
| question is novel, which the emergence of a new strain of a
| virus is not.
|
| It is certain that a new strain of some virus is emerging
| right now next to a lab that works with viruses, because that
| is a thing that happens continuously in nature, and labs
| exist within nature. It's also likely that such a new strain
| will not cause human illness, as most viruses do not.
|
| SARS-COV-2 only looks novel to humans because it made a lot
| of humans sick. There were tons of allegations that HIV was
| created in a lab too. This says more about our self-regard
| than about the virus itself.
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| > " _There were tons of allegations that HIV was created in
| a lab too._ "
|
| Scientists' best guess is that the precursor of the most
| common "M" virus jumped from the Cameroon chimps to humans
| sometime before 1931.
|
| https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/aids/virus/origins
| ....
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| This would all be more compelling if the WIV were not
| _explicitly experimenting with creating viruses like SARS-
| COV-2_! If HIV had emerged proximal to _a lab experimenting
| with creating viruses like HIV_ then that lab origin theory
| would be much more credible!
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Saying "viruses like SARS-COV-2" only makes sense for
| broad applications of the word "like."
|
| As other comments have pointed out, while that lab was
| working with coronaviruses, none of the strains were
| genetically close to SARS-COV-2. Coronavirus is a broad
| category of viruses.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| Betacoronaviruses with SARS-like attributes and natural
| reservoirs in bats is supposed to be a "broad application
| of the word 'like'"? Bit of a stretch, no?
| living_room_pc wrote:
| > Most importantly, the general reader should know that all
| labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses.
| After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses.
|
| That is completely untrue. Agricultural labs for instance
| research plant viruses which are _incompatible_ with humans
| completely. Still these plant virus would have to be researched
| under stringent isolation because of the damage they may pose
| to crops.
|
| > Most importantly, the general reader should know
|
| Speak on our level, don't baby us.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| pcrh wrote:
| Agricultural viruses are dangerous to human food security. At
| least the ones under study usually are.
| peteradio wrote:
| > Most importantly, the general reader should know that all
| labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses.
| After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses.
| So the fact that the Wuhan lab worked on coronaviruses is
| not in itself an indication of any ill-intent.
|
| What exactly are you trying to say here anyway? If they
| were researching some other virus type it wouldn't be
| getting a look. But they were researching coronavirus.
| ajross wrote:
| My position hasn't changed for years: if covid was really a lab
| creation we'd know, because someone would have told us. An
| email dump, a memo, a document, an interview. _Something_ would
| have leaked out. The incentives are just too high and the
| access is too pervasive[1] to believe otherwise.
|
| Is it possible? Sure! Is it likewise possible that some of the
| circumstantial claims about WIV are true? Sure! But if someone
| made this thing, someone else would have told us by now.
|
| [1] This is science! There are notes and logs and backups and
| email and chat and whiteboard photos and conference attendees
| and visiting scholars, all spread around a population all
| trained to compete with each other.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Shouldn't an oppressive regime change the math here? The
| ability to suppress potential whistleblowers means the
| absence of whistleblowers isn't all that convincing. Compared
| to moon landing conspiracy theories, where this argument is
| very convincing imo
| ajross wrote:
| Again, these are scientists. You really don't think one of
| them could move to a post at Stanford or wherever and spill
| the tea? No one has an old copy of an incriminating memo
| they can forward to a friend in Taipei? And regardless, the
| PRC does _not_ in fact have a great record in the opsec
| department even within its military and espionage arms. How
| many "Chinese spies" get arrested every year?
|
| Part of any conspiracy theory is positing a great
| totalitarian enemy who is able to keep all these important
| truths from The People. The PRC is economically large and
| somewhat questionably ambitious. It's absolutely not the
| kind of super state people want to imagine.
| bostonsre wrote:
| If the military was indeed involved, then it seems highly
| plausible that they would have been able to keep
| communications under control and that they would be able
| to repress a few dozen workers. Threats against them and
| their families would probably work pretty well.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| > You really don't think one of them could move to a post
| at Stanford or wherever and spill the tea?
|
| When? There's a pretty short window where a WIV scientist
| might have known the subject they were studying had
| escaped the lab before the PRC did. Certainly by January
| 2020 the PRC could've clamped down on those scientists.
|
| Spies caught outside the country don't tell me much about
| internal operations.
|
| ETA: I think my thinking here is pretty colored by Tank
| Man, whose name is unknown. The CCP claims they don't
| know anything about him. Even if that's true, presumably
| he had friends, family, and fellow protestors who have
| decided it would be a very bad idea to even give his
| name.
| Biorealism wrote:
| It took over a decade to confirm the Sverdlovsk anthrax
| outbreak was the result of an outbreak. In that case
| intelligence did suspect an accidental cause although
| scientists argued contaminated meat was the cause.
| Information can be tightly controlled under authoritarian
| regimes. Recall those who even reported the outbreak in the
| community faced recriminations.
|
| What is known is the nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are
| found in Yunnan and Laos. Both areas WIV sampled and they
| refuse to share their records with WHO or the NIH.
| toomim wrote:
| We still don't know what happened to JFK, 60 years later.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| This is a really great point. And it may not be knowable
| beyond what we already know.
| ajross wrote:
| Yikes. I mean, yes, in this sense you're right. We've never
| found conclusive _disproof_ of the various conspiracy
| theories around the assassination and have been forced into
| a consensus that, y 'know, Oswald shot him. But you don't
| believe that. And nothing is going to make you. So from
| you're perspective "we still don't know". WIV is going to
| be the same. You'll never get the _disproof_ you demand, so
| you 'll continue to disbelieve the consensus opinion.
|
| Yours is a world where disproof rules, and conspiracies are
| assumed true until proven false. I'm sure it's
| entertaining, but it's not "true" any more than mine is.
|
| In my world, Oswald _probably_ shot JFK and covid was
| _probably_ a natural virus, because those are the
| hypotheses that demand the least of the existing evidence.
| I 'm willing to change my priors with more evidence, but
| not because of the lack of disproof of an entertaining
| counter-hypothesis.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| We also did not know that Cuba housed missles from Russia
| during the crisis. We also did not know to the extent that
| Cuba's leadership explicitly did have plans to strike the
| US alongside their Soviet allies.
|
| It took until 1992 for what appears to be the truth to be
| discovered, 3 decades with far more people involved in the
| process, and a much darker outcome than a man being
| assassinated.
| Etherlord87 wrote:
| What is the time limit a secret of this magnitude could
| survive without being revealed by someone? A year, two years?
| If we look at our history, we will only see secrets that were
| revealed within that maximum period?
|
| Snowden revealed quite shocking information, and I think it
| is safe to say the secret of mass surveillance was going on
| for much longer than 4 years.
| ajross wrote:
| And if such information pops up, I will (with great
| surprise) re-evaluate my priors. Nonetheless I think
| history bears out my intuition here. The _overwhelming_
| majority of conspiracies likes this, especially ones in
| fundamentally civilian organizations like science labs, don
| 't survive a year if that.
| ergodic1 wrote:
| Making the claim that you know the proportion of
| conspiracies that get reported implies you know the
| number of conspiracies not reported.
|
| Im not aware of any way you could know that or the
| relative proportion of each.
|
| Where do you get your certainty here?
| randomperson01 wrote:
| Just like someone leaked out about the Sverdlovsk lab
| accident - how many years did that take?
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20210621032149/https://www.nytime.
| ..
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| It's amazing how easily some people deploy unfalsifiable
| theories to justify a presupposition.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| [flagged]
| fuckyah wrote:
| [dead]
| hayst4ck wrote:
| If anyone's in for a long read, despite the hokey sounding name,
| I found this to be one of the best contemporaneous explorations
| of Covid in china that I've seen to date:
|
| https://project-evidence.github.io/
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| cheaprentalyeti wrote:
| Because if we're relying on the people who are funding
| bioweapons research in hostile countries to tell us how to
| treat said viruses, under the delusion that they'd learn
| something useful, it's the kind of thing we need to know
| about before waking up three years later and finding out (per
| the Northwestern study) that we could have avoided a lot of
| deaths by simply following the sort of treatment regimen we
| used for more common flu varieties and given the patients
| azithromycin.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Why not do something about this directly. This lab leak
| wild goose chase isn't required.
| khazhoux wrote:
| For one, if it was proven that a lab leak was the cause of
| such global destruction, that may encourage stronger lab
| regulations in the future.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| We can and should do that anyway, why do we need a smoking
| gun, I mean, beyond the pandemic we had.
| khazhoux wrote:
| I'd avoid loaded terms like "smoking gun" in this
| discussion. My point is that if the pandemic was caused
| by a leak, then that would be a prior that could aid in
| future decision-making.
|
| I don't understand your position that we should not seek
| the truth. Somehow knowing the truth about a past event
| can have no bearing on the future?
| th0ma5 wrote:
| I don't think it is ultimately knowable in a way that is
| helpful. We need to act as if any of the possibilities
| happened because any of them could.
|
| I guess I also don't see why articles like this are
| needed to work on pandemic prevention.
|
| I can totally see why people need them for at the very
| least getting clicks and attention.
| kortilla wrote:
| It's possible aliens came from space and dropped the
| virus off to see how we would handle it. How much effort
| should we put into preventing that pandemic path?
|
| Nearly every airline regulation that results in air
| travel being so safe today is because we spend such an
| enormous amount of resources investigating the root
| causes of accidents with the NTSB. Try suggesting to them
| "it doesn't matter why the plane crashed, let's just push
| for generic improvements to planes". You'll get
| (rightfully so) laughed out of the room.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| The limit is five why's and often you can't even get
| that. Planes still crash. Perhaps we've pulled on this
| thread as much as we can. Especially with long ass
| articles like this that say nothing new.
|
| Seriously, what are we expecting to learn. This is like a
| plane at the bottom of the ocean never to be found. We'll
| never know what happened to this plane, and we don't have
| to.
|
| We know that situation was probably poor pilot mental
| health but pilots still have to lie about
| antidepressants. We don't need to find that plane to fix
| that.
| khazhoux wrote:
| > We'll never know what happened to this plane,
|
| You've decided the truth is unknowable, no good would
| come from knowing the truth, and searching for the truth
| is itself causing harm.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Well we stopped looking for it though
| hayst4ck wrote:
| Because exploring the truth is a worthwhile endeavor
| particularly in the face of an oppressive regime that made it
| very clear they did not want the truth to be explored.
|
| Just to be clear what I posted seemed like Chinese people
| exploring what actually happened more than a blame based
| document or fear mongering based document.
|
| I would really encourage you to give it a chance because it
| is very impressive investigative work and, really, an
| impressive exercise of investigative journalism from a
| country that hates investigative journalists.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| xcv123 wrote:
| You are spamming this thread. Looks like you are working
| for the CCP. Don't make it too obvious.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Lol. If the treatment of their own people wasn't bad
| enough and it took a pandemic conspiracy theory to hate
| them, then I feel like you need to read more.
| [deleted]
| hayst4ck wrote:
| The purpose of that article is not to bring down china.
| It's not ideologically opposed to china. It was not some
| conservative agenda article. It's a group of people who
| want to understand what happened. The article comes from
| a stance of curiosity. What I linked is very compatible
| with the HN mindset and not particularly ideological.
|
| You clearly have not read it because your comment makes
| no sense in the context of that article.
|
| If you don't want to be curious then don't be.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| randomperson01 wrote:
| Its a good compilation that I saw in mid 2020 that was one of
| the sources of data leading me to question the zoonotic
| spillover hypothesis that I had read in Zhou et al (RaTG13
| paper) and Anderson et al. That the WIV was conducting exactly
| the type of research that could have led to a highly human
| infectious novel SARS-CoV was poo-pood and cast as a conspiracy
| theory. As Ian Lipkin stated following the Fauci teleconference
| "we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to deal with"
| [deleted]
| ricksunny wrote:
| And helpful that it's hosted on GitHub. PRC can't block
| Github on a strategic level. So content can be hosted there
| that gets through the GFW that PRC netizens can see.
| throwawayio wrote:
| [flagged]
| chihuahua wrote:
| Peter Daszak says no.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| [flagged]
| soeptical wrote:
| Daszak/ecohealth alliance and by extension NIH and us govt are
| also culpable for a Wuhan lab originating virus
| maeil wrote:
| You're right that Daszak and the Ecohealth Alliance are
| culpable, but it must be noted that various USG orgs were not
| supportive of his actions
|
| > _The report he finally did submit stated that scientists
| planned to create an infectious clone of Middle East
| Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus found in
| dromedaries that had emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and
| killed 35% of the humans it infected. The report also made
| clear that the NIH grant had already been used to construct
| two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that caused
| Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in
| 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide. (A
| chimeric virus is one that combines fragments of different
| viruses.) These revelations prompted the NIH's grant
| specialists to ask a critical question: Should the work be
| subject to a federal moratorium on what was called gain-of-
| function research?_
|
| > _But the [2015 research paper he
| cited](https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985) was not
| particularly reassuring. In it, Shi Zhengli and a preeminent
| coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina,
| Ralph Baric, mixed components of SARS-like viruses from
| different species, and created a novel chimera that was able
| to directly infect human cells. (Baric did not respond to
| written questions seeking comment.)_
|
| > _If anything, the MERS study Daszak proposed was even
| riskier. So he pitched a compromise to the NIH: that if any
| of the recombined strains showed 10 times greater growth than
| a natural virus, "we will immediately: i) stop all
| experiments with the mutant, ii) inform our NIAID Program
| Officer and the UNC [Institutional Biosafety Committee] of
| these results and iii) participate in decision making trees
| to decide appropriate paths forward."_
|
| > _This mention of UNC brought a puzzled response from an NIH
| program officer, who pointed out that the proposal had said
| the research would be performed at the WIV. "Can you clarify
| where the work with the chimeric viruses will actually be
| performed?" the officer wrote. Ten days later, with still no
| response from Daszak, the program officer emailed him again.
| On June 27, Daszak responded, buoyant as ever:_
|
| > _"You are correct to identify a mistake in our letter. UNC
| has no oversight of the chimera work, all of which will be
| conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.... We will
| clarify tonight with Prof. Zhengli Shi exactly who will be
| notified if we see enhanced replication...my understanding is
| that I will be notified straight away, as [principal
| investigator], and that I can then notify you at NIAID.
| Apologies for the error!"_
|
| > _Allowing such risky research to go forward at the Wuhan
| Institute of Virology was "simply crazy, in my opinion," says
| Jack Nunberg, director of the Montana Biotechnology Center.
| "Reasons are lack of oversight, lack of regulation, the
| environment in China," where scientists who publish in
| prestigious journals get rewarded by the government, creating
| dangerous incentives. "So that is what really elevates it to
| the realm of, 'No, this shouldn't happen.'"_
|
| In general, his actions make clear he's much more aligned
| with the Chinese government than the US, so extending Daszak
| to US govt purely based off of nationality seems unjust.
|
| > _On January 30, Daszak went on CGTN America, the U.S.
| outpost for Chinese state television, and said two things
| that proved to be spectacularly wrong. "I'm very
| optimistic...that this outbreak will begin to slow down," he
| said. "We're seeing a small amount of human-to-human
| transmission in other countries, but it's not uncontrollable.
| " He went on to conclude that the Chinese government was
| taking all necessary steps "to be open and transparent, and
| work with WHO, and talk to scientists from around the world,
| and where necessary, bring them in to help. They're doing
| that. It's exactly what needs to happen."_
| Ins43b wrote:
| [flagged]
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| LeonB wrote:
| Early on the article makes a conjecture that others also make
| which I think is part of why the topic is so hot:
|
| "Whether the virus emerged as a result of a leak from a
| laboratory or from nature has become one the most controversial
| problems in science."
|
| The words "in science" are my problem here: people thinking this
| is a "scientific" question.
|
| It's a history question, a political question, and could be made
| into a forensic question. But science does not ask this kind of
| question!
|
| Is it possible for a lab to leak a virus? That's a question
| science can ask, but it doesn't answer this one.
|
| So we end up with a belief that scientists can answer this
| question... but it isn't a "scientific" question in the first
| place.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| > But science does not ask this kind of question!
|
| I disagree, it _is_ a scientific question. Whether we can
| answer it in isolation of politics and prejudice is the
| question for me.
|
| But if you observe some gravitational waves in a single event,
| you can correlate it to optical or radio observations, you can
| try to analyse the signals to match them to existing hypotheses
| of gravitational waves origination etc. The singularity of the
| event doesn't make it not science. Same as the emergence of a
| novel virus.
|
| It is just a shame that most of the evidence is subjective and
| non-scientific. But the _question_ itself is well posed
| scientific endeavour.
| switch007 wrote:
| I interpreted it as "in the scientific community".
| seydor wrote:
| why not? it is an important scientific question to guide
| research to mitigate the virus and prevent similar future
| disasters
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| The lab leak theory started in China. It has never been
| about xenophobia. The only people pushing the whole
| xenophobia thing was the CCP. Chinese news called it wuhan
| virus long after it was given the name Covid-19.
|
| So stop trying to protect the CCP.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Protect them from what? Being blamed? What does that do
| except stoke fear? There are actual things to talk about
| like their aggressive naval horseshit why do we have to
| make them nefarious mind controllers or secret world
| saboteurs or whatever this lab leak hypothesis is
| supposed to prove.
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| Knowing how the virus leaked allows us to figure out how
| to try and prevent it happening again.
|
| When you cover it up, prevent investigations, destroy
| data, and try to blame the rest of the world. That does
| not help understand how we can prevent it happening
| again.
|
| If China was open and honest from day 1, countries would
| have actually tried to help. But instead all the CCP did
| was hide it and blame everyone else.
|
| It's clear that you side with the CCP. You don't want to
| prevent another pandemic or make sure people are safe.
| All you seem to want to do is defend them and get angry
| at everyone who wants to discuss the issue.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Yeah, in fact being honest, sincere and collaborative
| with foreign powers is the tenet of NSA, CIA, and all
| major security agencies in the USA, right?
| th0ma5 wrote:
| I agree sort of with this sentiment, but it ultimately
| doesn't matter even if it is that china is covering up
| their bioweapon accident just like anyone might. We'll
| never know, and we don't need that to hold them
| accountable for many many many other wrongs, and we don't
| need it to start working to prevent the next pandemic
| either.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| I don't side with them, I side with reason.
|
| 1. Lab leak hypothesis being proven is not a requirement
| for any kind of prevention
|
| 2. If everyone was honest all the time life would be
| roses
|
| 3. These lab leak articles don't make anyone safer they
| just cause conspiratorial thinking.
|
| I don't trust the China for shit, but I'm sick of
| Americans suckered in by lazy bullshit thinking. I can't
| think of anything positive to say about China, but you
| can't say this because it is all a dead end useless thing
| that serves no purpose.
|
| How about putting back in our observers like Trump kicked
| out, arguably hobbling our view into what was going on.
| We still have not done this. Instead we're here dicking
| off about shit that doesn't matter. Way to be people.
| [deleted]
| computerfriend wrote:
| Don't ascribe motive ("cause xenophobic feelings") unless
| you can back it up.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| That's the very point I'm trying to make about this
| dubious article and all the people posting conspiracy
| theories here. How can we say they aren't trying to cause
| xenophobic feelings?
| at_compile_time wrote:
| Ah, so when people disagree with you, it's because
| they're conspiracy theorists and you're ready to make
| wild assumptions about their motives. How perfectly
| reasonable of you.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| This article literally explores and lays out theories
| about how potentially events and people could've
| conspired to our present day. I don't think that is
| intellectually helpful.
| computerfriend wrote:
| If you can't say either way, don't say it at all.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Yes exactly ... If you can't prove the lab leak stop
| writing articles about it, people.
| computerfriend wrote:
| Don't accuse people of xenophobia, is my point.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Sure yes, that is a fair point, but this conversation
| doesn't ascribe that kind of limitation in the argument,
| because we're already talking about other motivations.
| Maybe (probably lol) they were negligent, maybe it was an
| accident, my point is if we are also trying to get people
| to think for a moment "or maybe they did it on purpose"
| then it follows that people are pushing that idea, if
| false, for xenophobic reasons.
| [deleted]
| arisAlexis wrote:
| "Is it possible for a lab to leak a virus? "
|
| What do you mean? Ofc it's possible and has been done hundreds
| of times in the past with different viruses and lab security
| levels.
| qup wrote:
| Please, scientists, no need to peer review Wuhan.
| stewbrew wrote:
| Of course it could be a scientific to estimate the probability
| that ...
| pyuser583 wrote:
| There was a peer reviewed paper earlier in the pandemic where
| scientists used their knowledge of viral anatomy to argue it
| wasn't engineered.
|
| Subsequent scientific have disagreed.
|
| But this isn't purely historical.
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| The one with Peter Daszak who was hand picked by the CCP for
| the investigation and money trail back to the CCP??
| LanceH wrote:
| Apologies to those accused of being conspiracy theorists,
| xenophobic, and spreading misinformation will be going out
| shortly.
| camillomiller wrote:
| They will not, because those accusations came from people
| who intended to use them to discredit Chinese people in
| general, or that closely associate the leak with the
| Chinese way of doing things and so on. These accusation led
| to racist attacks against Asian people all over the us.
| kcplate wrote:
| Ok, so the original motivations for some making that
| claim were suspect. Should that automatically excuse or
| prevent discussion that better safety protocols should be
| used or a better "ways of doing things" should be
| undertaken when handling viruses and pathogens that are
| capable of killing 7M people? I think it's a valid topic
| and important one that should be verboten lest the next
| time we accidentally kill 14M with carelessness as the
| cause.
| plagiarist wrote:
| If the people making that claim had been sane, instead of
| pushing it in the middle of; "it's not deadly, just a
| flu," "masks do nothing," "maybe a bit of bleach is fine
| in the lungs," "hydroxychloroquine cures everything,"
| "no, wait, it is horse paste that cures everything," "the
| vaccine will kill you in X months, guaranteed," and
| "GREAT RESET," it'd be easier to transition into a
| serious discussion about studying deadly viruses in labs.
| Natsu wrote:
| The middle ground always gets pushed to the extremes when
| there's a strong push to alienate some views.
|
| Covid was worse than the flu, but the flu is also deadly
| and we should be paying more attention to vaccinating it.
| The deaths aren't evenly distributed, either, young
| healthy people have less to worry about, but "less" isn't
| "nothing." For masks, you really wanted N95 masks, not
| cloth, and you still have to avoid large indoor
| gatherings.
|
| Nobody said that bleach in the lungs was good. Trump
| mentioned _disinfectant_ presumably butchering a
| description of the HealLight which would use UV to
| destroy the virus, effectively "disinfecting" the lungs.
| There are always idiots poisoning themselves with bleach,
| though, but nobody pays much attention to the poison
| control stats most of the time. HCQ and Ivermectin had
| some promising studies but no real effectiveness for the
| things people wanted them for. There probably is some
| rise in myocarditis due to vaccines... but they're still
| a lot safer if you look at mortality rates. "Great Reset"
| was from an actual policy proposal someone put out, but
| doesn't really stand for the things the conspiracies say
| it does.
|
| All of these things got pushed into extreme caricatures
| depending on what side you trust.
| kcplate wrote:
| I honestly don't see much difference in the level of
| extremism between everything you listed vs people
| deciding a specific topic is off limits just because the
| theory may not be politically correct, or because the alt
| opinion may have some factual basis.
| plagiarist wrote:
| Yes, of course, everyone should treat disingenuous
| propagandists as if they were attempting to have a
| serious discussion. If anyone objects to that, it is
| "deciding a topic is off-limits," which is insane. Of
| course we should let them run their horse paste grift and
| just patiently repeat over and over, "no, no, studies
| show it doesn't work. Please wear a mask to reduce
| spread."
| kcplate wrote:
| Considering that you are intentionally misconstruing that
| ivermectin position that folks were discussing at the
| time using the same tired and dishonest "horse paste"
| media talking point, I'll assume that "disingenuous
| propaganda" runs in many directions.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| Science is in agreement that it is most likely not natural
| and was engineered. The missing piece is where it
| originated and majority agree that it most likely
| originated from the wuhan institute of virology.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > but it isn't a "scientific" question in the first place.
|
| ... which is true of the pandemic response in general.
| "Science" doesn't tell society how to react to something.
| Science is a process to test hypothesizes--it isn't a book of
| facts or direct answers on the trade-offs of various mitigation
| techniques. It can only inform, not dictate.
| fsckboy wrote:
| So, science doesn't have a problem when results of experiments
| are faked, because science doesn't ask this question, it's a
| question for politics, forensics, and history? Nice try! Still
| your move.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| oneshtein wrote:
| Yes, you nailed it properly. If results of experiments cannot
| be reproduced and confirmed by two independent researchers at
| least, then it's not a scientific process. History of science
| is full of fakes.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| There's a lab at U of A that accidentally infected their
| student researcher with cholera, and another case of
| campylobacter.
|
| It's just sloppy work, but when you're there for 12 hours a day
| for 5-6 days a week, you're bound to get sloppy
| toomim wrote:
| Is the big bang theory science or history, by that logic?
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| pbreit wrote:
| How is science not involved in a major way here? Of course
| science will continue to play a huge role in the matter.
| mikrotikker wrote:
| A few possible reasons.
|
| The communist party is sensitive doesn't want it to be known
| that a Chinese lab leaked a dangerous virus (see also "how
| does RBMK reactor explode?")
|
| The ecohealth alliance that Fauci and Dazack were involved in
| don't want it widely known that they had a hand in the WIV
| GoF (that Obama banned stateside) and worked early in the
| pandemic to obscure their own involvement in it.
|
| Trump doesn't want it widely known that his administration
| contributed $100k to the Ecohealth alliance.
|
| Lots of powerful people working to not take responsibility
| and obfuscate reality.
| baxtr wrote:
| I think when they say Science they actually mean: the
| scientific community.
| toomim wrote:
| Which actually means: a scientific community.
| tuxguy wrote:
| non-paywall version : https://archive.md/Edw0k
| yyyk wrote:
| Leaving aside the question of where and how the virus emerged,
| it's interesting to note that the lab was nigh useless during the
| pandemic, despite its main specialty was investigating
| Coronaviruses! It looks like a lot of dangerous research went on,
| and even if nothing bad happened because of that research,
| nothing was gained. A lot of risk for nothing.
| calderwoodra wrote:
| Are you implying the lab shouldn't have existed at all? And/or
| future coronavirus labs shouldn't exist either?
| Thorentis wrote:
| They're not implying anything. They're nearly making the
| observation that the supposed reason this lab existed was to
| research dangeours viruses like covid, and yet the lab itself
| did nothing to help during the pandemic.
| wwtdtgotiatl wrote:
| > yet the lab itself did nothing to help during the
| pandemic.
|
| Which people in this thread are somehow believing as truth
| instead of the bald-faced propaganda it is.
|
| Do you actually think a virus research lab in the epicentre
| of an outbreak would not be put to use?
|
| From Wikipedia:
|
| > As the virus spread worldwide, the institute continued
| its investigation. In February 2020, a team led by Shi
| Zhengli at the institute were the first to identify,
| analyze and name the genetic sequence of the novel
| coronavirus (2019-nCoV), upload it to public databases for
| scientists around the world to understand,[28][29][30] and
| publish papers in Nature.[31] On 19 February 2020, the lab
| released a letter on its website describing how they
| successfully obtained the whole virus genome.[32]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology
| yyyk wrote:
| Gene sequencing is table stakes with modern tech, and
| many countries did that during the pandemic. We don't
| need a BSL-4 level lab in the middle of a large city to
| do a gene sequence. It happened that they published early
| what many other labs would have done (and did do). On the
| other hand, the vaccines and effective cures had nothing
| to do with their work. The benefit/risk ratio seems very
| poor here.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| > It looks like a lot of dangerous research went on, and
| even if nothing bad happened because of that research,
| nothing was gained. A lot of risk for nothing.
|
| Your previous comment is clearly incorrect as shown by
| the parent, something is a lot more than nothing.
| dendriti wrote:
| So you're not going to admit you were ignorant or just
| lying?
| DangitBobby wrote:
| What was gained that would not have been gained without
| the existence of the lab?
| Thorentis wrote:
| You really missed the whole point of their post didn't
| you? If we are going to allow a BSL-4 lab to exist and
| introduce the risk of possible leaks or other problems,
| we need to get something in return. That "something"
| needs to be more than what other lower security labs can
| already do. It is fascinating that a lab which was
| supposedly researching coronavirsuses for so long (and
| which may have led to the outbreak, but regardless) was
| unable to do anything that other labs could not.
| himinlomax wrote:
| Afaik they weren't even applying BSL4 security to their
| coronavirus research. On top of that, before the
| outbreak, the Pasteur institute, who was incidentally
| supposed to be a research partner but was kept at arms'
| length, raised an alarm on their apparent general lack of
| safety compliance.
|
| That and the fact that the Chinese dicatorship blocking
| any inquiry into the matter are enough to put the blame
| on that lab until proven otherwise.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| They shouldn't perform gain of function research because the
| risk/reward is comically high
| asynchronous wrote:
| Heaven forbid we hold people accountable and/or learn from
| our mistakes as a species.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| I'd like for high risk biological research to be done under
| the same security arrangements as nuclear weapons research.
| Covid and influenza have together killed several orders of
| magnitude more humans in the last 150 years than nuclear
| weapons/accidents have. Thus GoF research presents a
| potential human cost much higher than nuclear weapons, and
| should be treated as such.
|
| If that makes it "too expensive and slow" then so be it.
| Perhaps there are some things humans should not be doing.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| Well, historically, you know, nuclear weapons research
| involved a lot of cavalier scientists doing dangerous
| things with limited knowledge, and of course in the early
| days, there was plenty of above-ground range testing; is
| that something you want included as well?
|
| If my information is correct, I believe that nearly all
| nuclear testing these days is 100% simulation on
| supercomputers, which is as safe as safe can be, as long as
| you can trust supercomputer simulations to render the
| correct answer to those trusting researchers.
| Clubber wrote:
| Not only that, the US is missing 6 nuclear weapons.
|
| https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/us-military-
| missing...
|
| To add to your point, regardless of safeguards and
| protocols, accidents happen.
| revelio wrote:
| That seems reasonable, yes.
| Biorealism wrote:
| Yes, the whole virus hunting grift that Peter Daszak's
| EcoHealth Alliance and PREDICT tout has been exposed as
| ineffective. Now they are doubling down with further funding
| and blanket denials that it could have come from a lab
| accident. They never mention the nearest relatives to SARS-
| CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. And that happens to be
| where WIV sampled.
| justanotheratom wrote:
| "nothing was gained"
|
| I see the irony (gain of function)
| lapama wrote:
| Gain of risk
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| xcv123 wrote:
| SARS-CoV leaked from a Chinese lab in 2004, and it is
| probable that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from Wuhan in 2019.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/
| th0ma5 wrote:
| That article says the first thing you said but not the
| second.
| xcv123 wrote:
| [flagged]
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| xcv123 wrote:
| [flagged]
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| xcv123 wrote:
| No it is not an ad hominem attack to say that your
| argument is childish and stupid. You're not even having a
| debate. You're just spamming the forum with drivel.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| I am trying to say that either it leaked or it didn't,
| but that we'll never know, but that it doesn't matter
| anyway.
| prepend wrote:
| We will know, eventually, hopefully. I think it really
| matters. To better prevent future pandemics and to
| establish frameworks for restitution. And it definitely
| matters for future economic reparations.
|
| If negligence is the cause of a multi-million death,
| multi-trillion dollar response it needs to be corrected
| to prevent future similar errors.
| totallychinese wrote:
| The linked article is from 2004. It clearly says nothing
| re: point 2.
| [deleted]
| xcv123 wrote:
| So what? You missed the point or are pretending to ignore
| it. Another CCP troll.
| akomtu wrote:
| HN should limit the rate of comments per user per post. This
| user is seriously worked up to mute this discussion and spams
| in every comment thread. Edit: this user wrote 26 out of 88
| comments here.
| yorwba wrote:
| HN already has a rate limit. You get the message "You're
| posting too fast" when you exceed it. Though I think it's
| also tied to karma and might not trigger when all those
| comments get upvoted. And if you try to downvote them all,
| you'll run into the protections against mass-downvoting.
| Tuning the feedback loops to encourage good discussions
| while damping flamewars is a difficult problem.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Once you have some post history, I'm pretty sure the
| harsh rate limit, the one that would stop someone from
| posting in every comment thread, is only triggered
| manually by the mods if you're a prick (personal
| experience).
|
| The basic new account rate limit and the one you get from
| getting downvote quickly are too weak to stop what they
| are complaining about.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| And they should ban throwaway accounts too which you can
| also see spreading more conjecture.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| I remember still when it was considered a conspiracy theory and
| we got downvoted here and banned on reddit for even implying the
| possibility. Unfortunately something similar is happening with AI
| x-risk right now.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| jansan wrote:
| Same with pointing out at the first studies that indicated that
| the virus was airborne. I got downvoted to oblivion here for
| posting a link to the study.
| asynchronous wrote:
| Despite that becoming at least partially true years later
| when the CDC admitted it.
| [deleted]
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| oneshtein wrote:
| Accusation without evidence is witch-hunting.
|
| We still have no strong evidence for lab leak from BSL4 lab in
| Wuhan, while we have some evidence (two early strains of SARS-
| CoV-2: A, then B; B was in Wuhan in December; where and when
| was parent of A and B?) that suggests start of epidemic outside
| of China in mid-September 2019. Russians start to delete videos
| about blast at their BSL4 lab "Vector" in Novosibirsk on Sep 16
| 2019[0], which suggests that this information may cause harm
| for them.
|
| So, "Lab leak" theory may be right, while "lab leak from BSL4
| lab in Wuhan" theory may be wrong.
|
| [0]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200407175030/https://www.youtu...
| arisAlexis wrote:
| We are playing with words. Accusation vs possibility vs open
| to options vs etc. The problem is that it was called which
| hunting anything that was not natural origin.
| asynchronous wrote:
| I won't forget no matter how many times they try to make me.
|
| What happened several years ago was a clown show of the highest
| order.
| ricksunny wrote:
| The sourcing and style will raise eyebrows. The revelations are
| valuable, and clear enough to be verifiable through one channel
| or another.
|
| And given that we are at 7 days remaining before the 90-day WIV
| intel disclosure deadline, old journo hands expect that info
| leaks are more likely to happen.
|
| https://twitter.com/mbalter/status/1667668700885819395?s=20
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| turtleyacht wrote:
| From the article,
|
| > _You infect the mice, wait a week or so, and then recover the
| virus from the sickest mice. Then you repeat._
|
| From _The Hardware Hacker_ (2017) by "bunnie" Huang:
|
| > _So, a single base-pair change--simply flipping two bits--might
| be all you 'd need to turn the H1N1 swine flu virus into a
| deadlier variant... for just over $1,000._
|
| > _[Influenza] packs a deadly punch in 3.2 KB... and we [still]
| haven 't eradicated it. Could influenza do hacks like the one I
| just described on its own already? The short answer is yes._
|
| > _... on average, every copy of an influenza virus has one
| random mutation._
|
| > _[H1N1] was probably just a couple of mutations away from being
| a bigger health problem._
|
| > _... novel H1N1 acquired a mix of RNA snippets that gave it
| high transmission rates and made it something humans weren 't
| innately immune to. That's the perfect storm for a pandemic._
|
| > _If there were a computer analogy to this RNA-shuffling model,
| [random relinking of virus "files" at runtime]... would also
| proliferate a diverse set of viruses in the wild..._
|
| Fortunately for swine flu at least,
|
| > _... a patient [had] a novel antibody... to confer immunity to
| all 16 subtypes of influenza A._
|
| Against Covid, research by Dr. Weismann and Dr. Kariko led to the
| development of the mRNA vaccine:
|
| https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/how-drew-weissman-and-katal...
| bredren wrote:
| > Witnesses are said to have told the US investigation that Zhou
| fell from the roof of the Wuhan institute, although this has not
| been verified.
|
| This guy who published a suspiciously early patent on a covid 19
| vaccine fell off a roof three months later?
|
| That's kind of buried in the article a bit but was this claim
| been made anywhere else?
|
| Also, the section on activity at the lab at the time of the
| outbreak does not mention analysis of private app data.
|
| IIRC, one of the early discredited reports suggesting lab origin
| had relied, in-part, on commercially available app data. The kind
| of adware built into "free" apps that violate user privacy.
|
| This data supposedly showed clear activity supporting a temporary
| shutdown of the Wuhan lab.
|
| This information always seemed the easiest to latch on to. Not to
| prove origin but at least offer an important fact for a pattern.
|
| US military bases have had their locations and perimeters out on
| the public web thanks to fitness apps.
|
| Was the WIV associated app data not real? If it was, why isn't it
| included in this article?
|
| The article relates a study "by academics at Wuhan University
| located the hotspots in Wuhan where people were reporting on
| social media that they needed treatment for Covid."
|
| How would this be more compelling than raw app data showing
| movement of employees or security workers in and around WIV?
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| ricksunny wrote:
| >This guy who published a suspiciously early patent on a covid
| 19 vaccine fell off a roof three months later?
|
| >That's kind of buried in the article a bit but was this claim
| been made anywhere else?
|
| As someone who's followed the debate closely, (with the
| submission history to demostrate that), I can tell you that the
| parent article is the first time the assertion that Zhou fell
| from the roof has ever been made in tbe public-facing side of
| the debate.
| verisimi wrote:
| I've never seen a virus in my life! So how did they make one in
| Wuhan?
|
| I'm pretty convinced that media departments are real though!
| christkv wrote:
| Nobody will ever want the truth because if it did come from the
| lab it implicates the Chinese government as well as the US
| government given that the US funded research in Wuhan through the
| EcoHealth Alliance to get around the ban on Gain of Function
| research in the US.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| Summary: The Case for a Lab Leak, from a Sunday Times
| investigation (C):
|
| (1) The institute sought funding to research something (A), which
| Covid could result from. (Said later they didn't do the planned
| research), but funding from the military appears to have been
| given.
|
| (1.1) They planned to do the research at the time and approximate
| place where Covid later emerged.
|
| (2) Protections at the lab were not what they should have been.
|
| (2.2) Lab scientists had previously created a highly infectious
| super-coronavirus (not Covid-19) with a very high kill-rate that
| in all probability would never have emerged in nature. Their
| tests showed no known (at that time) way to effectively limit its
| spread were it to leak.
|
| (3) NO animal testing was reported in a wide vicinity around the
| the Hunan market. Samples of Covid found in the market were NOT
| from animals (B).
|
| (3.1) The market is a busy place in the center of the city where
| the virus would almost certainly be once it's spreading between
| people.
|
| (3.2) There is some evidence that researchers from the lab were
| hospitalized with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019, and one
| of their relatives died.
|
| (4) The biggest hotspot of people reporting illness via social
| media (in the month before the province was locked down on
| January 23) was at the institute, though this was partly hidden
| in initial reports. The first case in Britain was recorded a week
| later.
|
| (A) The Wuhan Institute of Virology sought funding for inserting
| a furin cleavage site. The institute is a 40-minute drive from
| the Huanan Seafood market.
|
| (B) In January 2020, Chinese officials cleared the market without
| testing live animals. The presence of SARS-CoV-2 was from
| environmental samples (animal cage, hair-and-feather-removal
| machine, etc). Covid-susceptible animals were present but NOT
| tested. The study of those samples was criticized for not having
| any animal samples.
|
| (C) Information above drawn from archive.ph/L2BSO and comments
| and links here in this HN thread.
|
| ---------------------------
|
| "The Sunday Times has reviewed hundreds of documents, including
| previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific
| papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through
| sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three
| years since the pandemic started. We also interviewed the US
| State Department investigators -- including experts on China,
| emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare -- who conducted the
| first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19
| outbreak. The closest relatives to Covid known were too far from
| Covid to have developed into Covid on their own in a short time.
| So bringing in dangerous viruses and accidentally leaking them is
| an unlikely cause." Earlier reporting by the Times:
| archive.ph/Mkqox
|
| Genome statistical estimates indicate the "relatives" are decades
| away from Covid. In February 2020, RaTG13 was identified as the
| closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes
| COVID-19, sharing 96.1% nucleotide identity. It was found near
| the town of Tongguan in Mojiang county in Yunnan, China. However,
| in 2022, scientists found three closer matches 530 km south, in
| Feuang, Laos, designated as BANAL-52 (96.8% identity), BANAL-103
| and BANAL-236. However, it is alleged that one virus at the Wuhan
| institute was an even closer match to Covid-19 than RaTG13. Note
| that bat viruses had never been known to harm humans.
| Intermediate animals apparently catching a virus from bats and
| passing it to humans had been known to happen.
|
| In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently
| experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military
| Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People's Liberation Army
| (PLA). In published papers, military scientists are listed as
| working for the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and
| Epidemiology, which is the military academy's base.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| Overly-speculative information supporting a lab leak:
|
| "Scientists with close relationships with the Wuhan Institute
| of Virology said it was their belief that there was vaccine
| research going on in the fall of 2019, pertinent to Covid-19
| vaccination"
|
| "Investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an
| interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could
| be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate
| its population against its own secret virus, it might have a
| weapon to shift the balance of world power."
|
| In May 2020, one of the key researchers died from unconfirmed
| causes at age 54.
|
| "On November 19, the safety director of the Chinese Academy of
| Sciences made a visit, according to the institute's website. He
| addressed a meeting of the institute's leadership with
| important 'oral and written' instructions from China's
| president, Xi Jinping, regarding 'a complex and grave
| situation'. "
|
| "In the first months of the pandemic, many Chinese scientists
| visited bat caves in Yunnan to see whether they could find a
| place where Covid may have originated.... 7 scientists
| attempting to visit were told the Moijang mine (known source of
| at least one Covid-like coronavirus) was closed, so they
| sampled bats in another abandoned copper mine nearby. On the
| first day of their work, police arrived, seized the samples and
| took them to their station, where they were interrogated and
| detained for 48 hours. Officers also went to their hotel and
| seized the samples they had collected from elsewhere. Even
| though the team had approval to test in the area, they were
| ordered to leave. Searching for bat viruses was banned in
| Yunnan in early 2021"
| lifelong wrote:
| https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statem...
|
| Also posted on HN 2 years ago with ... zero comments"
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nih.gov%2Fabout-...
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| aaplok wrote:
| > The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an
| interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be
| used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its
| population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon
| to shift the balance of world power.
|
| This part doesn't make sense to me. Coronavirus is known to
| mutate constantly and rapidly. Having a vaccine against a strand
| might provide a temporary advantage, but that advantage would
| subside quickly. Coronaviruses would make poor bioweapons
| considering how impossible it would be to control them.
|
| If an army wants to develop a virus-based weapon wouldn't there
| be better viruses to base it from than COVIDs?
| revelio wrote:
| Viruses mutate because they are constantly exposed to the
| immune systems of people who were already previously infected,
| so they have to mutate in order to dodge prior natural
| immunity. That isn't a concern if most people who get infected
| die.
|
| Moreover, the first SARS-CoV-2 variant took a long time to
| start mutating and even then it was only minor mutations. If
| you release an extremely infectious very deadly virus and you
| have a vaccine for it, then at that moment it's a Deus Ex
| scenario and whoever can manufacture the vaccine can take over
| the world because your enemies are now collapsing and will do
| anything to obtain the vaccine including giving up their own
| autonomy. Guess that's the theory, at least.
|
| As to why SARS-CoV-2: because it's airborne and can spread long
| distances via gas-like clouds (which is why lockdowns, masks,
| wiping surfaces etc didn't work). You can't really get better
| if you want to very rapidly infect a whole country.
| 2devnull wrote:
| Governments investigate imperfect weapons. Consider LSD.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| johnea wrote:
| Too bad the article is from a UK equivalent to the National
| Inquirer...
| Biorealism wrote:
| Nonsense. The Times is one of the main UK publications along
| with the Guardian and The Telegraph.
| frank_bb wrote:
| [dead]
| highfrequency wrote:
| The idea that Covid19 was accidentally leaked from the Wuhan lab
| has moved from conspiracy theory to mainstream view of many US
| gov't agencies with the most classified information available to
| them.
|
| John Ratcliffe, former Director of National Intelligence: "My
| informed assessment, as a person with as much or more access than
| anyone to our government's intelligence during the initial year
| of the virus outbreak and pandemic onset, has been and continues
| to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported
| by our intelligence, by science and by common sense. From a view
| inside the IC, if our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab
| leak theory was placed side-by-side with our intelligence and
| evidence pointing to a naturally occurring "spillover" theory,
| the lab leak side of the ledger would be long and overwhelming
| while the "spillover" side would be nearly empty."
|
| https://oversight.house.gov/release/covid-origins-part-2-hea...
|
| The Furin cleavage site is one of the more compelling pieces of
| evidence. 1.5 years before the outbreak, the Wuhan Institute
| applied for a grant from Darpa to explore _mutating coronaviruses
| to make them more infectious to humans_ , particularly through
| the addition of a Furin cleavage site. (Darpa declined to fund
| the research).
|
| The Covid-19 virus is notable for being the only coronavirus to
| have a Furin cleavage site. Not only that, but it appears to be
| basically a _perfect mutation_ that specifically modifies the 12
| nucleotides necessary for the Furin site, without modifying other
| base pairs.
|
| Here's a quote from email excerpt included in the recent Congress
| hearing:
|
| "Before I left the office for the ball, I aligned nCoV with the
| 96% bat CoV sequenced at WIV. Except for the RBD the S proteins
| are essentially identical at the amino acid level - well all but
| the perfect insertion of 12 nucleotides that adds the furin site.
| S2 is over its whole length essentially identical. I really can't
| think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat
| virus or one very similar to it to nCoV where you insert exactly
| 4 amino acids 12 nucleotide that all have to be added at the
| exact same time to gain this function - that and you don't change
| any other amino acid in S2? I just can't figure out how this gets
| accomplished in nature. Do the alignment of the spikes at the
| amino acid level - its stunning. Of course, in the lab it would
| be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted."
|
| https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Lette...
| ricksunny wrote:
| (That latter quote is Tulane virologist Robert Garry. Like his
| peers he would go on to downplay the LL hyp in the wake of the
| Feb 1st conference call organized by then-head of Wellcome
| Trust Jeremy Farrar.)
| [deleted]
| marsven_422 wrote:
| [dead]
| smohare wrote:
| [dead]
| laserbeam wrote:
| This is the kind of writing you need to properly discuss the lab
| leak hypothesis. It's not perfect, there are no good links to
| sources which suggests a lot of it is made up.
|
| However, this kind of writing should only happen after years or
| months of investigation. You can't do the lab leak panic 2 days
| into the pandemic. You can't even really do it half way through
| the pandemic.
|
| I'm glad such investigations are being caried out. I only wish
| links to whatever is declassified from the investigations to be
| made public for such publications. Authors need to prove their
| research effort when it comes to such news.
| oneshtein wrote:
| > It's not perfect, there are no good links to sources which
| suggests a lot of it is made up.
|
| Existing evidence points to another lab: BSL4 lab "Vector" in
| Novosibirsk, Russia. They worked on their "Sputnik" vaccine
| when blast in laboratory on September 16 2019[2] caused chain
| of incidents: broken windows, unprotected soldiers break in,
| which checked rooms for signs of fire, equipment stolen from
| BSL4 lab by those soldiers[0][1], epidemic of unknown virus in
| Siberia, Military World Games in Wuhan[3].
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w7SAeNcXA8
|
| [1]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200407175030/https://www.youtu...
|
| [2]: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/17/health/russia-lab-
| explosi...
|
| [3]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7813667/
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| laserbeam wrote:
| I mean... There are references to names, institutions
| carrying out certain investigations, references to
| experiments done prior to the pandemic. Yeah, some of it can
| be congecture. Which is why I really want the direct links to
| data, not just mentions to the events.
|
| I'm not sure it's a conspiracy theory. I think it's a
| legitimate thing to investigate by an international entity
| like the UN (not the US), and the outcome (if it turns out to
| be true) should likely be some proportional sanction/payments
| by China.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Sure, but the article is implying there something new that
| actually would have some kind of bearing or meaning.
| oneshtein wrote:
| Russians started to clean up evidence, which points to
| BSL4 lab "Vector".
|
| IMHO, this article is a part of their disinformation
| campaign. The name of their vaccine "Sputnik V" (Follower
| 5) suggests that there was "Something","Sputnik I",
| "Sputnik II", "Sputnik III", "Sputnik IV" before "Sputnik
| V".
|
| It's impossible for Russians to produce 5 vaccines in row
| in such short span of time, just few months, which took
| billions of dollars and year of time for western
| companies.
|
| IMHO, Russians started developing of their vaccine since
| SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2003.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > The name of their vaccine "Sputnik V" (Follower 5)
| suggests that there was "Something"
|
| No, a regime known for throwing people out of windows if
| they say one word too much isn't so dumb to hide a hint
| like that in plain sight.
| dbtc wrote:
| Or they had 12 teams working in parallel, competition
| style, and team 5 won.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Sounds ominous but also completely devoid of useful
| explanations, blame, or actionable knowledge.
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| It was named after the satellite Sputnik 1 and the V is
| not a roman five but stands for victory, multiple sources
| consistently claim? Sounds reasonable that this was just
| PR propaganda to connect to prior great successes in
| Russia..
|
| (Even without that knowledge I'd find this theory a bit
| far fetched, there could be many other good reasons for
| that naming).
| oneshtein wrote:
| "Sputnik" is a regular Russian word, which means "one who
| travels together with another" (s-put-nik s-=with,
| -put-=travel/road/journey, -nik=somebody).
|
| Victory is Latin word. Russian word for victory is
| "pobeda" (po-beda po-=after, -beda=bad/something very
| different from good, "after bad times").
|
| It looks like 5 in the name is from Ad5 component of
| vaccine.
|
| Moreover, the vaccine produced by Vector is called
| EpiVacCorona[0].
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EpiVacCorona
| asynchronous wrote:
| Oh? But we can publish the Lancet document, asserting with
| ridiculous grandeur that it was NOT a lab leak, a mere 3 months
| into the pandemic?
|
| The same document that turned out to have been paid for and
| produced despite having numerous errors and lies, simply to
| turn a narrative?
|
| Let's hold everyone to the same standard shall we?
| pinewurst wrote:
| https://archive.ph/L2BSO
| terramex wrote:
| non-paywall link: https://archive.ph/22j9L
| kazinator wrote:
| Or: turn on Firefox reader mode, click refresh.
| _nalply wrote:
| Didn't work for me even after refresh, probably you and me we
| were disposed differently. Whatever, using archive.
| Xen9 wrote:
| I personally believe in Rootlclaim's Bayesian analysis
| (https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COV...)
| which states that "the virus was developed during gain-of-
| function research and was released by accident (89% probability)"
|
| This is consistent with David Martin's speech in Europe:
| https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1661698114917646336
|
| I haven't checked the "publicly available references" but many
| who inssist on a natural cause read about the bat theory in the
| first few months and then haven't updated & aren't willing to
| update their models.
|
| If you find any faults that can really change the results in the
| analysis Rootclaim made, I would be interested.
| jmull wrote:
| > If you find any faults that can really change the results in
| the analysis Rootclaim made, I would be interested.
|
| This is an interesting way to analyze the problem but the set
| of criteria and weights applied at each step are made up.
|
| The flaw is that you can use this form of analysis to reach any
| conclusion you want.
|
| For example, the "Already well adapted" section -- a "2x"
| factor for lab escape. We wouldn't even be thinking about this
| virus if it wasn't well adapted to spread among humans. So
| that's baked into the ground and isn't a factor of anything.
|
| Then take "Furin cleavage" -- a whopping 8x factor for lab
| escape relative to zoonotic. This is the same thing as already
| well adapted, so now we've got a combined 16x for something
| that should be 1x.
|
| The weight for "Chimera" -- another whopping 8x for lab escape
| relative to zoonotic -- seems really high for something that is
| found both in nature and in labs that merely "seems less likely
| to combine in nature". We should probably be arguing about
| whether this is 1.5x or 2x.
|
| The real conclusion is we don't know. The Chinese probably do,
| but it would be a very closely guarded secret and obviously
| they would never admit to a lab leak. I lot of people hate
| ambiguity and want an answer, but in this case it doesn't seem
| that we are going to get one.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > it would be a very closely guarded secret and obviously
| they would never admit to a lab leak
|
| A complicating factor is that some (much?) of the funding
| came from the US. Which means admitting to a leak is against
| the interest of not only Chinese but also the US government
| which would have a hell of a time explaining to taxpayers how
| pandemic was engineered on their money doing research banned
| in the US. (Though I don't think US government played any
| part in resisting the research tbh, CCP probably did all that
| at their accord.)
|
| I think all in all we shouldn't give up, and even if we don't
| find the actual data I don't see the world can be okay
| without big fat follow up over not some lab making a mistake
| (humans make those) but all obstruction of research into the
| origins of what could have been an extinction level event if
| the virus was a bit better engineered, whether it came from
| Chinese communist party or US scientists scared for grant
| money.
| Xen9 wrote:
| Idea:
|
| Community / site for collective truth-seeking. Possibly
| integrated with Metaculus.
|
| One can submit new pieces of evidene which would be
| commentable (in threads), votable, and programmable (to
| toggle / affect of other submitted evidence threads).
|
| Users can adjust the weights, vote on them (to generate a
| certain consensus / prediction), and even toggle of pieces
| of evidence manually.
|
| The site automatically gives the probabilities for
| different scearions. I don't have an instant vision on how
| "all" possible scenarios would be chosen.
| ricksunny wrote:
| Neat idea, if you can keep it from getting gamed.
|
| It sounds a little like this RootClaim (I just learned
| about here) https://www.rootclaim.com/how-rootclaim-works
| but with the users adjusting & voting on weights?
|
| This is a strawman demonstrator I'm wware of w r t
| origins probability surveying & calculation.
| https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/18631
|
| It's intended for any one user to evaluate ther priors
| and see how they stack up all together. like that your
| idea woukd aggregate & have comments & a voting
| mechanism,
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| th0ma5 wrote:
| [flagged]
| cubefox wrote:
| > But why do you think it is important to prove a lab leak?
|
| Perhaps because it is _slightly_ interesting what caused the
| worst pandemic since the Spanish flu? Because millions of
| people died? Because knowing the cause could _perhaps_
| prevent something similar happen again? Perhaps prevent
| millions of deaths?
|
| I'm astonished by this question.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Sure but what if it just isn't knowable?
| cubefox wrote:
| Historians are still finding out things that happened
| hundreds of years ago. Do you really think the origins of
| Covid are lost in the mists of time?
| nepthar wrote:
| I'd ask the inverse question to you - why would you think it
| is unimportant to determine the cause of things that happen
| in the world?
| th0ma5 wrote:
| I don't
| peteradio wrote:
| You can't in one comment complain about investigations using
| "made up priors" and then in another complain that we are
| investigating something which could actually provide a
| measured prior.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Could! But hasn't... Otherwise yes good points. I don't see
| how they measure all the rest of the probabilities and the
| article seems to be designed to settle arguments among dumb
| people or something? It is not even remotely scientific.
| peteradio wrote:
| > I think the whole premise that arbitrary priors and
| dreaming up probabilities and then washing them all
| together isn't applicable to a unicorn type event.
|
| Now I believe you said it. Maybe not exactly "made up
| priors" so pardon me for the misquote. But I'd be
| interested to see if you can make a distinction.
| some_random wrote:
| I remember when this was first released, everyone clowned on it
| (including me) for a few reasons the biggest one being the
| classic problem with these sorts of Bayesian analyses. That
| being, the individual weights per piece of evidence are pretty
| arbitrary.
|
| Meanwhile, it seems quite likely to have produced the correct
| results so -\\_(tsu)_/-
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Lol. Not how facts work! I mean, people on here claiming I'm
| a China troll and hell they probably did do it, but we'll
| never be able to prove it either way, and more importantly it
| doesn't matter for us to make changes and to hold China
| accountable for all kinds of things.
| tsss wrote:
| Regardless of the merits of the lab leak theory, David Martin
| is a NWO-level conspiracy theorist who thinks that Pfizer
| colluded with Bill Gates and the US government and infected the
| whole world with a virus, on purpose, just to push their
| vaccine on people. The conference that you allude to has
| nothing to do with the European union. It was organized by two
| equally nutty far right EU-politicians in one of the
| parliament's public rooms to give a false legitimacy to their
| "conference" and mislead people to think that it was an
| official event.
| Xen9 wrote:
| He seems to have worked on projects that are questionable in
| importance / authenticity but likely to have made profits.
| Claiming that the video filmed in EU was from an "official EU
| conference" would be uniformed or mispresenting him, indeed.
| But I think it's worth watching; Phizer's patent application
| and other claims he made are interesting and haven't been
| repeated elsewhere (from my perspective).
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