[HN Gopher] CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's or...
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CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins
Author : doctaj
Score : 118 points
Date : 2025-01-25 18:16 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| doctaj wrote:
| https://archive.ph/DaBme
| fgna wrote:
| Was thinking this would be due to the inauguration or decree
| spree, however the analysis was started under the biden
| administration
| mmooss wrote:
| Yes, but we can assume - Trump and his people have openly
| communicated, planned, and followed through on it - that the
| actions of executive branch agencies are politicized.
|
| Here we are told that the "C.I.A.'s new director, John
| Ratcliffe, ... wants the agency to get "off the sidelines" in
| the debate."; that he's long favored the lab-leak theory (which
| is a politicized issue); and of all the things a brand new new
| CIA director must do, we see that this was Ratcliffe's first
| priority. We know that the CIA did not choose to release the
| report before the Trump administration.
|
| I think the overwhelming evidence is that it's a politicized
| action. Would Trump or his team lie or mislead? Of course. We
| can't give them the benefit of the trust until proven false;
| they have embraced deceit.
|
| Unfortunately, even though they weren't always credible before,
| I think that means that these things are now meaningless, other
| than as clues to Trump's and others' intents: Why prioritize
| this messaging? Whose idea was it? And always, _cui bono_ - who
| benefits?
| MilnerRoute wrote:
| The Times also includes this unusual sentence. "There is no
| new intelligence behind the agency's shift, officials said."
|
| And right below the headline on the Wall Street Journal they
| even stressed that the CIA says it had 'low confidence' in
| its finding...
|
| https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/cia-now-
| favor...
| ironyman wrote:
| Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), Chairman of the Senate
| Intelligence Committee, released the following statement
| about the CIA's findings on the origins of the Coronavirus:
|
| "I've said from the beginning that Covid likely originated in
| the Wuhan labs. Communist China covered it up and the liberal
| media covered for them. I'm pleased the CIA concluded in the
| final days of the Biden administration that the lab-leak
| theory is the most plausible explanation of Covid's origins
| and I commend Director Ratcliffe for fulfilling his promise
| to release this conclusion. Now, the most important thing is
| to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world."
| mmooss wrote:
| What do you think of Cotton's statement (that is, why in
| particular are you posting it)?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Maybe because your first sentence above mentioned
| politicizing. (?)
| scintill76 wrote:
| Having no other information, the fact he went out of his
| way to associate it with Biden makes it seem actually
| politically driven by Trump/Republicans.
| jfengel wrote:
| "Now, the most important thing is to make China pay for
| unleashing a plague on the world."
|
| Is that really true? Even supposing it was a leak from a
| lab, is punishing China really our top priority? What does
| it accomplish? What does it look like?
|
| That sounds like the goal isn't to find the actual cause,
| but to seek excuses to justify whatever it is he wishes to
| inflict on China.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It was started under Biden, but the decision to publicize it is
| the new director's decision.
|
| Worth noting is that this is a low-confidence report. I'm not
| accusing the director of divulging a low-confidence report
| under the belief that the public will accept it as
| categorically true because they have no sense of how CIA
| confidence levels work, but they're willing to believe the
| director wouldn't publicize it if it wasn't true.
|
| ... you should have low confidence in the truth of my last
| statement.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Wasn't this one of those "forbidden" conspiracy theories,
| censored from most social media, while most people (here too)
| cheered for "fighting misinformation" with censorship?
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Or is this anti-china propaganda that is now in vogue with the
| Trump administration?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Are they really anti-china? Or are they just trying to shake
| down China for some cash?
| nradov wrote:
| There is now a broad consensus across the national security
| establishment and the leadership of both major political
| parties that China must be treated as an adversary.
| Attempts at constructive engagement failed so now we have
| to pivot to containment in Cold War 2. This is a strategic
| issue that transcends money.
| CMay wrote:
| Concern about China is not partisan anymore, pretty much
| everyone is on board now.
|
| Also from the article: "Officials said the agency was not
| bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment
| had been in the works for some time."
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| But we know Trump lies, and that people around him change
| their story and lie for him, and we know he gets rid of
| personnel who don't 'kiss the ring'... and this comes at
| the exact instant that he says he's going to start his
| import tariffs for Chinese goods and needs media support to
| convince USA-ians that making all goods coming from China
| now expensive is a good idea...
|
| I mean you're going to need extraordinary evidence to show
| this is true; but CIA say there's no new evidence and it's
| a low confidence conclusion.
|
| Probability that it's just Trump continuing to be deceitful
| and manipulative approaches certainty.
| api wrote:
| If this is true some of it may have been funded by the US, so
| it makes both countries look bad.
| matthest wrote:
| Trump (and Elon) are actually fairly pro-China. Or at least,
| Trump and Xi have a good relationship (and Trump was quoted
| last month as believing the US and China can solve many
| problems together), and Elon loves China.
| suzumer wrote:
| Saying COVID-19 leaked from a lab with zero evidence is
| different than waiting for evidence and then saying it leaked
| from a lab.
| Throw84949595 wrote:
| But we can say it leaked from wet market without evidence!
| cm2187 wrote:
| Censoring views that it came from a lab leak with zero
| evidence isn't any better. In fact I remember being lied to
| by major news outlets at the time saying that the evidence
| points to a non lab origin.
| asmor wrote:
| It did though. Animal origin only stopped being the most
| favored explanation because we haven't found the link in 5
| years.
| frde_me wrote:
| I'm confused, do you mean the animal origin had no
| evidence either, but was favoured? But not having
| evidence for 5 years suddenly makes the other theory
| favoured instead?
|
| So basically neither had real evidence, but one was
| favoured?
| asmor wrote:
| False equivalence. Zoonotic diseases have precedent
| (SARS, MERS) and SARS-CoV-2 most closely resembles
| BANAL-52, a bat Coronavirus.
|
| Animal origin still seems more likely to me, but less
| than 5 years ago, since we have a missing link one would
| expect to see.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Animal origin does not contradict a lab leak however.
| Especially if you have a biolab studying coronaviruses in
| bats in the city identified as ground zero.
|
| It does favor an accidental lab leak over a targeted
| weaponization and release, but it doesn't contradict a
| lab origin.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| There was a nucleotide sequence in the covid strain that
| did not show up in any of the proposed hosts or
| progenitor viral sequences, which is where leaked
| documents showed NIH (Fauci included I believe)
| discussing the non-natural origin of the nucleotide
| sequence. It's possible to search for articles about the
| Fauci NIH emails, and whether they mean anything
| scandalous.
|
| Here's a technical article at NIH discussing the theory
| of no known natural origin for a nucleotide subsequence
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8209872/
| asmor wrote:
| This is interesting, thanks for sharing.
| zeagle wrote:
| This is an open access journal by two people whose
| publication history you can look up if you want to draw
| your own conclusions. Read the disclaimer at the top of
| the link. Don't bootstrap its credibility by linking it
| to being at NIH (which does mean something) anymore than
| saying something found on Google is from the company
| itself.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Yes, but the rush to the wet market theory was no better.
| wongarsu wrote:
| There was also no evidence against it. If there is neither
| solid evidence for nor against something I find it perfectly
| reasonable to apply the balance of probabilities. At least as
| long as you qualify your statement with a "probably".
|
| And with the main competing theory (covid spreading from a
| wet market in a city that contains a biolab) also being
| consistent with the hypothesis that it was an accidental lab
| leak, to me the balance of probabilities always seemed to
| favor the lab leak hypothesis.
|
| Yet saying that Covid probably originated from a lab leak was
| once branded as dangerous misinformation, with seemingly no
| evidence to support that claim
| suzumer wrote:
| At the time, there was essentially a 50/50 chance it was a
| lab leak or from a wet market. The issue with saying it was
| a lab leak at that time is that you are essentially
| gambling the US's relationship with China should it come
| out that it was a from a wet market. Also, a lot of the
| discussion regarding the lab leak theory early on seemed to
| me like it wouldn't be sated even if the US presented
| sufficient evidence that it was from a wet market.
| themgt wrote:
| There were very good arguments that Covid (probably) leaked
| from a lab as early as April 2020 at the latest (and in
| January if you were a virologist included in top-level NIAID
| emails). HN largely went along with the shunning of debate,
| which helped give everyone the impression there was "zero
| evidence" of a lab leak compared to solid evidence of
| zoonotic origin, which was simply never true.
|
| https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-
| throug...
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| It was malinformation. Whether it is misinformation or not is
| irrelevant.
| Vecr wrote:
| I'm assuming this is satire?
| rUsHeYaFuBu wrote:
| I think the issue falls into the problem of getting reliable
| information out of China.
|
| Because of a lack of access and free speech it's hard to get
| verifiable evidence to it's origin being from a lab leak or a
| market in either direction.
|
| Unfortunately, because of that lack of access mistrust and
| conspiracy theories spread like wild fires.
|
| It's important with science to understand that there is what
| happened or what is observed and to separate that away from
| wishful thinking or feelings.
| dekhn wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/us/politics/covid-lab-lea...
| and https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/27/media/covid-19-origins-lab-
| le...
|
| In short a few prominent people claimed it was racist to
| suggest that China's research or wet market contributed to the
| origins of COVID. They were mistaken but with the highly
| politicized environment, it helped distort opinions at a
| critical time. The claims of racism have since been
| demonstrated to be at least partly false (that is, there is a
| legitimate case to be made that China's researchers or wet
| market did contribute to the origin of COVID, and that China's
| leadership hid most of the evidence that would be used to make
| a case).
| asmor wrote:
| Conflation of very different factors. Animal origin was
| always going to be the most likely explanation, so wet market
| tracks. Lab leak after secret gain of function research is
| much more of a speculatory accusation than the existence of
| wet markets.
| standardUser wrote:
| It's not racist to blame China, but it is racist to
| accuse/harass/disparage Asian people and that was what was
| happening in America. Pushing back on the lab leak theory was
| at least in part to stop the dumbest among us from blaming
| their Asian neighbor. That and the lack of evidence.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Yep. Right up there with the Hunter Biden laptop stuff.
|
| Both turned out to be real.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Downvote all you want. The laptop turned out to be real and
| everyone now admits that.
|
| The people killing that story as "Russian disinformation"
| have beclowned themselves.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > while most people (here too) cheered for "fighting
| misinformation" with censorship?
|
| Exactly right. Remember any comment daring to question the
| authorities was shouted down to oblivion. Anyone daring to
| question lockdowns or other draconian measures were met with
| fire and brimstone. I lost a lot of respect for HN during
| Covid.
| mmustapic wrote:
| So there's a new president and the main intelligence agency
| changes its position radically in alignment with the new
| government. Why should we be confident in any other claim they
| made in the past?
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yes that's what I thought but it does say it was an analysis
| project started by Biden. The timing is suspicious, true.
|
| But yeah this topic is extremely politicised (not just by the
| US mind you, but also by China). So it's hard to say what's the
| truth. I doubt we'll ever find it.
|
| The lab leak theory does make sense though IMO. I wouldn't be
| surprised if it were true. But yeah, I take this at face value.
| And to be honest I'm just really happy that this is all behind
| us.
| layer8 wrote:
| We shouldn't be confident in this specific assessment because
| the agency making it isn't either:
|
| > The agency made its new assessment with "low confidence,"
| which means the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and
| incomplete.
| hansjorg wrote:
| So what you're saying is that we shouldn't put our trust into
| people who pride themselves on being master manipulators and
| deceivers?
| rightbyte wrote:
| The head of a underpants subscription telemarketing firm is
| probably trusting his underlings more than the head of the
| CIA.
| mhb wrote:
| Or, in a parallel universe, there's an old president who
| preemptively pardoned the person who might have been involved
| in GOF research leading to a lab leak.
| bdangubic wrote:
| same person who Trump was licking balls for four years while
| President during covid? or he was licking someone else's
| balls while locking our children out of schools for months?
| kleton wrote:
| It is an interesting angle, because now he could potentially
| be subpoenaed by Congress or anyone else, and it seems
| unlikely that he would perjure himself over anything after
| 2014.
| morkalork wrote:
| Considering what is known about that agency's activities under
| Reagan, I think everyone lost confidence about any claims they
| made before I was even born.
| jfengel wrote:
| That's just it. It was a very long time ago. Not many CIA
| employees are still there.
|
| That's not reason to trust it. But "a bad thing happened in
| the 80s and that's all I need to know" isn't a compelling
| argument either.
| dandanua wrote:
| Even if the lab leak theory is true, why Trump was so confident
| about it? Does he have sources that CIA does not? I would be so
| confident in it only in the case if I myself caused that virus
| leak...
| zeagle wrote:
| Well, if there is one thing about Trump that everyone would
| agree on, it is that he is very self confident in everything
| he says.
| dboreham wrote:
| He has the voices in his head.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| And, an equally interesting question: why should we be
| confident in any claim they are making now?
| drewbug01 wrote:
| > The agency made its new assessment with "low confidence," which
| means the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete.
|
| I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift
| in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain.
|
| ---
|
| One thing that is, however, quite certain: there are very real
| political reasons to favor one theory or another. For example,
| Sen. Tom Cotton is quoted as saying:
|
| > "Now the most important thing is to make China pay for
| unleashing a plague on the world," Mr. Cotton said.
|
| So... I'm not certain this is a development worth trusting. Maybe
| it really did originate from a lab! But the real goal of the
| constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about
| finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me.
| manbart wrote:
| What is clear is that Ratcliff _wants_ the lab leak theory to
| be true
| rayiner wrote:
| That's certainly motivation for releasing it, but he's been
| in office for five days so the analysis being released was
| done under the prior administration.
| rayiner wrote:
| As the article observes, "the new analysis ... began under the
| Biden administration."
|
| The new administration has been in office a week. There is a
| political incentive to release it now, but they couldn't have
| meaningfully created the analysis for political reasons in five
| days.
| mullingitover wrote:
| This assumes operatives haven't been working on this plan
| long before the regime took office.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this
| shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from
| certain.
|
| That's fine. The really problem is all debate on such matters
| was shut down during pandemic. To the benefit of no one (except
| for maybe Biden trying to cajole to Chinese into something, or
| other. Or to protect USG's role in this affair by financing
| Chinese gain of function research).
| eastbound wrote:
| The real problem is, trying to cover that, they said masks
| were useless and other elucubrations for which they didn't
| have proof, like "Stay inside". "But they didn't know it was
| false" Well, if so, don't speak.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this
| shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from
| certain.
|
| There's never going to be any conclusive evidence of the source
| of covid, and anyone claiming they have certainty (who wasn't a
| witness to a lab leak) is simply lying to you. What they're
| doing is going along with everyone else worth listening to, who
| find the coincidence that we were funding banned research on
| coronaviruses in a lab a few feet away from the origin of the
| outbreak unlikely. They also find tales of non-lab origin both
| speculative _and_ vague, while stories of lab origin are only
| speculative.
|
| It's so strange to demand so much more proof of lab origin than
| one does of non-lab origin. The obvious reasons for that demand
| are that millions died, and that everybody involved with that
| lab can easily be named. Also weird that this observation is
| covid-skeptic _coded_ , when in reality the worse you think
| covid is, the greater the crime that a lab leak entails.
| silverquiet wrote:
| I assumed it was a non-lab origin at first because that's how
| all previous pandemics have started as far as I am aware. A
| lab origin (and what precisely that means has never been
| particularly clear to me), but I have to say that I'd say
| your last observation cuts both ways - if one thinks this is
| such a great crime, then perhaps one would have encouraged
| masking, shutdowns/distancing, and vaccines, but those seem
| anti-correlated. Perhaps we'll do better next time around?
| rayiner wrote:
| > Perhaps we'll do better next time around?
|
| We won't, because the judgment of many of our cognitive
| elites has been impaired.
|
| This is a bit of a digression, it I'm reading a tweet
| thread by a $2,300/hour attorney who is an MSNBC
| contributor that is making just basic logical errors in
| discussing the birthright citizenship EO. Not even on the
| merits, literally in just summarizing the implications of
| the argument being made on a page of a filing he
| screenshotted in his tweet. I'm persuaded that if you had
| these folks take the LSAT with questions that had a
| political coding, they'd score a 160.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Not that it was the start of a pandemic, but the original
| SARS leaked from labs in China twice.[1]
|
| [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7096887/
| derektank wrote:
| Both the FBI and DOE, which have their own foreign intelligence
| gathering capabilities, had previously assessed that COVID was
| caused by a lab leak with moderate confidence. So while I agree
| with you that the truth will likely remain shrouded in some
| mystery, most of us that believed it originated from zoonosis
| at first (and I would include myself in that camp) should
| update our priors both based on the CIA assessment and previous
| assessments
| mulderc wrote:
| Are the FBI or DOE assessments public? What I last read in
| the peer-reviewed public literature seemed to point strongly
| to animal origin and not from a lab.
| caycep wrote:
| aka, "new CIA director wants to make hay"
| eightysixfour wrote:
| I had a pretty long post about this here before, due to the
| politicization of the issue it is highly unlikely any of us will
| ever know "the truth" without a surprise smoking gun. There are
| good reasons to believe the natural or the lab leak hypotheses.
|
| I think you have to accept it is now unlikely we normies will
| ever know the truth.
|
| The post, and its comments, are worth reading still IMO:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26750452#26751943
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| I feel this is a great summary, and really calls out the issues
| that we are certain of -- namely the politicization and the
| resulting uncertainty. IMO, everything else is difficult to
| know with high confidence, because of those two issues.
| bhickey wrote:
| > unlikely we normies will ever know the truth
|
| Thanks for the dose of epistemic humility. I'm willing to go
| one step further: It's plausible that no one knows the truth.
| Keeping secrets is hard. If someone knew they might've died in
| the early stages of the outbreak.
| chimprich wrote:
| The CIA is not a neutral party in this. Discrediting China may
| well be their goal here.
|
| A lab leak is not impossible, but there are good reasons to
| suspect a natural spillover event. There have been a number of
| studies that point in that direction; e.g. recent genetic
| analysis that suggests that the Wuhan wet market was the origin.
|
| https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2
| tcdent wrote:
| overlaying an additional conspiracy theory in skepticism of the
| current conspiracy theory
| wkat4242 wrote:
| > There have been a number of studies that point in that
| direction; e.g. recent genetic analysis that suggests the Wuhan
| wet market was the origin.
|
| Those are not mutually exclusive theories.
|
| It could have been a lab leak that was then superspread by the
| visit of an affected lab worker (or someone they came into
| contact with) at the wet market.
| chimprich wrote:
| That is possible, but the evidence doesn't suggest that. E.g.
| if I am reading the paper correctly, they say that there is
| evidence of two distinct spillover lineages, which wouldn't
| be consistent with a simple visit from a lab worker.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| They really are mutually exclusive theories.
|
| The current evidence points to at least two different
| spillover events (of slightly different variants) at the
| market, followed by spread of the virus in the communities
| surrounding the market, eventually radiating out to the rest
| of Wuhan. There is solid evidence now for each of those
| statements.
|
| If you try to reconcile that with the lab leak theory, you
| end up with an ever more implausible theory: two different
| scientists got infected in the lab with different variants
| (of a virus we have good evidence never existed at the lab in
| the first place), then both of them went to the market (where
| the same types of wild animals that caused the original SARS
| outbreak in 2002 just happened to be sold) and infected
| people, but somehow they didn't infect anyone else at the
| lab. It's just one implausibility stacked on top of the next,
| all with the goal of avoiding what the data is obviously
| saying: the outbreak began at the market.
| Retric wrote:
| Carful when assuming how a lab leak must have unfolded,
| there's many possibilities.
|
| A single worker gets infected/accidentally releases
| multiple variants, sloppy worker messing up twice doesn't
| seem that crazy. A lab leak is also consistent with an
| infection person visiting a location that experienced a
| separate variant.
|
| And that's just a few options there's also things like an
| intentional leak followed by another intentional leak etc.
|
| I've read that the lab was intentionally set near that wet
| market, so there being overlap like this doesn't seem
| extraordinary.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| This is how conspiracy theories become unfalsifiable.
|
| You're now positing that a lab worker got infected with
| multiple variants (which wouldn't exist in the lab, by
| the way, since they would work with cloned virus), then
| traveled across town and spread the virus at the market.
|
| The evidence all points towards a spillover (two,
| actually) at the market, but you can always make the lab
| leak theory ever more convoluted to keep it alive.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Why do you believe that lab workers only work with cloned
| viruses? Do you know the exact nature of the research
| that was going on there?
|
| Two spillovers at a lab that has one spillover does not
| seem that unlikely. There's a good chance that the lack
| of safety was in the culture and not just one careless
| person. In November and December, several Wuhan Institute
| personnel were reporting unknown illnesses and took
| standard precautions (weeks of isolation) over it. It
| sounds like they weren't equipped to deal with a class of
| pathogens that they were working with.
| mrkramer wrote:
| US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no
| conclusive evidence of what exactly happened. The burden of
| proof is on China. But let's be honest if it was a lab leak of
| this scale and consequences in US, US wouldn't admit it as
| would probably no country.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no
| conclusive evidence of what exactly happened.
|
| Right, but in 2020 and 2021, the US was doing everything it
| could to discredit those who were trying to possibly
| discredit China. And the WHO was doing whatever China wanted.
| No scrutiny was to be tolerated. That in and of itself is
| very fishy.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no
| conclusive evidence of what exactly happened.
|
| The US funded the lab and the specific fields of research. I
| have no idea how people can still be banging on about lab-
| leak origin being a racist plot against the Chinese. Covid
| probably leaked from _US lab experiments_ in China. The rest
| of the world should be raging against the US and China both.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| IIRC the US had given something like $250K to the
| organization that was funding the research at the lab.
|
| $250k is nothing for something this size.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The US funded the Wuhan lab through the EcoHealth Alliance,
| which was used as a vehicle to steer US government funding into
| areas of research that Obama had banned the US government from
| funding.
|
| The idea that this assessment needs a _goal_ is strange,
| because it is the most reasonable assessment, but the idea that
| it discredits China more than it discredits the US is bizarre.
| Maybe it does for the Chinese people, who can see that their
| government is willing to put Chinese people in danger in
| partnership with a US that was nominally refusing to put
| American people in danger. Turns out viruses don 't need visas
| so it didn't matter, but maybe it's the thought that counts.
| hulitu wrote:
| > The CIA is not a neutral party in this. Discrediting China
| may well be their goal here.
|
| The lab was founded by the CIA. Yes their goal was to discredit
| China.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| US intelligence likely has more evidence than they will
| publicly discuss. It is a matter of public record that parts of
| US intelligence (not CIA) had been tracking COVID in China
| since at least November of 2019. That they coincidentally
| happened to be johnny-on-the-spot when the initial infection(s)
| happened, long before anyone was paying attention or trying to
| create a narrative, suggests that they probably have more
| context around the conditions of the initial infections than
| they will ever disclose. How they managed to be "right place,
| right time" to observe the initial stages raises all kinds of
| interesting questions that aren't going to be answered.
|
| However, what the (classified) evidence indicates is somewhat
| separate from whatever public posture the CIA finds useful to
| take.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| Pretty safe to say this is a politicized nothingburger:
| The announcement of the shift came shortly after Mr. Ratcliffe
| told Breitbart News he no longer wanted the agency "on the
| sidelines" of the debate over the origins of the Covid pandemic.
| Mr. Ratcliffe has long said he believes that the virus most
| likely emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology....
| Another senior U.S. official said it was Mr. Ratcliffe's decision
| to declassify and release the new analysis. There is no new
| intelligence behind the agency's shift. Rather it is based on the
| same evidence it has been chewing over for months.....
| To boost the natural origins theory, intelligence officers would
| like to find the animal that passed it to a human or find a bat
| carrying what was the likely ancestor of the coronavirus that
| causes Covid. Similarly, to seal the lab leak, the
| intelligence community would like to find evidence that one of
| the labs in Wuhan was working on a progenitor virus that directly
| led to the epidemic. Neither piece of evidence has
| been found.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| It's wild to me that everyone is calling lab leak a politicized
| theory.
|
| I suppose flat earthers make heliocentrism and the laws of
| physics politicized theories too, then.
| m0llusk wrote:
| The thing is that unlike political science, virology is an
| actual science. Scientists have found little evidence of
| coronavirus at the labs and there is record of them failing
| even to culture the virus which would be required for any
| research including gain of function research. In dramatic
| contrast samples from the wet market were easily cultured into
| multiple related strains which strongly points to the wet
| market as the source.
| int_19h wrote:
| _All_ theories regarding COVID-19 origin are politicized simply
| because the question itself became a prominent political
| matter.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| +1, the question of origin in general is politicized. I don't
| think individual theories are taboo, it's just very difficult
| to truly evaluate the evidence at this point, unless perhaps
| you are an expert and can do all the fact checking yourself.
| jfengel wrote:
| Heliocentrism was politicized. The Galileo affair had a lot
| more to do with Church authority during the Reformation and
| Counter-Reformation than about cosmology. Galileo went out of
| his way to antagonize certain key players, and his punishment
| was primarily a political matter, not a scientific or even
| theological one.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| We can conclude nothing, except that humans do stupid stuff and
| usually conspiracy theories are incorrect. Thanks for coming to
| my TED talk.
|
| Do we actually know if NIH was doing gain of function research
| (on Corona viruses) in the Wuhan lab? It sounds like another
| right wing conspiracy theory but if people have high quality
| sources for this being true I'll happily change my mind.
| frankharv wrote:
| They subbed it out to these guys because it was illegal to do
| Gain of Function research:
|
| https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/2024/06/ecohealth-alliance...
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| The demonization of the Ecohealth Alliance is one of the more
| depressing aspects of the response to the pandemic.
|
| EHA has been warning for decades that a coronavirus pandemic
| is likely, and that governments should be taking steps to
| prepare for it and to make it less likely. Then, they're
| proved right, but instead of society thanking them, they're
| subject to a politically motivated witch hunt, with the aim
| of distracting from the US government's disastrous pandemic
| response.
| buyucu wrote:
| CIA probably cares more about hurting China, than finding out the
| truth. There is no reason to pay attention to anything CIA says
| on Covid origins.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| It was never an implausible theory so the censorship over it was
| foolish.
|
| Of course the immediate jump to conclusion in the first few
| months by some who found it politically expedient was no better
| either.
|
| People need to be more comfortable saying I don't know but we are
| looking into it.
| nxm wrote:
| Back then anyone who suggested the lab leak theory was
| immediately labeled a conspiracy theorist by main stream media.
| calibas wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EcoHealth_Alliance#Project_DEF...
| frankharv wrote:
| https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/11014...
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I simply cannot use this as signal to update my priors on the
| theory given how politically charged this issue is and the new
| administration.
|
| We cannot ignore the timing or the fact that the release appears
| to be the direct consequence of the previous director not
| believing the information he had passed the evidential bar and
| the new directory believing it does.
|
| It's new signal on the question, which is always nice-to-have,
| but I'll be digesting it with a huge grain of salt given its
| pedigree.
| jfengel wrote:
| I don't think anyone is updating their priors. It's just a loud
| restatement of existing priors.
| rhansgrt wrote:
| Fauci has been preemptively pardoned for gain of function
| research (lying or funding), so the bureaucrats can now pander to
| Trump. Anyway, we have always been at war with Oceania and China
| is now our enemy! Next week the NYT will use the term "Wuhan
| Virus".
|
| This is the first US presidential change of power I'm following
| consciously. Have there always been such abrupt 180deg turns and
| pledges of loyalty as now? I feel like I'm watching The
| Godfather.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| FWIW, the pardon doesn't mention gain of function research.
| (https://www.justice.gov/pardon/media/1385746/dl). This pardon
| applies every bit as much to him parallel parking while
| attending a Chief Medical Advisor meeting as it does to gain of
| function research.
|
| > This is the first US presidential change of power I'm
| following consciously. Have there always been such abrupt
| 180deg turns and pledges of loyalty as now?
|
| No; this is 100% new. This is in no way a normal Presidential
| transition of power.
| ndr42 wrote:
| I found this recent interview with Christian Drosten [1] very
| interesting, he explains very good scientifically why it is much
| more probable that the origin is not from a laboratory.
|
| A quick summary of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av2Hax3Bg1U
|
| (1) The area where the Nyctereutes spec. (german: Marderhund, I
| have no idea how it is called in english) where kept, there where
| a lot of DNA of Nyctereutes and a lot of nucleinacid of SARS II.
|
| (2) From the beginning there a two lines of the corona viruses
| laboratory-confirmed. From the evolutionary speed of virus
| mutation it is nearly certain that the separation had to be taken
| place months before. About 8 times a corona-variation had been
| aquired by man. From this infection chains 2 virus-types had
| survived to be confirmed in Wuhan. A person who works in the
| laboratory would have been working with a clonal virus that is
| not mutated in that way.
|
| (3) The market is the center of all infections even if you take
| out everybody that is known to be at the market, not the
| laboratory.
|
| (4) For the animals at the market a analysis showed that they had
| been ill/infected (not specifically corona)
|
| These are all separate published aspects that points to the same
| thing.
|
| The part starts at 2 hours 23 minutes 30 seconds - you have to
| use auto-translated subtitles which are unfortunately not very
| good (german language)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Drosten
|
| edit: grammar
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| there's a 23? bp sequence that is directly lifted from the
| moderna hiv vaccine patent (which preceded covid-19 by a
| decade).
|
| now an exact match of that length isn't impossible, but which
| is more likely? that this managed to be exactly correct on
| accident? or some grad student was told to just copypasta every
| furin cleavage site in the database into a GOF library and
| surprise surprise the most virulent form that became a pandemic
| came from the sequence that is _engineered_ to be efficient.
|
| any scientist that has any molecular biology wet experience
| will tell you this is exactly what they would have done (though
| us researchers would probably not have pulled from the patented
| BLAST sequences, since that selector is turned off by default
| by the NCBI)
| cakealert wrote:
| Can you estimate the entropy of the sequence? Maybe by
| walking to it from other known sequences?
| nickburns wrote:
| [delayed]
| 110bpm wrote:
| I wanted to learn more about where this claim comes from and
| found this article [0].
|
| The linked commentary [1] raises several interesting points.
|
| "Unfortunately, the authors did not provide details of their
| BLAST research. The patent database that they used contained
| 24,712 sequences. Yet, by querying BLAST, we obtained a
| database of 46,121,617 patent sequences with an average
| length of 560 nucleotides. The authors should give more
| details and justification for their query, especially if they
| queried the full database but a posteriori restricted their
| computation. Of note, with such a large database, and despite
| the fact that the average sequence length decreased, the
| probability of finding at least one sequence containing one
| of the 16 patterns previously mentioned may rise to 68% under
| assumption 2."
|
| 0: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.
| 33...
|
| 1: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.
| 33...
| dist-epoch wrote:
| The virology research in Wuhan was done with US money and US
| experties (Ralph Baric, ...).
|
| The US has absolutely no interest in prooving that the virus
| leaked from there.
| jfengel wrote:
| It very much does. China is a political opponent, and casting
| blame on China allows the US more freedom to act against them.
|
| American involvement is barely an inconvenience. For those most
| eager to blame it on China, it was the fault of one American.
| They would like to punish him, too, but he has received a
| preemptive pardon. (Either to avoid political persecution of an
| innocent man, or to cover up the dastardly deeds of their
| domestic political opponents; take your pick.)
| sumek83 wrote:
| and the people that believe it tend to be also very happy to be
| exposed to biological weapons running wild
| nxm wrote:
| But the fact checkers back in 2021 labeled the lab leak theory as
| false/misinformation. Meanwhile anyone who suggested it was
| labeled a conspiracy theory by the main stream media.
| stvswn wrote:
| It's pretty wild to me that a good portion of commenters here
| seem to think that only one side can politicize Covid's origins
| when the cited article itself says that the conclusion predates
| the new administration.
|
| The natural origin bitter-clingers are still citing papers that
| claim to lean towards natural origin with the thinnest possible
| evidence. I admit I'm not a virologist, but I am a bit skeptical
| that this community would be completely forthright with us.
|
| I can't shake the feeling like there might be fire where there's
| smoke: the Chinese government has not provided access to the
| WIV's data, for instance. The Chinese government deleted the
| virus's genome sequence from GenBank before later releasing it
| publicly. The closest relative to Covid-19 in known databases is
| RatG13, a virus from bats that was discovered in caves thousands
| of miles away, a complex that the researchers at WIV had used to
| collect samples. Peter Dasnak of EcoHealth alliance had
| previously submitted a plan to the DoD to introduce furin
| cleavage sites to existing coronaviruses to do gain-of-function
| research (or some euphemism for GOF to evade restrictions), a
| proposal that was declined, but within which there are still
| comments extant where they discuss outsourcing the riskiest
| research to China. Peter Dasnak led the delegation from WHO to
| China but never publicly disclosed that he had, only several
| years earlier, been interested in research that would have
| produced a virus that very specifically resembled Covid. A small
| group of influential scientists and bureaucrats were discussing
| via email that it certainly appeared to be a lab leak to them
| until they met in person to speak with Dr. Fauci in February
| 2020, after which they abruptly stopped discussing the
| possibility of lab-leak and worked to submit the Proximal Origin
| letter to Nature that claimed a consensus among scientists that
| it must be natural origin -- based on the airtight logic that if
| a lab wanted to make a coronavirus it probably would have done it
| differently. Those authors did not disclose the influence of
| Peter Dasnak and Dr Fauci in drafting the letter. Subsequently,
| the US government used the existence of the letter as
| authoritative evidence of a natural origin in order to lean on
| social media companies to censor speech about the potential of a
| lab leak. Meanwhile, the fact remains that in order for Covid to
| have made a jump from an animal species, it would have to be
| extant in the population of an animal species -- or a variant
| clearly one mutation away would need to be. It's been 5 years and
| we haven't found an animal with Covid.
|
| Of course we'll never get the smoking gun because the data you'd
| need -- the experimental data from WIV -- is likely gone forever.
| Why would that be? Why wouldn't a leading research center on
| coronavirus virology -- perhaps the foremost in the world -- hide
| its records when the big event that represents its entire reason
| for existence -- a coronovirus pandemic -- has shown up in the
| world, conveniently on its doorstep? Shouldn't that be their time
| to shine? Are you going to blame that on Trump's rhetoric? Why
| hasn't all of Baric's data from UNC been released to the public
| yet, then?
|
| It is really pretty amazing to me that many people will likely go
| to their grave thinking "oh, no, no scientists released a paper
| that says the natural origin is still a live theory, I don't have
| to listen to any of this conspiracy nonsense" simply because they
| can't live in a world where Trump was right.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| I have some opinion on this: despite whatever was the source, the
| reaction that was made by countries (i.e. complete global
| lockdown of population) means that they were scared as hell. And
| I haven't seen any govt scared so much on any flu that came out
| in my life, however some of them were baddest in my life (not
| mathematically speaking, I know that every set has a supreme
| element, what I mean that flu can be dangerous to people incl me,
| with asthma)
|
| Based on their reaction we may know that they either knew
| something very bad (i.e. failed experiment) or were suspecting
| something so bad that could, at least in their theory, kill the
| population or massively decrease it.
|
| In other words something was fishy and they overreacted.
| notRobot wrote:
| > were suspecting something so bad that could, at least in
| their theory, kill the population or massively decrease it.
|
| Yeah, a _really bad virus_.
| jmyeet wrote:
| It's crazy for a Trump loyalist to complain about
| "politicization" of this process when declassifying and releasing
| a report with no hard or new evidence is quite clearly a
| political decision.
|
| The US is clearly setting up China to be the next Big Enemy, the
| USSR 2.0. The US establishment expects--and arguably is fomenting
| --economic and possibly eventual military conflict with China.
| The "lab leak" declassification neatly fits into that narrative.
|
| We may never know the truth or it may take decades to find out.
|
| There's really only two likely theories here: zoonotic origin and
| lab leak. There are many variants of "lab leak" but the most
| likely is that it was accidental. It's more fringe to claim it
| was intentional. This sort of thing has happened before [1].
|
| There is circumstancial data for this like China not cooperating
| with a WHO investigation back in 2020 and 2021 and a Wuhan
| Institute of Virology virus database in SEptember 2019. To my
| knowledge, that has never been recovered or examinted by external
| parties. My theory is, like every government (including the US),
| China doesn't want to know the answer to this question. There's
| literally no upside. Would you want to be the official who
| oversaw a leak like this? Would you want to be in charge of the
| government at that time? Nobody wants that. Governments love
| ignorance.
|
| The zoonotic origin is still more likely but it has the obvious
| problem that we haven't (yet) identified the host animal. Also,
| Wuhan is quite far from the bats that might be the likely source.
|
| It might be a complicated origin, such as a person or animal
| being infected with multiple strains and a replication error
| creating the virus from multiple sources.
|
| But the main point here is we're going to see a lot of anti-China
| sentiment being drummed up by the US in coming years. This is
| bipartisan too.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
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