U.S. government debunks Covid lab-leak conspiracy theory | Hacker News Reader

U.S. government debunks Covid lab-leak conspiracy theory

latimes.com

> The lab-leak conspiracy gang has smeared scientists and misled the public into believing a theory that has no factual support whatsoever. They should be ashamed.

Cleverly disguised opinion article. The USG debunked nothing. The official stance of the US has been the pangolin-soup theory since 2020. The USG still has to contend with a large contingent of actual scientists who have evidence otherwise.

I guess I didn't expect any different from the LA times. Objectively speaking the US government has a vested interest in keeping China-US relations slightly less than lukewarm for the time being. They hardly can be considered an impartial arbiter of truth and after the latest ruling against Biden pressuring social media companies you can be certain "truth" is very flexible in the white house.

It hardly debunks it. Scroll to the bottom of page four in the original report.

I treat this whole thing just like every other government message; could be this, could be that, could be a combination of both. If anyone takes any message from any government agency from any country as gospel truth they are delusional.

> Scroll to the bottom of page four in the original report.

The bottom of page four of the report states the WIV institute's genetic engineering capabilities and that it has likely conducted some engineering of coronaviruses. Does that constitute proof of WIV engineering the COVID19 virus and the virus leaked from the lab?

Not an expert but from page three of the report:

"Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered. Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination. All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon."

The thing that tickles my conspiracy theorist, is that the outbreak originated 2 km from the lab that gain-of-function research into SARS-2 strains was outsourced to.

Could be correlation. There's pretty plausible reason to have a cutting edge research lab close to the highest risk place for natural outbreaks of the viruses it studies.

It's amazing that people are still repeating this line. Dr. Shi's sampling trips were to Yunnan and surroundings, ~900 miles away. Expected prevalence of SARS-like coronaviruses in the Wuhan population was low enough that they used blood samples from Wuhan as negative controls in antibody studies. (Of course that expectation could have been incorrect; but the idea that her research group was deliberately based in a region of expected natural spillover is unquestionably wrong.)

Also, the WIV was more than 2 km from the market; the grandparent is probably thinking of a different, closer lab. The market was definitely the first big super-spreader event, but not necessarily the site of introduction into humans; the earliest cases show much less clear geographic distribution.

There's no conclusive evidence for any origin of SARS-CoV-2 yet. The ODNI report clearly leans against a research-related origin, but no one except the LA Times's "business columnist" is claiming that they "debunked" anything.

The us government is motivated to attribute the outbreak to natural causes, because if the leak came from the wuhan lab, us policy and action is partially responsible. No one in power benefits from covid being the result of careless isolation protocols in GOF experimentation.

YMMV but to me the spike protein encoding on the original covid strains was just a little too close for comfort to fall into the random mutation category for my armchair opinion. I would have expected to see a non-human variant of the spike protein if it was a natural occurrence.

Either way, it is doubtful to me that we will ever know for sure.

> Could be correlation. There's pretty plausible reason to have a cutting edge research lab close to the highest risk place for natural outbreaks of the viruses it studies.

The bat virus they were doing gain-of-function research on at the Wuhan Lab came from miles away.

"Inside the risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan"

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...

> The thing that tickles my conspiracy theorist, is that the outbreak originated 2 km from the lab that gain-of-function research into SARS-2 strains was outsourced to

“Wuhan lab workers were sick in November 2019, intelligence suggests”

https://www.livescience.com/covid-lab-leak-wuhan.html

The whole, entire US government debunked it! Phew. I can sleep easy at night now...

Who writes these headlines anyways...

> Who writes these headlines anyways...

A Pulitzer prize winning journalist. Lab leak is dead.

> Lab leak is dead.

Is this satire? One biased source parroting another is not news or fact.

Also, does anyone in the real world give a shit about who wins a Pulitzer?

Argh. I’m lost. Is your outrage being ironic too?

I would expect Covid is one of several lab made viruses released by accident. It’s not malicious just a statistical inevitability as the means become more accessible.

Personally I’m very concerned about the grey goo scenario. The three disasters I’m mentally prepared for today are a heart attack, hydrogen bomb flash and having everyone and everything around me rapidly dissolve into a giant block of carbon.

As usual with most contrarians, their response is just that things are an ever larger conspiracy.

Yes, if Dr. Fauci says COVID came from the market it should be good enough for everyone. But the MAGA conspiracy theorists will try anything to discredit Dr. Fauci.

> Yes, if Dr. Fauci says COVID came from the market it should be good enough for everyone.

Gross. Have some dignity.

lol

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