Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
there is evidence for a long history of discovery of a bat coronaviruses, and manipulation/splicing of those genes https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7744920/ One of those scientists pieced together this information in the early months after the covid outbreak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug Don't tell me "I don't like Bret Weinstein"; your mission is to listen to what Yuri Deigin was saying way before any information had come out. The only way he could be that accurate that early is if he found the information he cites. You'd have to be a real conspiracy theorist to believe that he had access to the conspiracy plans.
there is evidence dating to before the covid outbreak for proposed laboratory experiments putting the spike protein at the furin cleavage site in a Chinese lab which is exactly what appears to have happened.
I literally had to check the date on this post.
Does anyone else remember when claiming it was a lab in China that leaked was “racist”… but “they eat tainted exotic animals at wet markets” was “the consensus”?
Wild times!
Similarly, you're referencing a name that was uncommonly used. People mostly called it the Wuhan Virus, which would be a far more typical name than "COVID-19". Major outbreaks are regularly named based on their origin: Spanish Flu, Hong Kong Flu, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Ebola, West Nile Virus, Marburg Virus, Zika Virus, Mexican Swine Flu, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
> The earliest probable cases were documented in March 1918 in Haskell County, Kansas, United States
Oh.
In other words other countries were effectively censoring it out of existence owing to WW1. Spain didn't have such censorship/propaganda going on, and so was seen as the epicenter (even within Spain!), even though it ultimately wasn't.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spanish_flu&oldid...
It's amazing how you had all those at the tip of your tongue, you are a clearly a learned medical scholar.
A peer comment discusses where the Spanish Flu originated, and illustrates the gap between what you asked the LLM for and well, how humans think and what the people you're talking to are actually talking about.
The LLM also went a bit overboard with the Wuhan Virus thing, it's a response, but it's hilariously out of context because, again, there's a gap between you're asking it for and what your interlocutor is communicating.
It's so confused that it's giving "Ah, but, people didn't say the thing you said was bad, because it was bad. The politically correct version was Wuhan Virus." - thus validating exactly what I said, the Chinavirus version was weird and bad.
Major outbreaks _were_ named like that, but as the other reply pointed out, the "Spanish Flu" did not actually originate in Spain at all.
It is for reasons like that, that WHO best practices now specifically say to not name diseases this way: https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-pra...
> Terms that should be avoided in disease names include geographic locations, people’s names, species of animal or food, cultural, population, industry or occupational references....
Normally city + virus using country + virus is incorrect. But to call it racist or transphobic or fascist would be an incorrect usage.
Maybe place + virus isn't inherently racist, but it's been politically charged & exploited; best to put the combination down.
I think you are misremembering.
> The lab-leak theory had been floated by President Trump and others in his circle in April last year. It was widely dismissed at the time as an unfounded conspiracy theory with racist undertones.
https://theconversation.com/covid-19-why-lab-leak-theory-is-... (2021)
> New York Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli deleted a tweet Wednesday night that said the COVID-19 "lab leak theory" had "racist roots."
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ny-times-covid-reporter-... (2021)
> The lab-leak theory came to legitimacy by a circuitous path. It was first auditioned by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo shortly after lockdown started, but journalists were quick to distance themselves from its overtones of crude Trumpian racism. Nevertheless the theory gained new life last spring, when some of those same journalists — abetted by a chorus of concern trolls — began to question if they had been blinded by liberal partisanship.
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-42/politics/lab-leak-theor... (2022)
Some of this was a case of people failing to recognise that Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence, reasoning (implicitly) like this:
Trump lies all the time + Trump said X => not X
instead of like this:
Trump says whatever suits him, regardless of the truth + Trump said X => no significant change to our credence in X
> Calling it the “Chinavirus” was obviously racist and weird.
That was a dumb Trumpism for sure, but separately from that, here in Australia, before the global spread of covid became too obvious to ignore, there was a sense among right-thinking people that even being concerned about it, let alone wanting to take any kind of action, was a manifestation of anti-Chinese racism / very literal xenophobia.
No. I remember it being called a conspiracy theory. And it still is.
But it's more like conspiracy fact by now. We have written records of NIH funded scientists literally conspiring with each other, even debating how to throw journalists off the trail.
We’ll never know if the lab in Wuhan originated the virus. But it is awfully strange that the first patients of a novel pandemic coronavirus were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus.
[0] https://www.public.news/p/first-people-sickened-by-covid-19
https://www.science.org/content/article/ridiculous-says-chin...
Just based on the logic of institutions, I'd expect all the parties involved here to start covering up before they even know themselves what the truth is.
Unfortunately online search has gone useless and it's not possible to find out if anyone ever confirmed anything about that report. Just gazillion of other newslets repeating the original claim.
...with funding from a US group that discussed conducting this gain of function research in China using a spike protein at the furin cleavage site, a group whose members were appointed to come up with an explanation for what had happened.
So no matter where it comes from the chances are good a coronavirus outbreak will first be detected in a city that has a coronavirus lab.
Ideally, said belief is rooted in scientific methods, of course.
But there is actually no need for this "lab! No! Market! no! Lab!" ping-pong that seems to be developing here.
Except - as far as I know - the first patients weren’t.
In 2021 the WSJ reported that 3 workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 with symptoms resembling COVID-19 that they sought hospital care. Their source was a U.S. intelligence report.
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/intelligence-on-sick-staff-a...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210622121243/https://www.chann...
The WHO responded by saying the lab leak theory was extremely unlikely, and this line of investigation was dropped (except possibly within the government - this is the sort of information that would be convenient for governments to know but inconvenient for the public to know). But then in a follow-up documentary, a WHO scientist that published that statement says that they were under heavy pressure from the Chinese government to do so:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/12/who-origins-...
« lab leak theory » — Doesn't matter whether you adhere to the lab leak theory or the bat market theory. I'm sure there is a theory for some fringe group that points to “clear signs of extraterrestrian origin”, or “generated by AI”. Any crap will do. The only thing that matters in this business is that you believe there is some new-fangled and dangerous “CoVID” out there to get you.
Dumbest thing I've heard today.
Ever since we started studying autism, we found it! Therefore studying causes autism.
Not really; "there is probably a connection" probably was supposed to mean "could be studied, maybe a correlation is found", rather than "surely there must be a causation", which is what some people seem to want to take it for.
It's not unusual/unexpected that there were labs working on coronavirus research in several major Chinese cities: the 2002 SARS outbreak, which began in southern China and caught researchers and public health officials off guard, led to significant investment in the study of coronaviruses.
They also didn’t find any animal corona samples at the market. Also around 50% of people of the initial cluster had no connection to the market.
Also the hospital where the lab workers were treated was on the corner of this market.
All sides of the question were heavily politicized. The Trump administration and the US GOP have heavily pushed a lab leak hypothesis and used it to argue against China and against scientists (e.g. turning Anthony Fauci into a bogeyman). On the other side, China has blocked investigations and tried to steer public statements by various organizations away from anything that would question their government's motives or competence.
Quoting the report:
• ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ The National Intelligence Council and four other IC agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2.
• ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2, although for different reasons.
• ⬛⬛ The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.
• ⬛⬛ 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.
[...]
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ Several WIV researchers were ill in Fall 2019 with symptoms; some of their symptoms were consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19. The IC continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19. [...]
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ While several WIV researchers fell mildly ill in Fall 2019, they experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with COVID-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to COVID-19. While some of these researchers had historically conducted research into animal respiratory viruses, we are unable to confirm if any of them handled live viruses in the work they performed prior to falling ill.
There are a few with dubious origins.
SARS-CoV-2–positive environmental samples were spatially clustered around vendors selling live mammals.
Also don't forget other pandemics have some from wet markets too. Bird flu and SARS. Do you think they were also lab leaks?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/24/china-rejects-...
The bioengineering origin is, according to the overwhelming consensus of virologists, not plausible scientifically. It also requires a large and airtight conspiracy involving a number of respected scientists. Conspiracy theories are possible, but never parsimonious.
If we're going in for conspiracies, you should consider that the US intelligence community has a proven track record of lying for political gain. The Iraq War was started by a conspiracy.
And when you look at the documented lab release of SARS-CoV-1, it killed the researcher's mother. If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest to the researchers at the lab who were infected, and the places they visited. Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.
The outbreak looks like a wet market spillover. The fact that it happened in the same city as WIV is an unusual coincidence, but if the virus developed in rural Hubei, it was likely it would spillover in Wuhan.
Is it possible that the animals at the wet market itself was the source? Sure. But it seems sort of coincidental to me it is also the most dense area of the city; could’ve already been spreading and this location just happened to be where a major outbreak occurred from density factors alone.
Zoonotic spillover is not a spontaneous 0->100 event, there should be a trail of intermediate hosts and adjacent infections that there is zero evidence of.
> If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest
thats not representative of sarscov2. People in the same household could fail to spread infection.
> Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.
It didnt. There were early cases outside of the wet market.
> unusual coincidence
A novel coronavirus appearing outside a coronavirus gain-of-function research lab is not a coincidence. Id sooner believe it was a sleight of hand to cover for a terrorist attack.
just because we are missing a link does not mean it doesn't exist. Christians use similar arguments to try and disprove evolution.
> thats not representative of sarscov2. People in the same household could fail to spread infection.
so you think a single person in the lab was infected (with no evidence), and then right as they were contagious, went straight to the wet market and on the way, infected not a single person related to the lab or degrees of separation from it? this is the case you are making?
> There were early cases outside of the wet market.
no there aren't
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454?referrer...
> Id sooner believe it was a sleight of hand to cover for a terrorist attack.
that's because your way of thinking is conspiratorial and so you assume malintent with very little evidence
yes and no. in every other zoonosis, we have lineages and source animals and collateral infections. we have none of that for covid. its not definitive, but it is strongly dispositive.
> no there aren't
the article you linked is contradicting you, but regardless the claim isnt falsifiable:
"If Huanan Market was the source, why were “only” one- to two-thirds of early cases linked [...] why would one expect all cases [...] to be confined to one market?"
the article's thesis is that there are multiple cases not linked to Huanan market, but thats expected because of asymptomatic transmission. That argument could be used in favor of either side, so its not particularly meaningful.
> infected not a single person related to the lab or degrees of separation from it
as I just mentioned, the article you linked makes this very claim. you cant have it both ways.
Also we don't have the Zoonosis of the plauge, or the spanish bird flu but we are very confident they came from animals because we can tell that. So that claim we always now is just dumb we are mising many origin animals for many diseases because can back generate dieasese lineages from the DNA of the disease sometimes we can't and I am sure there are some back traces that just go to the wrong animal.
China didn't help with the fact they killed and bleached every animal at that wet market but that is documented to have happened but that is not proof of lab leak.
Going from infecting a lab worker to a high-precision spillover in a wet market, without leaving a trace anywhere else, is just not how a viral infection is likely to work.
> An important feature in this distribution, consistent with earlier findings (4), is that the majority (76%) of infected cases shows no evidence of onward transmission amongst any of their contacts.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7523148/
So there's no reason to expect that the first cluster that generates enough sickness and death to attract official attention will occur near the point of introduction. If we look at North America, then it in fact did not--the introduction must have been at an airport or seaport, but the first large clusters were in nursing homes, church choir practices, etc. This is different from SARS-1 or MERS, which were deadly enough to make that cryptic spread much less likely.
Bio-weapons are untraceable, one side can seed an infection in a way to frame another player, and all that could be done about it, would be heated but fruitless speculations. There's no point in arguing about "who's done it", actually that line of argument is a huge distraction causing a lot more harm than good.
Learn and argue about the dysfunctional internal and international bio-regulations, they are the reason for the uncertainty and lack of accountability which enable and invite truly global and truly disastrous villainy.
I'm ignorant but thought that the evidentiary record for ebola was also really thin? Where we have lineages and source animals, sometimes that has taken many years, I think?
For what it's worth, the "first patients were lab workers" part isn't established. What is documented is that the earliest cases cluster around the Huanan market. The lab workers attribution shouldn't be carrying the argument.
Before COVID, people were just unable to be roused out of their sleep about the dangers of cross-species virus transmission. "Wake me up when something important happens." By a certain standard nothing important had ever happened: so people slept on.
Then COVID hit. "Time to wake up." Suddenly people went from basically unconscious to hypervigilant overnight. Something which was a clear and present danger - the wet markets - looked uninteresting compared to the lab. Environmental samples taken there tested positive. In other words: don't sleep on the wet markets again - they are dangerous, then and now.
While paying attention was arguably an improvement over complete indifference, I don't think we landed in the right place.
That's how people start believing in supernatural explanations and conspiracy theories, though. Improbable events happen all the time; just because each event is improbable doesn't mean the set of improbable events that can occur isn't large.
Weird shit happens all the time, and we should expect it as a matter of random chance.
If the alternative hypothesis is that the events are independent, yes. But it is somewhat more common to have labs studying viruses in regions where there are virus reservoirs. So the events "lab studying viruses" and "virus outbreak in local area" are not independent, as both are more likely in regions with viral reservoirs, and in particular, in dense urban areas thereof. A coincidence is not as extraordinary as it may seem.
Thing is, it is not possible to know at this point, as long as the virus does not seem to be bioengineered, whether it was a lab accident while studying animal samples or an outbreak starting in the market.
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210727042832/https://www.scien...
The virus doesn't seem to have been engineered from any previously known sarbecovirus, but the WIV had the largest collection of novel sarbecoviruses collected from nature in the world, and had proposed in DEFUSE to engineer them in collaboration with Dr. Baric at UNC. DARPA rejected that proposal, in part for safety reasons, but the WIV was technically capable of doing the work alone.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
Never said that, labs are close to places with high viral reservoirs because it is easier to get animal samples to study, obviously, not to guard against outbreaks. Neither one "expects" such an outbreak, obviously. The fact that it is a tail event does not mean it is arbitrary, though, ie that it can just happen anywhere with equal chance.
The other arguments have been answered 1 million times and they are not worth even discussing about anymore. They only exist as justification for somebody really wanting certain conspiracy theories to be true.
You are continuing to imply that Dr. Shi's lab was "close to places with high viral reservoirs", but nobody--lab leak advocate, zoonosis advocate, or otherwise--thinks that's true. She collected "animal samples to study" from Yunnan and surrounding areas, >1000 km from Wuhan. For example, RaTG13 came from Tongguan (thus TG), in Mojiang County. The location of her lab did not make those samples "easier to get".
There are probably lots of other labs that are deliberately placed near natural reservoirs of the organisms that they study, but Dr. Shi's was not. If anything, she thought those sarbecoviruses were less abundant near Wuhan than in some random location in China, not more.
She could be wrong, but no evidence has yet emerged that she was. Even among advocates for theories of natural zoonosis, the pathway is usually proposed to be smuggling of an unknown intermediate host rather than any natural reservoir in Wuhan, thus the attention on the wet market (since a similar pathway probably did explain SARS-1).
As to the rest, what evidence do you think could distinguish one natural novel virus from a laboratory chimera of two novel viruses? I think it would be more helpful to explain the basis for your belief than to smear mine as a "conspiracy theory".
Lazy, anti-science, conspiratorial way of going about it
> A natural origin is still the more likely theory, said Professor David Robertson, head of viral genomics and bioinformatics at University of Glasgow.
Is that right, or is your point simply that it naturally occurred in China in the vicinity of Wuhan? I ask since the OP mentioned military games.
a) I don't know that they have the right skills to track down patient zero of a disease.
b) They certainly don't have jurisdiction to do such an investigation in a foreign country, unless invited, and there's no way they were invited.
I strongly doubt we'll ever see a good answer on this, unless we get very lucky and some random research sample is looked at later that shows detection months earlier in a different location or if the Chinese did a good investigation and kept it quiet, but it leaks in a couple decades.
A timely and thorough investigation might have been able to determine an origin, but the US FBI certainly didn't do one.
IIRC one of the FBI guys who investigated anthrax was like “yeah, it’s pretty obvious looking at what that lab was up to.”
You think China just lets US law enforcement do investigations on their territory without their consent??
>> And other US government agencies have drawn differing conclusions to the FBI's.
But that's not at all enough evidence that they knew about the extent of the issue. Such institutions reflexively try to control information flow whether they themselves know what's going on or not.
The local government might know. They would have started a cover up reflexively.
But in either case, it could be that neither the local government nor central government wants to know or to find out. Ultimately, destroying the evidence and failing to cooperate with foreign investigators has cost China very little or nothing, even.
In short, I feel China should be admonished for covering things up, but not that the cover up proves the lab leak.
And that goes for western spy agencies too, by the way. Headless chickens all around.
A really easy knockdown for this kind of argument is - why did they close down, sanitize, and dispose of all animals and items at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market? If your argument is that a coverup points to the source, why wouldn't that mean the wet market was the origin?
Given the choice between blaming "the system" and all the ideologically unimaginable questions that would come with that and blaming some elderly Chinese guy who didn't cook his bat soup well enough, well that's not really a choice.
Imagine trying to tell some mid tier guy in the Taliban about the pros of educated women. It's just gonna bounce right off. That it could ever be worth it is just incomprehensibly foreign to him.
The lab leak theory bounced right off of a lot of people here for all the same reasons.
> blaming some elderly Chinese guy who didn't cook his bat soup well enough
that's also a bit racist. they just eat raccoon dogs, which we don't. and they bring live animals into the market, that people browse, which is the bigger problem.
and ask devoutly religious people what they think of americans eating pork and beef...
To me it is a difference, if a naturally mutated virus caused a global epidemic, than a lab made one.
Furthermore, within China, alternative conspiracy theories claiming that the virus came from the US were allowed to circulate. A significant number of people in China actually believe that theory.
Then it was made worse by Trump's insistence on calling it the Chinavirus (just to make it "not my fault!") and predictably then the anti-Trump left reacted by censoring any connection between the lab and the outbreak.
Official report mandated by US Congress (under Biden btw): says it's likely it's a lab leak of a modified virus. CIA also changed its official stance and consider it's likely a lab leak.
The international expert who everybody based its idea that "it cannot possibly be a lab leak" has been debarred and cannot ever get funding from the US for research on modified viruses.
To me there's "something" off and it is a lab leak. And I always felt like this.
Hence you looked for evidence that matched and dismissed evidence that doesn't match.
Unless you can tell me that the majority of virologists agree it was a lab leak, I'm going to go with their majority opinion - which last I checked was that it couldn't possibly be a lab leak for specific genetic reasons.
The summary does not mention lab leak of a natural virus at all but the body of the article says it's perfectly consistent with the best independent evidence / investigation:
> The leader of the WHO investigatory team, Peter Ben Embarek, said "An employee of the lab gets infected while working in a bat cave collecting samples. Such a scenario, while being a lab leak, would also fit our first hypothesis of direct transmission of the virus from bat to human."[114]
Seems a little dishonest, no? Pretending that lab leak == bioweapon conspiracy is just deliberate distraction.
There's simply no hard evidence one way or the other - it's a natural bat coronavirus, but we don't know how it got to Wuhan (a city with a world class coronavirus laboratory which just so happens to be the only institute on the planet which worked on isolating, sequencing, and culturing novel SARS-like bat coronaviruses from field samples - literally the only one.).
It seems like which of these two is the majority opinion heavily depends on the language/country you read information in and also whether there are still in service or not.
I have no idea what “ whether there are still in service or not.” means
Yet the comments here seem to indicate, that that would be not the case from an US-centric perspective even if the publishers in my language claim it comes from the US intelligence agencies. And indeed that seems to be the tenor to a larger percentage in English publications.
> I have no idea what “ whether there are still in service or not.” means
Officials that are still in office seem to it's fringe to say it comes out of a lab, while does that are retired seem to claim, that it is obvious. Even if these are the identical person at different times.
The reality is nobody can say confidently that it did, or that it didn't leak from a lab. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. But what virologists can say with some degree of confidence is that covid was probably NOT the product of genetic manipulation.
So if there's no evidence it was the subject of research, all we are left with is the coincidence of the wet market and the lab being a 40 minute drive away from each other.
So a guy who disagreed with the official CIA stance has been barred from obtaining funding for research from the US.
I mean, that just makes them seem more trustworthy.
But no, I'm sure it was the wombats.
I get so tired of hearing this rationalization. It's anti-science. Not all evidence is equal and the preponderance of evidence is heavily skewed to it being zoonotic.
So why are people citing 2020 reports from German intelligence agencies?
The expert consensus is that it was natural. It's not close. You are free to reject that consensus but should be aware that you are doing so.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...
The bat variant did not have that - wet market - close proximity - a fortuitous gene swap and hey presto.
Even Fauci himself kept a private diary where he wrote, "now we know the wet market was not the source, it was an amplifier" - while telling the public the opposite.
The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning. It's not just one line of evidence or inference, it's dozens. The only people I've met who still cling to the idea it wasn't a man-made pandemic tend to be people who work in public sector science themselves.
This particular was over a month before it was published, who's lying again? But this is discussions between colleagues as new evidence was coming in. If the investigation was tilted in the direction of the wet market we would have seen evidence of that, instead we see different people having different opinions on early and incomplete evidence and eventually coming to an agreement on what is more likely based on evidence they had at the end.
>"now we know the wet market was not the source, it was an amplifier"
Doesn't exclude that it was from natural origin. Amplifier meaning where it entered the human population and started spreading widely.
> The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong
There is a lot of conjecture for the lab leak theory, no real evidence. Meanwhile there's plenty of actual evidence that points to the wet market, such as the initial spread was clustered around the market.
>to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning.
This sentence alone is rather telling...
In these situations we rely heavily on intelligence services. For example, the German secret service has assessed an 80-95% probability that it was leaked from a lab in Wuhan and presented a report to then Chancellor Angela Merkel. [The assessment was later leaked and was published in a German Newspaper.](https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/corona-bnd-china-li.3217...) I think the German intelligence services are far better equipped, resourced, and have far wider access to sensitive and privileged data, than either of us.
As opposed to current America?
Scientists can still asses information and evidence with that in mind and still say which option is more likely to have happened. Or even say that China has faked evidence if they did so.
>In these situations we rely heavily on intelligence services
I don't think intelligence services are equipped to do this. But if we go by who has the better data, better equipped and resource I would assume that America wins on that, so should we believe them more?
https://archive.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Rep...
>The National Intelligence Council and four other IC agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARSCoV-2
They cannot evaluate evidence if all evidence has been destroyed.
> I don't think intelligence services are equipped to do this. But if we go by who has the better data, better equipped and resource I would assume that America wins on that, so should we believe them more?
I find it odd that you would cite an American intelligence report right after implying that America is authoritarian and autocratic. You can't have it both ways.
To point, the US intelligence report “does not address the merits of the two most likely pandemic origins hypotheses.” Its purpose was to declassify information concerning potential WIV connections and describe what US intelligence knew about WIV activities. You cited a report you didn't read or didn't understand.
I should also point out that the US agencies couldn't agree. In 2023, FBI favoured a lab incident, Department of Energy favoured a lab incident, CIA favoured lab incident, and NIC + four other (name withheld) intelligence agencies favoured natural spillover.
I'm not sure if you just aren't engaging with what is being said or are not reading the full post - he only shared that link IN RESPONSE TO you appealing to intelligence services. Read again:
"I don't think intelligence services are equipped to do this. >>>BUT if we go by who has the better data<<<"
He is saying "well IF we ARE going by intelligence services because YOU made that argument, then what about this?"
> > China is an authoritarian, autocratic state.
> As opposed to current America?
He is implying that America is also an authoritarian, autocratic state. This was in response to my comment explaining why China will not comply with investigations. He is arguing that America cannot be trusted to provide accurate information, or comply with investigations. He argues this first, then attempts to argue that America is a more trustworthy source than Germany.
you aren't saying anything here. "well the evidence could have been destroyed because China doesn't want it exposed" is not an argument for or against a lab leak. In fact, you and most people in these threads arguing for lab leak theory aren't providing evidence at all - you are just doing the classic "well isn't this weird"
Nope didn't say anything like that. All I said was that the motivations of China does not prove or disprove either idea about the origin.
> The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning.
the irony
I only bothered citing evidence relevant to your claim:
> almost nobody who understands the science and how viruses spread gives more credence to the lab leak theory
... which isn't true. Some of the people who pointed out early on that there was a coverup were molecular biologists (e.g. Alina Chan), virologists themselves admitted right up front it probably came from the lab despite their massive incentive to not conclude that, and it is obvious to anyone regardless of background that a novel coronavirus appearing literally right next to the only lab in the world doing GoF research on coronaviruses is not likely to be a coincidence.
The wet market was a distraction in the end caused by ascertainment bias. Most cases, once the data was fully collected, appeared along the length of a railway line with Wuhan Airport at one end and the WiV at the other.
But I have weary experience of this debate on Hacker News. Before anyone goes further with you, please confirm you do not yourself get grant money to do scientific research, nor have you in the past? Because way too many times over the years when this topic has come up the people most dismissive of the obvious facts about COVID have turned out to be epidemiologists, public health workers, virologists and so on - people with incentives to mislead the public about this topic and who have done so repeatedly. Fauci being a case in point, where there is abundant proof that he misled the public.
You can't see that this is perfectly in line with conspiratorial thinking? You think everyone who has disagreed with you are essentially "paid shills"?
I'm good. I can see this is not going to be productive.
They said those things before publishing their paper.
You can read the messages here:
https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Proximal_Origin...
From what I can see, they start off by saying that the lab leak seems likely, and then re-evaluate in light of new evidence (see page 65, page 67 "again, it doesn't rule out lab infection/release, however, there is now no longer any ‘mysteries’ to explain"). This is just science being done. You can see them discover new evidence and update their beliefs. You can read how they revise their paper over time.
You can also see that they criticize other researchers for publicly decrying the lab leak theory absent sufficient evidence (page 23).
Here is the statement from the paper that you claim is a lie:
"Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."
I think that statement is measured and supported by the available evidence. They state that they can't rule out a lab origin but that it does not seem likely. If you don't buy the conclusion, the evidence to support that conclusion is all accurately laid out in the paper. You are free to draw your own conclusions.
If you enjoy diving deep on the topic I highly recommend watching the entire Rootclaim Covid Lab Leak debate https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r...
I expected that arguing for Lab Leak would be a huge uphill battle but it was surprisingly almost the exact opposite. Some of the biological arguments are above my head, but they decompose into timelines and other consequences that make it hard for a Lab Leak origin to be coherent.
The assessment was later leaked and was published in a German Newspaper (https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/corona-bnd-china-li.3217...)
But the lack of transparency and the coverup to this day has immensely weaken the public trust in the scientific institution and government bodies for public health and safety.
I agree with your comment re trust. I'm not sure institutional trust (at least in healthcare) will be regained in our lifetimes. I love vaccines, and I had all of them prior to and during the outbreak. Since then I have become profoundly wary of taking any medication without extensive longitudinal research.
But then again 2020 was the start of woke culture and everything and everyone has to be politically correct even though whatever you said ended up offending some group.
The vaccines work, however there will always be side effects to significant portion of people when it’s administered to billions of people. Although I find it dumb that young healthy people still get covid booster shots like you have the immunity already and your immune system now knows how to handle the virus
Here's the setting, 1000s are dying in hospitals every day. People know very little about how to protect themselves. The first country that was really hit locked everything down hard to reduce transmission.
Regardless of how you feel, separation and isolation is sure fire to prevent grandma dies via drowning in her own mucus.
But preventing deaths is anti-freedom. We can't prevent the deaths, but we can find someone to blame.
So we blame China because our own public health facilities cannot keep up with the actual virus. It's a human right to infect as many people as possible. It's a human right to have a 7th grade reading level while also telling doctors to "do their research".
Vaccines and quarantine have been selected as a culture war target. It's all over facebook now. Minions are telling your mother only dumb people get vaccines.
Since you can't be mad at a force of nature, you create conspiracies that the dastardly Chinese have released a virus while simultaneously moving mountains to prevent the spread within China.
The smart thing would be to follow the moves of the supposed evil country that wanted to kill americans, by doing what they do to protect their own citizens. Not today commies, they're both at fault for creating a virus, and any attempt at not dying is communism.
The Aristocrats.
Accidents happens and results in disasters. China could have been transparent and accepted that it was an accident and they are doing the best they can to contain it. Also they could have shared their research on the virus strain they have been experimenting in the research facility with the world immediately so the vaccine creation would have been faster.
Of course people would have been mad, but that would have ultimately resulted in a much safer and strict Lab safety measures enforcement to prevent a disaster like that in the future and faster vaccination and less number of deaths.
One cannot hide and coverup the truth, ultimately it would come out. One perfect example is Chernobyl. Soviet Union tried their best to keep it secret because admitting the disaster would have made them look weaker, but ultimately the truth came out.
It seems people who actually looked at the evidence and came to the lab leak conclusion independent of racism got caught up in a 'racist by association' event.
The entire thing is very well documented by Nature and Science, among others.
Dr. Shi Zhengli of WIV was involved in the original UNC research prior to 2014 defunding.
In 2017 she had combined DNA of few different bat coronaviruses to “study their virulence”.
In 2019 she published a paper forecasting a new virus outbreak likely to originate in China.
You know the rest of the story.
It’s like when Russia bombed the olympics in Paris and the story got nudged to “mysterious explosions happen across France for no reason, move along citizen”
I don’t know why we keep doing it. People should be mad at these countries.
A lab worker would need to have taken public transit for 7 miles through a place more densely populated than Manhattan infect no one arrive at the wet market infect 1 person than leave and go several miles home without infecting anyone. This basically seems impossible and if it did happen it would have radically changed the infection pattern and with how we know how covid works seems impossible. Its not bullet proof but it basically requires us abandoning everything we know about epidemology for it to have come from that lab.
Now there are issues we never found the animal of origin but its hard because China killed and bleached the whole market trying to hid evidence. It seems very consistent though with China trying to perserve reputation. There could be scheme to sell infected dead animals from the lab to the wet market but its conspiry theory seeking as there is no evidence supporting lab leak besides China bad. (And Trust me I think China is bad they are a horrible government who definitely hid covids existence and that behavior propably enhanced the likelyhood of it become the pandemic it was but there is just no hard evidence that lab leak as theory is true just scary hypothetic and stories. I hate that I sound like a China shill here)
You mean Dr. Fauci?
She also reports that Bush rode in the back of a laundry truck on the day of 9/11 to avoid detection getting to the Doomsday plane. Single source attribution, though.
Containment in Russia is different from that in China.
They expect stuff like this to happen, and to be fair I think Russia never stopped their bio programmes, and the fact that we are not all dead yet seems to prove them right, that their containment protocols are overall working.
This is not 79' Sverdlosk.
https://meselsonarchive.hsites.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omn...
The lab in question in this incident has a documented Soviet Biodefense connection.
https://nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/cns-archive/...
But there is no public or otherwise evidence that this is a military pathogen-production plant comparable to Sverdlovsk-19.
The institute’s activities include surveillance of naturally occurring plague in the Russia–Mongolia border region and training Mongolian specialists in plague diagnosis and prevention.
So the handling of pneumonic plague in this facility is probably an everyday occurrence, and not related to a weapons programme.
This is an institute for biodefense, not offence. There was a single person messing up and she paid the price for that mistake.
I understand people are on edge since Covid, but this is not that, or a bio weapon. Just a 28-year-old that dropped a tube by accident and then probably panicked and didn’t follow containment protocol. Shit happens.
Let’s hope she stays the only victim of her mistake.
Sucks to die because of pneumonic plague because a 28-year-old sneezed in the same cafe you get your matcha latte fix.
If you want to go down the incompetence route with potential weapons of mass destruction, you could also ask why US Americans allow their army to have access to nuclear weapons.
There were multiple recorded incidents where American citizens almost got atomised on American soil (Broken Arrow operations). Not because of individual mistakes but institutional incompetence.
But you see no one fearmongering about that in public. Because they have proven they can lose a nuclear weapon and recover it, without harming the public.
Just like a single young Russian woman can fuck up and they contain the fuckup without harming the public.
There are about 1000 competent people in an army of the size of Russia, China or the US and that’s it.
It’s expected that most soldiers are incompetent, and just need to follow orders, and in ideal case be patriotic enough to believe they sacrifice themselves for the greater good if they get sent on a suicide mission. Russia is no different from any other army in that regard.
But I honestly consider the Russian forces tasked with biodefense and nuclear more competent than most of their other counterparts in other nations. They frequently train and you get hung by the neck if you leave a blast door open to let the pizza guy in.
In Wyoming you get promoted to three-star nuclear doofus in charge if you do that.
Feel free to read this if you want to know more about the people tasked with preventing nuclear incidents on American soil.
I would link the official page on the Air Force website (https://www.compliance.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-1312...), but the Trump administration is silently deleting all of these documents.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/963093/afd-131219-045...
Just one of the highlights.
[Maj Gen Carey] insists that we go to this place called La Cantina, I think it was... it was a Mexican place. And I was kind of surprised... I wouldn't pick a Mexican place to go to in Russia but all right, if that's where he wants to go, we'll go there.
So we show up and it turns out that I guess he somehow found out that this place had a band that plays and so he was really intent on singing with the band. He wanted to sing with the band. So we get in and it's extremely loud and the band is playing and he keeps asking the waitress and the bartender if he can sing with the band and they want nothing to do with this. And so he kept having our translator go up with him and ask them well can I sing with the band.
[Maj Gen Carey] said, "go ask them if I could play the guitar." I said okay, I, I asked one of the band members and the guy said, no, I mean, you know, I can't do that.
He goes if you really want to play this guitar go ahead and talk to the restaurant owner or the administrator or the manager, the restaurant manager and I didn't feel like doing that because I didn't want to go find the manager so I, told the General that basically, uh, you know, that he can't, he can't play the guitars and then he said, well try again, so I asked him to get up and we both stood next to this rock band and watched them up close.
I was hoping to keep his interest in doing so and, uh, he, um, and then I said, listen if you really want to play the guitar maybe if you ask him, you know, um, maybe they'd listen to you more than would to me. And I'm not sure if he asked him or not because I, I, you know, I, I sat back down at the table, but he stood there for a while in front of this band and then he came back to the table a little later also, he came back later and sat down also, and said well, no they won't let me play.
That shit is indeed funny.
Sure, it's possible that this one specific force is more professional than the rest, but the bar is low. Soviet Union is the state that gave us Chernobyl after all. For more recent evidence, do check out the recent Russian track record with space technologies - the 2018 ISS air leak incident is particularly telling. Or, you know, the whole war thing that's been going on.
Unfortunately, that competence thing counts for everyone else as well. So if you talk about Russian incompetence, we also need to make sure that people understand that this is by design and applied to every military force in existence, and put it into proper context.
This is not about bashing militaries or being American or Russian or European or Chinese, it’s a good example to showcase how the world really works.
If any army becomes extremely competent in executing the best possible outcomes for the people of their country, what keeps them from taking over and getting rid of the layer of decision-making that is causing the most problems?
So the people making their livelyhood from mostly talking about problems and solving them for domestic intesterest groups that don’t necessarily have the best interest of the average citizen in mind make sure they can not be overthrown by their military.
That’s why you see Hegseth dumbing down the force at record speed and Russia is sending the kids of farmers into war and not those of the oligarchs or duma politicians. No matter the color of the pin they wear or what language they speak, it’s all the same filth.
Anyway, a competent military full of competent specialists taking over is what we call military dictatorship, and we tried it often enough collectively that we can confidently say, sometimes the way to get somewhere is just as important as getting there, so democracy and convincing a majority of citizens is better than simply suppressing them.
Because it allows us to think and collectively learn, whereas military decision-making is always a bit backwards and pushes for results at neck-breaking speed.
You cannot apply military optimisation to a healthy civil society. It’s incompatible. Military is a necessary evil, it’s not how the main branch of civil society should work.
If the leaders of the mightiest nations on the planet were competent, we would all live in peace and happily ever after, but conflict is in human nature and incompetence fuels conflict and puts a lot of money into the pockets of everyone who profits from conflict and putting the most incompetent people into the most powerful positions.
Glad we can agree that Russia sucks and hopefully on that almost none of the people in charge of our fate are competent in what they do and we are always an inch away from catastrophic global events.
And that’s why I am now baking some cinnamon buns. Good talk.