Well, good. Now Orac dismantles the “lab leak” nonsense promoted by Alina Chan and the NY Times.
Even so, before I close, let me just reiterate that it is not impossible that SARS-CoV-2 arose in a lab, either due to scientists carrying out modifications on existing coronaviruses or from a collection of natural coronaviruses, in which the virus escaped. The claim is not impossible, like the claims made for homeopathy. However, as I like to say, just because a hypothesis is possible does not mean that it is equally possible (or even more so) compared to a competing hypothesis. You have to look at the evidence. Lab leak conspiracy theorists love to point out missing evidence that would make a natural zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2 an unquestioned slam dunk, even as they gloss over the fact that their evidence base is nothing but holes that they try desperately to fill with appeals to personal incredulity that the virus could have arisen naturally, wild speculation as to how it might have escaped from a lab, conspiracy mongering about “cover-ups” everywhere, and lots and lots drawing links between facts and observations that are probably unrelated. Moreover, if there’s one thing that all versions of lab leak share, it’s suspicion and constant finger pointing at the Chinese for being less than enthusiastic and cooperative about letting investigators into the Wuhan Institute of Virology to try to determine if a lab leak happened. This is, of course, not surprising and not in and of itself evidence for a lab leak. China is an authoritarian regime, and such regimes tend to be secretive.
Note that, since this is Orac, what follows after that “before I close” is 1700 words of even more debunking.
Just as well, there is no last word when trying to deal with the lunacy of committed kooks.
I’d add that China became a lot less internationally co-operative after the US President started using anti-Chinese rhetoric about the outbreak.
Hey, that sounds like me!
The start of the pandemic, of course, is a place where China’s authoritarian aspect caused them major problems. Just like with the big famines under both Mao and Stalin, part of the problem with authoritarian regimes (okay, it’s far from unique to authoritarian regimes, but it tends to be even worse there) is that local functionaries in the regime never want to look like there’s a problem in their area so they will lie up the chain of command and try to stop any bad news from getting to Dear Leader. One of the things we do have evidence for is that local doctors in the Wuhan area were trying to sound the alarm about a new disease well before the Chinese central government took action, and most of the delay was due to regional Party members not reporting the problems and even actively threatening the doctors who were bringing up the problems.
And my own comments about the lab leak hypothesis, which I’ve made a number of times… what does it even matter where the virus came from? It’s long since mutated anyway, and we have to deal with the virus we have now. The original source makes no difference in how we should react to it, and yet many of the people touting the lab leak hypothesis are also acting as if this was some proof that we don’t need to take any public health actions against it.
Basically it’s all a pointless distraction anyway… which is, of course, the point for a number of the folks pushing it, since tje actual goal was just to sow enough Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to keep the general populace from thinking about the real problems, and to prevent actually useful actions from being taken.
The decision by the NY Times to put its thumb on the scale for the lab leak “theory” would have been made by an editor with a degree in something like political science and little understanding of science. The lab leak theory is attractive to the public because it changes the millions of death from Covid-19 from “evolution means there is a steady stream of new disease forms and the best we can do is to be ready to respond and minimize the number of dead” to “those evil, Chinese, scientists trespassed outside their domain like in Jurassic park and we need to punish them so this doesn’t happen again.”
Reading the comments was saddening because they all said: “she sounds like she is making a really good argument.” If the NY Times was honest, they would have run a parallel opinion piece pointing out how Alina Chan is misleading and likely wrong and then the comments would have been “they both sound like they could be right, which should we believe?”
Instead, an even larger fraction of the non-science public will reach the wrong conclusion about Covid19 and what to do in the future. Meanwhile, the Alina Chan has learned that she doesn’t have to do honest science and publish peer reviewed papers to advance whatever agenda she is pushing. Is she anti-China or just self-promoting? She could have asked for an honest debate presentation here if she really believes she has the right answer.
bcw btw @ #4 — What are the chances that the thumb of a person at the NYT was that of the publisher or owner, not an editor?
@5 In that the editors picked by Sulzberger are already pretty conservative the distinction may not mean much.
Meanwhile, at the Washington Post, Amazon and Post owner Jeff Bezos has put an ex-Murdoch British-tabloid-phone-hacker in charge.
They just did another review of this on TWiV including an extensive bibliography of other TWiV episodes and papers debunking the lab leak theory.
Three important points that are crucial to me are 1) there were 2 variants at the market in Wuhan, a lab constructing viruses would not do that but evolution would, 2) the closest virus to COVID19 is thousands of base pairs different and the changed pairs are scattered all over the genome, a lab could not construct such a thing but evolution could, 3) the pattern of the outbreak is consistent with the virus jumping to humans from the market.
One thing Dr Racagniello pointed out is that a lab leak conspiracy has to make all the evidence true, through human agency, i.e: 2 variants of a virus humans do not know how to create were innoculated in a victim patient zero at the market. He also pointed out that viruses jumping from animals to humans just like the virus in Wuhan did has been observed many times in the past. There is no need to multiply entities unnecessarily by imagining a lab did it.
I suppose a lab with an existing virus and some human test subjects could try to nudge evolution in a bad direction but if that’s the scenario why not imagine smallpox or ebola or any other nightmare?
jenorafeuer@#3:
The start of the pandemic, of course, is a place where China’s authoritarian aspect caused them major problems.
I find it interesting how people like to note how China’s government’s handling of information made the outbreak worse when it’s equally clear that the free world’s handling of information made the outbreak worse, too. I’m not arguing with you but it’s always seemed a bit weird for us in a country where the president said the pandemic would end in a week, and maybe we could bleach from the inside… we handled the information well? I was watching the SARS outbreak in Toronto, where the outbreak was worsened by the government not wanting to impact tourism. Just like the Chinese in Wuhan. The only conclusion I can come up to is that human civilizations could not effectively spread information about pandemics, if it was mixed with piss, and stored in a jar with instructions printed on the bottom.
@Marcus:
I live in Toronto, so I’m right with you on some of that. (And I remember what a mess the 2003 World SF Convention was in Toronto, what with SARS, West Nile, and the blackout earlier that year and the U.S. still largely in post-9/11 ‘not travelling’ mode.)
And yeah, I put ‘not unique to authoritarian regimes’ for a reason. Though in this case it’s really more a difference of where in the chain the problem was. As you note, a lot of the issues in the response over here was more ‘don’t want to impact tourism/economy/etc.’… even with good information, people often make the wrong decisions due to letting short-term priorities override long-term ones. Here we had good information get to the top and then got mishandled (in some cases deliberately to try to screw things up, back when Trump Jr figured that they could let it kill New Yorkers before having to worry about it). Not quite the same thing as the information not being allowed to get to the people who should have been making those decisions as a result of local idiocy.
Not a minimizer per se but I’m fully vaccinated against COVID and my B-cells hopefully mutated well to handle variants even if antibody titers on downslide, but the kill rate of SARS-CoV-2 was a joke even in the beginning against what may be very well coming. The kill rate of OG SARS too was a joke, unless renamed bird flu gets attenuated by cow nipples. So Monday morning QBing the last pandemic has taught us nothing except that when people start actually dropping like flies dingbats will still be blaming 5G and sticking UV bulbs up their nostrils and/or anus, drinking bleach, and eating deworming paste. And shunning masks.
I still eat cheese. Why not? But raw milk? WTF? I cringe at cleaning bird poop off my vehicle because well…bird flu!
Oh and mpox is kinda not going away. When can people who aren’t gay or bi get shots without fibbing? I am willing to get that shot and H5 ASAP! Seems the supply chain is lethargic in response to either. Capitalism.
@8.Marcus Ranum : ” The only conclusion I can come up to is that human civilizations could not effectively spread information about pandemics, if it was mixed with piss, and stored in a jar with instructions printed on the bottom.””
Huh. That certainly does sound like a very poor and likely highly ineffective method of spreading information about pandemics!
Few people are going to want to fish around in urine-filled jars instructions on the bottom or not.
Repeat after me: Assertion is not evidence. Rinse. Repeat.
Absent evidence, all ya got is glittering generalities and nebulous conclusions. Nothing you would bet the farm on.
I find it interesting how people like to note how China’s government’s handling of information made the outbreak worse when it’s equally clear that the free world’s handling of information made the outbreak worse, too…
Actually, I kinda think America’s handling of the “information” was WORSE than China’s: the Chinese just stalled and delayed and covered things up for a bit before kicking into high gear with an actual response; while our “leaders” went from ignoring to minimizing to letting the pandemic loose unchecked on populations they didn’t like to a succession of scams and incoherent BS (the quinine stuff, horse-paste, bleach injections, some Trump-loving African witch-doctor, etc.), all the while encouraging everyone to REFUSE to do ANYTHING that any actual medical or epidemiological experts recommended (‘cuz “deep state” or something). And now the people who inflicted all that crap on us are demonizing Dr. Fauci.
All of which is, of course, why they’re so eager to go back to screaming about China’s response: they need a diversionary scapegoat, so it’s Yellow Peril 3.0. Or maybe 4.0? 5.0? I have a hard time following Yellow Perils…
Speaking of mishandling information, the president of the USA was one of the worst.
Trump is an idiot.
The Covid-19 virus hasn’t gone away yet.
Republicans: “It’s Biden’s fault!”
@8.Marcus Ranum : ”The only conclusion I can come up to is that human civilizations could not effectively spread information about pandemics, if it was mixed with piss, and stored in a jar with instructions printed on the bottom.”
Now that’s what I would call a piss-poor way to spread information.
Heh. Raging Bee: https://aprilmunday.wordpress.com/2021/07/04/medieval-parchment-and-vellum/
Yeah… no. Both Orac, and most of the commenters here, appear to think there are only two possibilities: (1) the virus arrived at the Wuhan wet market in one or more individuals of a susceptible non-human species as part of the wildlife trade, or (2) it was produced in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But that’s simply false. I’ve thought from early on that the most plausible alternative to (1) is that a sample collector from one of the two labs in Wuhan that were working on bat coronaviruses acquired a (quite likely, asymptomatic) infection in a bat cave (see here), and transmitted it to other people or members of another susceptible species or both, quite likely at the wet market, without any of the Wuhan scientists, or the Chinese authorities, knowing anything about it. However, I also see a lot of utterly ludicrous naivete about the Chinese authorities: we know they lie systematically – for example about the horrifying repression of the Uighur people, and about their intention to respect Hong Kong’s democratic freedoms; and they have no hesitation in suppressing anyone who raises inconvenient concerns. It’s also worth noting that they deny not only the possibility of any connection with the Wuhan labs; they also deny the virus arrived in Wuhan as a result of the “wet market” trade. They claim it arrived from abroad, probably on frozen food packaging. And I always come back to the question: why did the pandemic start in Wuhan? There are many wet markets in China and nearby countries, while Wuhan is one of very few places where research into bat coronaviruses is going on. Yes, of course this could be a coincidence, but unless and until the actual source of the virus is discovered, the and it’s somewhere whence susceptible species were transported to Wuhan for sale, and not from somewhere sample collectors were sent by one of the labs, the question remains open and it’s absurd to pretend otherwise. I repeat my recommendation of the BBC podcast series Fever: The Hunt For Covid’s Origin.
Claiming it’s a conspiracy theory is a way to dodge the really important question IMAO, which is what kinds of regulations and oversight, if any, we the public should impose on scientists doing gain of function research creating viruses that are more dangerous in humans (or other animals). I’ve asked this in the FTB Discord once, long ago, before I left voluntarily because I did not fit in, but I’ll ask it here again.
I remember that the typical answer from the FTB Discord users was something like “trust the individual scientists; no oversight”, which I think is flagrantly ridiculous position. Even if there’s a 1% chance that it was an accidental lab leak of a virus created with the best of intentions, this should have started a public conversation about the benefits vs dangers of this particular kind of gain of function research, the kind of research that makes more dangerous viruses.
As best as I can determine from my research, the possible gains of this kind of research are nebulous and minimal. Compared to that, we have the risk of of millions of people dead, and billions significantly negatively affected worldwide. Given these premises, it seems obvious that we should ban gain of function research that is intended to, or can be reasonably predicted to, make a virus more infectious or dangerous to humans. Maybe / probably extend that ban to making viruses more infectious or dangerous to other animals.
Part 2
I don’t like calling it a conspiracy theory. Typical conspiracy theories are ridiculous because they involve thousands or millions of separate persons all working in concert without anyone leaking the truth to the public. Conspiracy theories like this are ridiculous because it’s impossible for not even one person to leak the truth among thousands or millions of separate people with little to no common interest. However, conspiracies of a dozen people happen all the time. People lie all the time, and people work together in small groups to lie all the time. This is normal. Moreover, the Chinese government coordinating a lying campaign on a slightly larger scale is all so commonplace as to be completely mundane. Calling it a conspiracy theory is a poisoning the well fallacy and conflagration of ridiculous conspiracy theories like “we didn’t land on the moon” with extremely common and mundane conspiracy theories like “2 people working together to embezzle money from the company”.
The truth of the matter is that most of the calls from the scientists saying that it’s a conspiracy theory are coming from just a few dozen people AFAIK, including Dr Fauci.
Dr Fauci is not a disinterested third party. If it was a lab leak, Dr Fauci would likely face some sort of ethical culpability for being partially directly responsible for it happening, including directing the funding to the Wuhan lab, and also probably violating prior bans on funding overseas gain of function research to direct funding to the Wuhan lab. Dr Fauci has a huge vested stake in the outcome, and therefore anything he says in this matter should be dismissed out of hand. Being a scientist doesn’t make someone immune to common petty human foibles like pride, arrogance, and desire for money and fame and power. He’s also a longtime political appointee and not a mere practicing research scientist, which should make us doubt his honesty and integrity even more. And on top of all of that, Dr Fauci is widely regarded as the foremost political activist arguing in favor of continued gain of function research. It is hard to imagine someone more biased and less trustworthy on this issue than Dr Fauci.
AFAIK, most of the rest of the directly acting scientists who are calling it a conspiracy theory are acting directly with Dr Fauci to put out these public statements and academic papers, and they number in the tens or twenties. It is not ridiculous to suggest that there is a strong internal pressure coming from Dr Fauci and others to silence this, whether it’s true or false, by whatever expedient methods are available. This kind of conspiracy is not farfetched. It is mundane and trivial. This kind of coverup of unethical and maybe criminal behavior happens all of the time. It is unremarkable. Calling it a conspiracy theory in the sense of the moon landing is ridiculous.
Part 3
There are many flavors of the hypothesis, ranging from a purposeful release of a military engineered bio-weapon (which I think is ridiculous), to an accidental release of a military engineered bio-weapon, to a purposeful or accidental release of a gain of function research virus, to a purposeful or accidental release of a wild strain of virus that was collected from the wild. Not all of these are implausible.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/u-s-intel-report-identified-3-wuhan-lab-researchers-who-n1268327This predates the outbreak centered at the wet market by roughly a month. I should not need this particular evidence to claim that the accidental lab leak of a gain of function research virus is plausible. I will argue that it remains plausible even without this evidence. However, with this evidence, if true, it tips the scales of probability so that an (accidental) release of some kind from the Wuhan lab is more likely than not. I would go so high as 90% likely.
Part 4
I had to apologize to my friend a while ago. I got pulled along with the zeitgeist like many other people here. Because it came from Trump, and because it seemed racist, we all circled our wagons and agreed with the leftist narrative that it must be a conspiracy theory. However, I recognize how I fell prey to my biases and to tribalism, and I should not have been so quick to dismiss this possibility on such flimsy evidence as was presented.
I do believe that Dr Fauci performed many extremely unethical actions over the last decade, predating the COVID outbreak and after the COVID outbreak, some of it criminal, and I would like nothing more than to see Dr Fauci charged with perjury for lying to congress under oath and thrown in jail, along with the rest of his co-conspirators who also lied under oath to congress. I’d also like to investigate Dr Fauci’s possible historical decisions to continue funding the Wuhan lab and their gain of function research, IIRC through an intermediary group, in spite of a moratorium at the time on funding foreign organizations who were conduncting this kind of gain of function research.
Part 5
This is not the first time nor the last time that the top dozen or two dozen leading scientists of the medical establishment will have covered up things of this scale. It is important that we recognize that scientists in these positions are just as human as the rest of us, and they can fall prey to this kind of coverup, so that we can try to prevent it from happening again, such as through the correct kind of oversight.
I speak of the HeLa coverup, where for decades, half of all medical research was basically knowingly conducted on HeLa cell lines instead of the actual cell lines being reported in the academic papers (whether it was supposed to be rabbit cell lines, or human cell lines of other human tissue, etc.) This means that all medical research from that period of 10 or 20 years is completely worthless, and yet many papers are still relying on it today. This is a huge shame which almost no one knows about, and has had an unimaginably huge impact on medical research, including to this day. It has set most medical reseasrch back by decades.
This HeLa situation was not unknown at the time. It was well known among the whole medical research community at the time for at least a decade, but nothing was done about it, and when a researcher tried to fix the issue, he was buried and run out of academia. It wasn’t a conspiracy theory in the typical sense of overt coordination. Instead, many research medical scientists acted independently in a way that seems coordinated in order to protect their own personal prestige, and to protect their friends, and to protect the prestige of academia as a whole. This has happened before, and it happened again for COVID.
I speak of Walter Nelson-Rees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Nelson-ReesHe should be remembered as a hero just like Clair Patterson, but no one even knows the hard work that Walter Nelson-Rees did. Effectively, the coverup of the HeLa debacle was successful.
PS:
This kind of coverup from a dozen leading scientists in the medical community has also happened another time. I speak of the origin of HIV-AIDS. HIV-AIDS was also likely the result of a lab leak. It was likely the result of Dr Hillary Koprowski using hundreds of chimpanzees to amplify his OPV (Oral Polio Vaccine) locally in the Congo which he gave to half a million people in the Congo, which matches exactly both in time and space the beginning of the HIV-AIDS epidemic in humans. Like the Wuhan researchers, he didn’t purposefully cause it, but arguably he caused it negligently. The two big human pandemics of the last 100 years were both caused by the practice of human medicine. I think we need a more serious and nuanced discussion about what we can do to stop it from happening for a third time.
For more reading on this topic of the HeLa coverup, and also the HIV-AIDS coverup, I suggest:
https://documents.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/dissent/documents/AIDS/Pascal91.htmlhttps://documents.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/dissent/documents/AIDS/Pascal91.html
Emphasis on the “prophetic” last paragraph.
Maybe we’ll learn after it happens for the third time? Probably not. Enjoy your echo chamber.
Even if there’s a 1% chance that it was an accidental lab leak of a virus created with the best of intentions, this should have started a public conversation about the benefits vs dangers of this particular kind of gain of function research, the kind of research that makes more dangerous viruses.
First, why should we “start a conversation” from a false or dubious premise? Such conversations aren’t likely to lead anywhere good, especially if they fail (or refuse) to address what is more likely to have actually happened. (Another dubious premise is that this gain-of-function research is really producing dangerous pathogens, or that it even CAN produce something like COVID-19. This premise has also been, at least IMO, plausibly disputed.)
Here, lemme give another example of how badly “starting a conversation” this way can go:
“Even if there’s a 1% chance that Chinese are malicious heathens intent on enslaving all our daughters, this should have started a public conversation about the benefits vs dangers of letting Chinese people move to more civilized Western countries and live among us.”
See what I did there?
And second, if there’s a greater chance that COVID jumped from live animals to humans in that wet market in the center of Wuhan, wouldn’t it be more productive to “start a conversation” about the benefits vs. dangers of such markets and how THEY should be regulated? What’s the fucking point of “starting a conversation” from an accusation that has very little chance of being true, when other explanations are far more likely to be true?
AFAIK, most of the rest of the directly acting scientists who are calling it a conspiracy theory are acting directly with Dr Fauci to put out these public statements and academic papers, and they number in the tens or twenties. It is not ridiculous to suggest that there is a strong internal pressure coming from Dr Fauci and others to silence this…
SO WHAT?! The lab-leak claims have long been debunked by knowledgeable and people anyway. If anyone feels any need to shut this zombie-allegation up, it’s because there’s so many REPUBLICANS keeping it alive to distract attention away from their own despicable failures and malfeasance. The more we let them keep it alive, the more we let them control the entire public conversation.
As I said before, the lab-leak “theory” is nothing but diversionary scapegoating. It’s just Yellow Peril 3.0. Or maybe 4.0…
Sorry, I need to restate one sentence in my previous comment:
“What’s the fucking point of “starting a conversation” from an accusation that has very little chance of being true, when other explanations are far more likely to be true — and far more likely to happen again and again?”
https://www.kqed.org/quest/40925/the-great-cancer-cell-mix-up
Btw, this is a huge problem even today.
I’ve thought from early on that the most plausible alternative to (1) is that a sample collector from one of the two labs in Wuhan that were working on bat coronaviruses acquired a (quite likely, asymptomatic) infection in a bat cave (see here), and transmitted it to other people or members of another susceptible species or both, quite likely at the wet market…
I agree that this is indeed plausible, and others have mentioned it for some time already. In fairness, I suspect this explanation tends to get lumped together with the wet-market-transfer explanation, simply because it’s generally the same claim: “a virus mutated and jumped from animals to humans.”
However, I also see a lot of utterly ludicrous naivete about the Chinese authorities…
You’ve “seen?” Or you’ve heard vague claims? I’ve heard lots of accusations of “naivete,” but never anyone on the ground actually saying Chinese authorities are always honest and trustworthy. The problem here is not that no one doubts Chinese authorities — it’s that we need China’s cooperation on this, and accusing them of malfeasance makes them less willing to cooperate with us. No one’s being “naive,” they’re being diplomatic and trying to work with other organizations that we can’t totally trust, but also can’t push around on their turf. It’s called diplomacy.
Gerald, the last person in the world who thought you might be sane at least once a year, just gave up.
You are obviously delusional and have left the real world.
Your rambling trash is wrong in every sentence and it isn’t worth my time to bother with any of it.
The proof is your lie that the HIV virus is a lab leak.
There is zero evidence for that. The whole polio vaccine in Africa theory was completely made up and factually wrong.
Unlike the Covid-19 virus where we don’t exactly know which animal species it came from, we do know where the HIV viruses came from.
BTW, there are two HIV viruses that aren’t all that similar and obviously of independent origin.
.1. HIV-1, the most common strain of HIV in developed countries, originated from a subspecies of chimpanzees in west equatorial Africa.
.2. Human Immunodeficiency Virus 2 (HIV-2) is a less virulent AIDS retrovirus that originated from West African sooty mangabeys (Cercocebus atys) and was transmitted to humans:
If you are going to say lab leak, there has to be…two lab leaks to produce two different AIDS viruses.
GerrardOfTitanServer is incapable of rational thought.
This is someone delusional and living in a separate reality.
He’s been told many times by many people that he is a serious loon.
In Gerrard’s mind, he isn’t crazy. The entire rest of the world is crazy.
BTW, he’s made the claim before that the HIV/AIDS virus is a human made virus. He’s had it explained before that he is wrong and why.
It doesn’t do any good.
Gerrard is incapable of learning anything new or reasoning.
What he does is collect all of the conspiracy theories there are, and they are starting to star him as a leading character.
Gerrard can have the last word and he will.
I’m not wasting another second of my valuable time on total nonsense.
raven: God’s balls, I totally missed his HIV-lab-leak bullshit — thanks for catching that (again).
Oh well, look on the bright side: at least he’s not repeating the old claim that HIV was deliberately engineered and released to kill Blacks and/or gays…
I clearly dispute that claim, as does like half of all US intelligence agencies.
I really don’t get the need to claim that it’s been “debunked” given the extremely flimsy evidence and clearly biased arguments being leveled against it.
Why do you feel the need to claim such extreme confidence given that it’s unwarranted in this case?
In other words, you’re going to take as holy gospel the words of Dr Fauci and the two dozen people working directly under or with him, considering that Dr Fauci controls their future careers and funding, and considering that they might also share ethical and maybe criminal culpability for their part of it was a lab leak? Naive and foolish.
Blatant lies.
Raging Bee:
and Raging Bee:
You’re such a partisan lying hack. Have you no shame? You just blatantly contradicted yourself in the space of a few minutes and a few posts in order to uphold the narrative that protects those small number of people in power who are probably partially responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. What the fuck?
Gerrard: as Taylor Swift might say, you need to calm down. The claim I called debunked is NOT THE SAME CLAIM as the one I called plausible. Read more slowly for comprehension. Or, you know, maybe just fuck off and get help…? Check yourself before you wreck yourself and all that…
Why can’t one be a natural transfer and one be a lab leak? I fully accept that many / most virus transfers from non-human animal populations to human populations are caused by something other than the practice of human medicine. This is an extremely ridiculous and fallacious argument that you are using against me with zero principle of charity, instead relying on a fundamentally dishonest “gotcha”.
Raging Bee:
Fucking liar. You go read it. That’s exactly what you did.
Why do I even bother to post here. I should have continued my prolonged absence. Fucking full of dishonest partisan hacks like Raging Bee.
AFAIK, we have not located a sufficiently close match of SIV to make such a bold claim. The wide variability of SIV among neighboring tribes of chimps is extremely large. We simply don’t know which location of chimps it came from.
And from a quick google:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d42859-018-00008-6
That’s pretty close to the Congo.
Not that any of this matters anyway. Hooper has receipts of chimps from all over Africa being present in Koprowski’s lab in the Congo. It doesn’t really matter where the ancestral population of chimps actual for the OPV HIV hypothesis.
Just one facet of the extremely effective coverup. Because it’s your tribe, you throw out arguments which you should be able to see are inapplicable and wrong with just a modicum of thought, but you’re not actually thinking now. You’re acting on impulse, on instinct, because you identified me as “the other”, and I must be wrong, and you will use any sort of argument to prove that I am wrong, motivated reasoning, in order to reduce your own cognitive dissonance.
Such acumen!
Wrong. “Field worker dunnit” is not a new hypothesis that no one has considered. It’s explicitly mentioned as part of the spectrum of different kinds of “lab leaks”in a piece quoted in Orac’s article:
If you’d been paying attention, you’d know that those various kinds of “Accidental sample leak” have been an integral part of the general “lab leak” theory from the very beginning: they’re the more defensible “motte” to the gain-of-function/furin cleavage/bioweapon/etc “bailey”. Just because you’ve very carefully worded your formulation of the lab leak as “produced in the [lab]” doesn’t erase that fact.
So, no, your pet hypothesis is not special. It’s been considered.
And dismissed, like all the other unsupported lab leak variants. After all, I fail to see how it offers any explanatory advantages over the other variants, nevermind a market crossover. Like all the other lab-leak variants, it’s simply a just-so story, with zero supporting evidence. More so, perhaps, since at least some variations of the lab leak offer some gesture at a falsifiable hypothesis, like the possibility to detect unmistakable genetic tampering signals.
But let’s think it through. Suppose a field worker for the lab did get infected in Southern China or somewhere, during a course of field work that might have lasted a few weeks or more, during which they’d interact with co-workers, locals, restaurant staff, etc. Then they travel all the way back, probably on a crowded train, get off at the Wuhan train station, mingle with family, friends and coworkers in Wuhan for some amount of time, and then, eventually visit the wet market for some reason. Out of all those encounters, the only time they spread any observed infection is when they happen to visit one of the most likely places in the city for a virus to emerge on its own: the wet market. Oh, and they don’t do this just once, but twice, with two slightly different viral lineages.
Pretty weird, right?
Could it happen that way? Maybe. But it doesn’t seem especially likely. It’s so unlikely it’s not really worth thinking about. After all, if we’re not constraining ourselves by evidence, and allowed to carefully craft just-so stories to skirt around any constraints offered by evidence or probability, then there are literally millions of scenarios which become equally plausible. If the field worker can make that journey, why couldn’t, say, a student or young professional living in Wuhan, who returns from a visit to her family out in a province somewhere. Family who occasionally hunt bats, or run a mink farm, or…
Indeed, this latter class of story is much more probable than anything involving lab workers, because if if you tallied it up, there are likely hundreds or thousands of times more such students and random people, and thus chances for the latter scenario, than there are field workers at WIV…
(These other scenarios also illustrate the other lie in your false dichotomy at the beginning: an animal at the wet market is not the only “natural” origin possibility. There are many of them. Infected farmers from the country travelling into the city, for example. Or an origin at some of the bat caves within the city. Those aren’t normally talked about, however, because they’re speculation with no evidence. The wet market is the only hypothesis — natural or not — with any supporting evidence whatsoever. If the early cases clustered around, say, the Wuhan train station, we might be considering something else.)
Where precisely do you see this “naivete” and from who exactly? Because I don’t think I’ve seen anyone, on either side of this issue, uncritically assume honesty or openness on the part of Chinese authorities.
They’ve not been honest or open about any of this, obviously. I don’t think anyone is confused about that. The problem is that you can’t really draw any conclusions from it, in either direction. Not even to say that originating in China is actually a sure thing. Their behavior is inconvenient for determining what really happened, of course, but otherwise meaningless. (If you really want to try, the evidence for a cover up at the market is much more compelling: authorities removed and destroyed the animals (without preserving samples) and sanitized the whole place. Nothing similar has happened at WIV.)
And there it is. The fundamental “intuition” at the heart of the entire lab-leak phenomenon: “Gee whiz, what are the odds?”
This is always near the surface of the thoughts of any lab-leaker. But it remains a not very uninteresting observation. A combination of innumeracy, ignorance, and incuriousness:
To start with, Wuhan is not the only city that has labs. Hundreds of cities across China have labs and researchers studying coronavirus. Also, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, Thailand…There’s an open question as to how many cities of any reasonable size could host a virus crossover event without someone on the internet Googling up some plausibly concrete connection to coronavirus research. You’re welcome to actually do that calculation, if you’d like, but until then, “pretty good” remains at least as good an answer to “what are the odds” as “unlikely”.
Then there’s the fact that Americans (and others, but particularly Americans) hear “Wuhan” — which they had perhaps never heard of before late 2019 — and apparently conjure up the image of some sleepy provincial village in the middle of nowhere. But it’s a “village” of almost 14 million people: if Wuhan were a US city, it’d be the second largest in the country. Bigger than LA[1]. And not only is it a (very) large city and a provincial capital, it’s the key economic and cultural hub for the entirety of central China. It occupies something like the position that, say, Chicago does to the rest of the US Midwest.
And therein lies the nexus of the ignorance and innumeracy : if a mutated cow virus broke out in Chicago next month, I don’t think any “lab leak” conspiracy would form simply because it turned out there’s USDA lab at the University of Chicago that’s been actively studying that type of virus for a few years. In fact, I don’t think anyone would be surprised by that at all. Of course Chicago would be a good place for that lab, and a good place for the virus to emerge, both for much the same reasons. It’s a big city at the heart of an agricultural region.
So, why is it suspicious when it’s Wuhan? Answer: it’s not.
Why can’t one be a natural transfer and one be a lab leak?
That sounds kinda whiny — “Why can’t I cling to just ONE wild inflammatory claim out of two?!” Or maybe “Why can’t we split the difference and compromise and get along?”
Just one facet of the extremely effective coverup.
Right. That certainly explains the lack of any actual evidence supporting your claims. Why am I not surprised?
Indeed.
I remember I had a long back and forth with them a while back here about the HIV thing. It was actually the first time I’d heard of the polio vaccine accusations, so I looked into it. On the plus side, I got to read a lot of papers and learn a lot about the (actual) genetics and origin of HIV. Spoiler: it wasn’t polio vaccine testing. On the minus side, I laid all that research out for Gerrard as well, in no uncertain terms, and now they’re back here again spouting the same debunked nonsense.
Far be it from me to tell someone not to sharpen their claws, but don’t expect them to realize just how much they’ve been shredded at the end. Reality and evidence clearly isn’t the point for them.
…if a mutated cow virus broke out in Chicago next month, I don’t think any “lab leak” conspiracy would form simply because it turned out there’s USDA lab at the University of Chicago that’s been actively studying that type of virus for a few years…
No, such a conspiracy theory would be cobbled up — and very quickly — by angry anti-government Retrumplitarians looking for an excuse to discredit and incite mindless hatred against any damn gummint agency trying to tell them what to do. And if there wasn’t a USDA lab nearby to blame it on, they’d find some other big-gummint office nearby to attack instead. (they’ve already said they want to defund and destroy the FBI, and there’s bound to be an FBI office in the Chicago area, right? They’ll do as a scapegoat, especially if they’ve ever been seen with Chinese officials…)
Also, Gerrard, what “small number of people in power” am I allegedly trying to protect? The Chinese Communist regime? They don’t need no stinkin’ protection from no stinkin’ FTBers. I’m trying to do my tiny little bit to protect AMERICAN DEMOCRACY from a much larger number of fascist insurrectionists and con-artists who are using bogus accusations (including, but by no means limited to, scapegoating China for COVID-19) to cover up and distract everyone’s attention from their own blatant incompetence, failures and malfeasance. Not sure why you’d have a problem with that…
…while Wuhan is one of very few places where research into bat coronaviruses is going on.
And why, exactly, is that research going on there? Because that’s where the bats and their coronaviruses are. So that would also be the most likely place for a coronavirus to mutate and jump from a bat to a human in the wild (where lab-security protocols aren’t routinely in effect), whether or not any virology lab even exists in that region. QEDuh.
Ugh. You’re not wrong.
Still, I think the specific “what are the odds” argument probably wouldn’t be the backbone of that conspiracy theory in the way it is with Wuhan.
It works with Wuhan because our brains are bad at logic. For most people outside of China, Wuhan isn’t actually a real place. Just a name, an arbitrary signifier to which they’ve attached a few very limited pieces of information: perhaps only that it’s where Covid-19 came from, and it’s where a coronavirus lab is. Since our brains are compelled to try to put facts together, they attach signficance to what little information they have out of proportion to its objective salience. Of course those facts must be related, they’re the only facts we have. And thus, obviously the lab must have something to do with covid. How could it be otherwise?
At that point, a conclusion is already formed. Even if they learn additional facts from there, they’ll be selected or ignored to support it, at least without a degree of mental effort to be objective about it.
So it works with Wuhan because of a particularly rarefied kind of ignorance. With Chicago, well the average American probably knows hundreds of facts about Chicago. Adding a couple more won’t necessarily trigger connections with quite the same degree of emotional salience, it’s just a couple more in the pile.
Careful with that. I think you’re right in the ways that matter, but that statement could be twisted in a “technically correct” fashion.
The area typically considered the most at risk for coronavirus spillover is more to the south in China, or further south in SE Asia: SARS started in Guangdong, several hundred miles south, and the samples of SARS-CoV-1 predecessor, RaTG13, etc. have mostly been collected from caves in Yunnan, about 1000 miles to the southwest. The closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 so far was found in Laos somewhere, even further away.
And then, the WIV itself was founded decades ago, AFAICT before coronaviruses were known to be a particular matter of concern in the region, and certainly before major 21st century spillovers occurred from animal populations in southern China and southeast Asia. It was just a general virology institute, sited in Wuhan because the city is a major population center in the heart of China. It was only later when these kinds of coronaviruses DID start to get on the radar, that WIV started to take lead on some of the research, even if it wasn’t necessarily right on top of the hotspots geographically.
Still, Yunnan (where the CoV-1 predecessors have been found) and Guangdong (where SARS started) are about 1000 miles apart too, so it should be obvious that these viruses can move around quite a bit, either through animal migration, or being carried by humans. I don’t think anybody can quantify by how much, exactly. And Wuhan itself is actually within at least the northern fringe of the range of the horseshoe bats in question (climate change probably shifts that around on a weekly basis anyway). There are actually bat caves in parks within the city itself. It may not be the area of greatest concern for such spillovers, but it wouldn’t exactly be shocking if the host animals came from Wuhan’s immediate environs somewhere.
And even if that weren’t true, trains and trucks exists, so Wuhan’s size and economic significance is the more important fact, not its exact location. The collection zone for the animals in the wet market, particularly the exotic ones, probably spans all of Asia. They’re brought into Wuhan for more or less the same reason the lab is there: because it’s an important place with lots of people.
With Chicago, well the average American probably knows hundreds of facts about Chicago.
One of those facts is that Chicago is a city; another is that there’s lots of nonwhite people in it. And there’s plenty of ass-backward crackers who already HATE Chicago, and most other cities, for that reason. And they’d be the ones to grab and run with any damning scare-story about Chicago their favorite demagogue lobs at them. So, yeah, Chicago is a little safer from such deranged hate than Wuhan; but still not really out of the woods.
Also, Chicago is still associated with that black ex-President who’s still a Kenyan/Indonesian sleeper-agent (or the Antichrist) in many of those crackers’ minds. COINCIDENCE?!! I think not!
I clearly dispute that claim, as does like half of all US intelligence agencies.
Once again, Gerrard, you are flat-out misrepresenting what those agencies have said. They DID NOT state that the lab-leak theory was true or proven, or that they believed it; they merely rated the credibility of that claim according to a set of generic metrics they use to rate any claim or information they get from any source on any subject. And, IIRC, they rated it “low confidence.”
Oh yeah, exactly. It’d all be “corrupt dumocrat crime city Hussein Obama community organizer blah blah blah”. There’s a whole gross, sticky ocean of pre-existing prejudice and stupidity to base a theory on.
But that’s why I think the specific incredulity you see with the Wuhan lab leak bozos, the emotional shock of, “ZOMG, there’s a research lab in
WuhanChicago?!? One of the largest cities in the country??! What are the odds?!!” probably wouldn’t be that much of a factor in it. Not only wouldn’t Americans be particularly shocked to learn that there’s stuff in Chicago, it’d be buried under all that other, more emotionally salient stuff.I wouldn’t be surprised if any notional lab(s) in Chicago didn’t even make the cut for the main conspiracy. I’m sure it was actually designed in China or Iran or France or Quebec or something anyway. No doubt funded by the “globalist” deep state and then smuggled in from Colombia by a giant convoy of terrorists, immigrants and drug smugglers.
Raging Bee
Yes. Why can’t I just stick to the claims that I want to defend instead of defending claims that I nevr made? What’s so wrong with that?
False. And projection. I never claimed that half of the intelligence agencies said it was proven. I said that half of them said it was plausible and/or more likely than not. Myself, I never claimed it was proven either. I said that I consider it to be more likely than not. You are the one who is clearly misrepresenting me, again. Please take your head out of your ass, put on your reading glasses, and try again with some honesty and integrity.
Dr Fauci (and his cohorts) who are probably partially responsible for the COVID pandemic by unwisely funding and supporting dangerous gain of function research, and moreover by sometimes violating legal bans on funding such research in foreign countries.
PS:
You are such a scumbag. I already caught you out in more than three clear misrepresentation of me in this thread thus far. A normal person would never have completed that in the first place. Moreover, someone with even a shred of decency or integrity would have used the words “I’m sorry” when it was pointed out. You’re almost as bad as John Morales.
…
jack lecou
Of course, I disagree. If you want to retread that again, I’m game. I completely forgot the last conversation, and thus I probably dismissed every single one of your points. What was it again?
You believe that they didn’t amplify the vaccine locally in the lab in the Congo? Wrong. This is implausible given the standard practice at the time. For example, Koprowski’s competitor at the time amplified his own vaccine locally in locally obtained monkeys/primates. Also, Koprowsky et al had to bring live virus vaccines on planes in boxes with ice to preserve them from NA / Europe to Africa, and the live virus vaccine would still lose potency, so they would need to amplify it locally to be effective. Also, it’s implausible that the 400 chimps that they killed in the Congo lab was used for any other reason. We also have written records from one of Koprowski’s compatriots talking about the titer of the initial vaccine sample flown in, and later notes discussing a higher titer of the doses to be given to people, ergo it must have been amplified locally in the Congo.
Or you believe that they didn’t use chimps to amplify the vaccine in the lab in the Congo? Also wrong. Again, we have indisputable records of 400 chimps being brought to the Congo lab and killed there. There’s no plausible reason to buy and bring 400 chimps in a lab in the middle of nowhere in the Congo and then kill them except as part of amplifying a polio vaccine to be given to half a million nearby people.
Or you believe that they used the wrong kind of chimps? Also wrong. We still don’t know which population of chimps was the immediate accessor. Also, there were chimps brought from nearly every part of Africa to the Congo lab.
Or you believe that the genetic dating is reliable which purports to show that the SIV-HIV crossover happened before 1957? Also wrong. First, the technique of assuming a constant rate of mutation is simply not valid for a retrovirus which changes primarily through recombination, and there’s no way that they could have reliably identified and removed recombinant strains from their analysis, regardless of their protestations otherwise. Moreover, the dating technique assumes a single point of crossover, and on the OPV crossover hypothesis, we had vaccine made from 400 chimps given to half a million people. It’s quite plausible that there were multiple viral crossovers with these 400 chimps and half a million people. This clear possibility means that any dating technique relying on a single point of crossover is bunk.
All while eating recently-aborted abused babbis in the basement of a pizza place.
(Qanon could not do better)
Did you bother to read this link that I posted above? How about just the title?
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/u-s-intel-report-identified-3-wuhan-lab-researchers-who-n1268327The problem appears to be that you, like many others, are operating on incorrect prior assumptions of probability. You are operating on the assumption that lab leaks are very rare compared to zoonotic transfers that are not directly caused by human medical practice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidentsLab leaks are worrying mundane and common. That’s tens or hundreds of known lab leaks in the last 100 years. How many zoonotic transfers of novel viruses (without being caused by human medical practice) have there been in the last 100 years? I know this is not exactly comparing apples to oranges, but I think that this information does not support such a strong prior probability that zoonotic transfer is much more likely.
Over 37.5 Mwh from my solar panels, so far.
Today (around a week before winter solstice) I got 24 Kwh.
(Bbbbbbbbbad to the bone!)
<snicker>
Nah. Doesn’t appear like that at all, because it ain’t.
Problem is that some people believe they know better than actual experts and expert bodies, such as the WHO.
(Guess who!)
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/us-intelligence-agencies-remain-divided-likely-covid-origin-rcna90914
Ah, the NBC news article from June 24, 2023.
(Surely that’s the dog’s bollocks!)
Ah yes.
The provision of “inconclusive, circumstantial evidence” that to them “appeared to bolster a hypothesis”.
Well, no more need be said!
Everyone here, including Dr Myers, needs to stop drinking the coolaid and stop with this (not baseless) accusations of racism against some speakers of the hypothesis. For example, if Hitler or Trump (basically the same person) said that the sky is sometimes blue – that doesn’t mean the claim is wrong. The sky is sometimes blue. Also, saying that the claim is seemingly racist and therefore it’s wrong – that’s simply fallacious. For comparison, we can attack the Chinese government all day for their genocide of the Uighurs and no one is going to call me racist for that, but to suggest that there was a lab leak in a Chinese lab (an event which is depressingly common around the world), and then suddenly I’m the racist.
The truth is that both hypotheses are plausible, and it depends on how much you rate the circumstantial evidence regarding the coincidence in location of the Wuhan lab that specializes in studies of Coronaviruses, and the US intelligence report that 3 Wuhan lab Coronavirus researchers were sick in November 2021 with COVID-like symptoms (which flatly contradicts reports made by spokesperson of the lab that no researcher was sick at that time). I rate those circumstantial evidence highly, which is why I think it’s more likely than not that it was a lab leak, but even if you don’t rate those circumstantial evidence that highly, it’s preposterous to say that it’s a “debunked conspiracy-theory”. Unless you’re saying that basically every intelligence agency of the USA is full of conspiracy theorists, and especially the FBI and the DOE under Biden who report that they consider the lab leak to be the most likely explanation.
Oh wait, or are you going to rely on Fauci and and half dozen friends who are covering up any involvement that they had in this whole affair because it looks bad for them personally because of the involvement that Fauci had knowingly breaking USA rules regarding funding foreign labs doing gain of function research?
France switched most of their grid to nuclear power in just 15 years, and it was not costly or hard to do. In 10 or 15 years from now. We’ve been arguing about this for close to 10 years. I hope in another 10 years, you will see that Australia is still very far from 100% renewables for electricity generation, and I hope you remember this conversation and realize: “Gerrard was right. If only we started building nuclear power 20 years ago, we could have near zero pollution and near zero greenhouse gas emissions from our electricity production today”.
Ah yes, the elderly and otherwise distinguished scientist is actually a cabalist whose friends do stuff to the world.
Yup. Wikpedia obviously agrees:
“Anthony Stephen Fauci (/ˈfaʊtʃi/ FOW-chee;[5] born December 24, 1940) is an American physician-scientist and immunologist who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to 2022, and the chief medical advisor to the president from 2021 to 2022.[6] Fauci was one of the world’s most frequently cited scientists across all scientific journals from 1983 to 2002.[7][8] In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, for his work on the AIDS relief program PEPFAR.”
Obviously, a nefarious mad scientist who secretly did mad science using Chinese labs in China in order to disregard USA rules. Mwahahah!
—
[Hey, Gerrard, been following Aussie news recently?]
I remember the news, sometimes.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/03/anthony-fauci-covid-19-threats-harassment
—
Hey, Gerrard, are you familiar with the sacrificial lamb metaphor?
[nicer than a scapegoat, but similar]
Being the target of a harassment campaign doesn’t mean he’s not guilty of some of the things that he is accused of. He did willfully and knowingly violate a ban on foreign funding for the Wuhan lab for gain of function research, and he did lie about this in front of Congress under oath. This is true regardless of whether some Republicans are harassing him or claiming wildly ridiculous things involving a sex slave ring in the non existent basement of a pizza shop.
mmmhmm.
Or so you claim.
Or so you claim.
Wow.
There you go. Look at the unbounded power of an elderly medical scientist and his alleged friends!
Mocking the law! Doing mad science!!
—
You are funny, Gerrard.
See here for a discussion of basic background.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/10/29/repeated-claim-that-fauci-lied-congress-about-gain-of-function-research/Here’s some newer and specific information about what he did know before he lied to congress under oath. Fauci knew that they were conducting gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan institute, and he lied about it later under oath to congress.
https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/fauci-nih-wuhan-coronaviruses/https://michaelbalter.substack.com/p/yes-anthony-fauci-and-other-majorFauci himself sent an email about passagign the virus through micr with human ACE2 receptors, which is arguably a gain of function technique. It’s also completely impossible that Fauci would not have known about all of the things that the other researchers knew about who talked and worked in his core team on origins, and we have a lot more documents talking about other gain of function research from other researchers on that core origins team that Fauci put together.
It’s pretty clearly an orchestrated coverup done at the behest of Fauci and Collins, involved a dozen or so people. These dozen prominent people said the lab leak was a conspiracy theory in social media, and they said it was completely debunked in that Science paper. After that, tribalism took over and the urge to not step out of line took over, and people just accepted it, in spite of these internal communications being known for a long time that shows that people on his team were being pressured to come to certain conclusions based on the obvious political repercussions of blaming China for a lab leak.
On top of that, we of the possible criminal liability that Fauci has for violating the prior ban on funding this kind of research oversees,. We also know that Fauci would be highly motivated to defend gain of function research and to cover up any negatives about it because he is the biggest champion and advocate of that kind of dangerous research.
He clearly lied under oath to congress, and therefore he should be tried by a jury of his peers in court, and upon the very likely finding of guilty, he should go to jail.
Wow.
That is quite malevolent of you.
Of course, you are an internet kook and he is a respected, accomplished, humble and honest scientist.
And he is credible.
(There, there, Gerrard — you are 100% with Qanon and the MAGAs about him, so… grats?)
‘Do You Think Dr. Fauci Intentionally Lied Under Oath?’: Ex-CDC Director Gives Bombshell Testimony
https://youtu.be/95MgYyAbDwk
I have no idea why on this issue the left has circled their wagons to protect an obvious perjurer, an arrogant asshat to the extreme. Fauci is an adamant defender of the notion that we should trust him and other scientists, and they should be allowed to, and encouraged to, create viruses in the lab that, if released, could be another COVID pandemic, for the (minor) scientific value that such creation would bring. It’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This kind of research is extremely dangerous, and if not outright banned, should be under the strictest kind of regulation and scrutiny, instead of the complete lack of oversight and regulation that exists now.
I have no idea why no one here wants to discuss the real dangers that come from gain of function research, and specifically research that involves altering viruses to make them more easily infect humans, including, for example, passaging a non-human virus through mice that were genetically engineered to express human ACE2 receptors. This is exactly the kind of shit that one would expect to lead to human pandemics. It’s a horrible and dangerous practice that needs much more public scrutiny and public discussion, at minimum, and IMAO it needs a complete ban.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
Because it’s not the topic; the topic is the very conspiracy upon which you engage.
(Well, one of them)
To me, you sound exactly like one of those concerned parents that want to ban books with gay stuff.
One of the tells that we’re dealing with a kooky conspiracy theorist is that they bandy about the term “gain-of-function research” as if it’s something Bond super-villains do, rather than a tool used by legit researchers to identify mechanisms behind infection and growth.
Horsey hydration hesitance.
(I can point you to reality, but you will nonetheless curate your newspaper articles and indulge your apophenic syndrome; it is impressive, just not in the way you imagine it to be)
Yes. This is the standard argument. What is the benefit of this research vs the dangers of a leak of of such an “engineered” virus such as CARS-COVID-2 in the specific context of research that makes viruses more infectious to humans? As far as I can tell, the risks far outweigh the minor potential benefits.
The character Ian Malcolm, talking about the dangers of genetic engineering, which I think is quite apt at this point.
I am aware that this kind of research is commonplace. It is commonplace to make viruses in the lab that are more dangerous and infectious to humans. I know that we can do it. I know that we do it all the time. The real question is: Should we do it? Saying that everyone does it is not a defense for doing it.
I have yet to hear any remotely compelling knowledge that we have learned by making viruses more infectious or dangerous to humans in a lab, and I’ve looked. The best that I’ve found from the likes of Fauci is that by making the next pandemic virus in the lab from a natural virus in another animal population, we can estimate how many mutations it will take for the natural animal virus to be infectious and dangerous to humans, which can help us prioritize other research into protecting ourselves by prioritizing research into viruses that are closest to jumping to humans by natural methods.
I’m sorry, that is just not a sufficiently compelling reason to do this kind of incredibly dangerous research. This kind of research is nearly indistinguishable from creating a bio-weapon in a lab – purposefully making a virus more dangerous and infectious to humans. It should not be allowed. It absolutely scares me that it’s commonplace, and it absolutely scares me that you’re using the argument “don’t worry because it’s already commonplace”.
Dr Myers
I also don’t appreciate the dishonest fob-off that you gave to me. I have been quite clear throughout my postings here that I know that gain of function is a very broad term, and I have consistently said that my concerns are around a very narrow aspect of gain of function research, specifically research that makes viruses more infectious and dangerous to humans. Calling me a crank is fundamentally dishonest. Lots of real scientists express the same concern that I do, and say that this very narrow subset of gain of function research should be heavily limited and/or banned. For example,
Duprex, W., Fouchier, R., Imperiale, M. et al. Gain-of-function experiments: time for a real debate. Nat Rev Microbiol 13, 58–64 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro3405
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro3405
You can disagree with this view, and argue that the benefits are worth the risks, but it’s dishonest to say that the alternative position being presented is illegitimate. You are better than this. Be better.
While the National Intelligence Council and four unnamed agencies assessed that natural exposure to an infected animal was the most likely scenario for the first human infection…
Read the parts I’ve bolded, SLOWLY AND CAREFULLY. It doesn’t support your claims.
In 2021, a U.S. intelligence report identified three researchers at the Wuhan institute who sought treatment at a hospital after falling ill in November 2019 — providing inconclusive, circumstantial evidence that appeared to bolster a hypothesis that the virus may have spread to humans after escaping from the lab.
Again, read the parts I’ve bolded. They’re admitting the “evidence” is nowhere near conclusive. All it says, in fact, is that someone who worked at the lab — and also just happened to live in a big city that had a wet-market, remember — got sick.
Your lab-leak claims are bullshit, unsupported, and already debunked long ago. If you actually bothered to read the endless walls o’ text you post here, you’d know how lame your “case” is.
Also, saying that the claim is seemingly racist and therefore it’s wrong – that’s simply fallacious.
Once again, you’re lying about what we’re saying, and you know it. What we’re saying is: it’s DEBUNKED therefore it’s wrong, and continuing to repeat this debunked claim is racist.
Being the target of a harassment campaign doesn’t mean he’s not guilty of some of the things that he is accused of.
No, the falsehood of the accusations means he’s not guilty of the things that he is accused of.
Dr Myers, I also don’t appreciate the dishonest fob-off that you gave to me.
Yeah, well, we don’t appreciate your endless copy-pasting walls of text and gumming up a forum with sheer quantity of text in place of quality. Although I do admit it’s amusing when we find those tiny gems in your trainloads of crap that totally undercut the claims you think you’re supporting.
Calling me a crank is fundamentally dishonest. Lots of real scientists express the same concern that I do…
There’s nothing at all dishonest about calling you a crank, because you consistently ACT like a crank. And citing someone else who shares your “concern” doesn’t make you less of a crank.
And if we really need to have any sort of a “discussion” or “debate” about any important issue, then obviously-irrational cranks like you SHOULD NOT be included in any such discussion. Important safety issues are for SANE ADULTS to discuss; and you’re clearly not acting sane, or honest.
Ian Malcolm is a fictional character, authored by a man who made his fortune writing about the horrors of science & technology.
In the paper you cite, Duprex says:
You only cite Relman. Like a crank.
Morales @63: (There, there, Gerrard — you are 100% with Qanon and the MAGAs about him, so… grats?)
Yeah, I really hate to say this, but it really does look like GOTS is acting here as a Retrumplitarian plant, working, with malicious intent, to once again distract public attention away from their own disastrous performance and toward whatever scapegoat seems handy on any given day.
I mean, God’s death, Retrumplitarians gave us that quinine stuff, ivermectin, bleach injections, some loony quack from Africa, “herd immunity” that never happened, and gods know what other malicious sadistic con-games in place of sensible policy…but we’re all supposed to think FAUCI is the bad guy?! I bet Putin, Xi and Khameini are all laughing their asses off at this endless shitshow…
Morales: “Today (around a week before winter solstice) I got 24 Kwh.”
GOTS: “France switched most of their grid to nuclear power in just 15 years, and it was not costly or hard to do…” blah blah etc.
Me: Yeah, John, you’re a total dumbass, you shoulda waited 15 more years and got one of them quik-built French nuclear reactors installed on your roof!
Raging Bee
Lying partisan hack who cannot even admit that the FBI and the DOE both say that the lab leak is more likely than all alternatives, and that most of the other USA intelligence agencies say that the lab leak hypothesis is at least plausible.
Dr Myers
Sorry, why is Relman a crank? Did you mean to say he’s a crank? Is he a respectable person? What about the rest of the Cambridge Working Group who are concerned that some experiments on viruses are too dangerous to do?
I tried to briefly research why Relman might be a crank, but I came up short. The only other controversy that I could find which he was apart of was Dr Atlas’s public policy approach to reach herd immunity through unconstrained public infection, and Relman said that was a stupid idea, aka he’s on the correct side of that issue.
So, I take it that you have strong personal feelings on this matter from your own experience in the lab. Do you think that there should be no oversight or rules governing hypothetical experiments like making ebola become highly infectious via air transmission? Do you really think that we should just trust the individual scientists to do the right thing? Currently, there are no rules at all to even require a certain bio-security level lab to run that kind of experiment. I think that’s outright obscene and wildly dangerous. Cannot we have a public conversation about what precautions should be required by law, and also what experiments, if any, should simply be banned? Or do you think you shouldn’t have any oversight on matters of bio-safety and preventing the next pandemic?
PS: because it really looks like you’re adopting the position “don’t worry, trust us, we don’t need legal oversight”, which is simply a complete non-starter for me.
What? I don’t understand. This is either a strawman (I never suggested that there would be residential roof-mounted nuclear power plants; I have always suggested medium-large centralized nuclear power plants) or a non-sequitir: In order to help solve for climate change, air pollution, and national energy security and independence, John, and Australia at large, needs safe, clean, cheap, abundant, scalable, reliable electricity generation. For those goals, it is not a requirement that power plants go on residential roofs.
Can’t you make a single post that argues in good faith?
Stupid scientists, stupidly pretending to do sciency stuff, getting away with no oversight.
Here’s Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory#Accidental_release_of_a_genetically_modified_virus
(my emphasis)
John,
And yet, there might be oversight in some sense, but there are no laws that actually require a certain bio-safety level lab to conduct any of the experiments that we’re talking about. There is no legally enforceable classification scheme saying “this experiments needs this level of bio-safety, and this one is too dangerous and is simply banned”. It seems like you are also endorsing the position that we should simply trust the scientists to do the right thing and we shouldn’t have any proper legal oversight and regulations, which I still think is obscene.
This just seems so ridiculous. It’s like in the Twilight zone. Many posters here over-worry to an extreme degree about nuclear power plant accidents, but they’re incredibly rare, and their impact is far far less than a COVID pandemic. However, when we talk about other scientists doing work in labs where if there’s an accident (and there will be accidents), the impact will be thousands or millions of times larger than any conceivable nuclear power plant accident. Yet, I’m being brushed off as a conspiracy theorist and a crank for expressing genuine worry about scientists creating the next viral pandemic in a lab, and how there are no hard legal requirements for safety precautions for doing so, and regardless of what safety precautions you have, there will be accidents and leaks at some rate, meaning that we need to do a proper cost-benefit analysis, weighing the cost of a leak times the rates of leaks, compared to the typical and expected benefits of this kind of research.
tl;dr This shit is way scarier than any nuclear power plant accident. Nuclear power plant accidents can’t kill tens of millions of people. A viral pandemic can.
Not sure what part of “the intense scrutiny and government oversight gain-of-function research is subject to” eluded you, Gerrard. You clearly have zero idea of what he applicable principles, rules and regulations apply to this sort of research, but they are quite strict and onerous.
cf. https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/attachments/publications/National-Statement-Ethical-Conduct-Human-Research-2023.pdf
You assert that, but I don’t believe you.
Again: “Virologist Angela Rasmussen writes that this is unlikely, due to the intense scrutiny and government oversight gain-of-function research is subject to”.
I reckon a virologist might know a bit more than you about the applicable regulations and oversight regarding research on viruses.
(There are indeed “hard legal requirements for safety precautions” regarding nuclear power plants, but)
John
Why are you citing a research scientist on this matter as though they are in any way trustworthy? Would you treat an oil executive as a reliable source if they were saying that there was too much safety regulations and red tape in oil drilling? Why do you think that practicing scientists are these mythical super-beings who never lie or cheat? They’re human just like the rest of us, and of course we shouldn’t just believe one of them picked at random when it comes to the matter of their own regulations. Don’t listen to the fox when it comes to how we should guard the hens.
There are no laws in the USA regarding the necessary level of bio-safety lab to do this kind of research.
What that scientist is likely complaining about is some oversight that the federal government imposes as a condition for funding grants. Those rules were recently made more strict.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/science/covid-lab-leak-biosafety-rules-virus-research.html
Even then, these new rules still do absolutely nothing about the specific concern that I have:
“Disease surveillance” is AFAIK codespeak for precisely this sort of gain of function research that takes natural viruses and more them more dangerous or infectious to humans in the lab, meaning that these new controls on federal funding do not apply.
And this is exactly what Fauci et al want – no meaningful oversight of any kind. For Fauci specifically, he seems like he’s on a one-man religious crusade to protect this dangerous research from oversight because he genuinely believes that’s for the greater good. I strongly disagree with his risk and benefit analysis. It just seems like another old white male who is supremely arrogant and doesn’t want anyone else telling him what he can and cannot do.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/dual-use-research/expert-recommendations-gain-function-research-aim-boost-safety-transparency
Its the wild west. There are no rules, just whatever best practices that are imposed by your university / laboratory / funding source, which might not be worth the paper that it’s printed on because of the lack of proper regulatory oversight.
Good grief!
Sure, your opinion is much, much more trustworhy.
Bullshit.
One click, and here I go: https://www.selectagents.gov/overview/index.htm
[also, Wuhan is not in the USA]
Non-sequitur. No relevance to gain of function research on viruses that makes them more infectious or dangerous to humans.
From your source:
Did you even read it?
Complete non-sequitur.
Horsey hydration hesitancy:
Directly on point.
You are arguing from a position of ignorance, and claiming you know better than actual scientists working in the specific field is not exactly a sensible attitude.
—
https://www.selectagents.gov/compliance/faq/index.htm
“The following biological agents and toxins have been determined to have the potential to pose a severe threat to both human and animal health, to plant health, or to animal and plant products. An attenuated strain of a select agent or an inactive form of a select toxin may be excluded from the requirements of the Select Agent Regulations.”
Examples:
“19. SARS-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV) [5]
20. SARS-CoV/SARS-CoV-2 chimeric viruses resulting from any deliberate manipulation of SARS-CoV-2 to incorporate nucleic acids coding for SARS-CoV virulence factors”
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47114/4
I stand partially corrected. If it’s on that list, then some federal oversight actually exists. However, it wouldn’t apply to any other virus that isn’t on that list. This is a huge oversight.
As per your #91, that list is reviewed regularly, as often as necessary and at the very least every 2 years.
You quoted that.
Presumably (and I’m not gonna pore over the documents of the first source of regulation I found so easily) concerned people report their concerns to the regulator and that report is evaluated by experts and so forth.
I reckon that, should I look deeper, I’d find even more axes of regulatory oversight, direct or indirect.
Complicated place, the USA.
And, of course, when Chinese laboratories are involved, it’s not just medical regulatory bodies that might legitimately take an interest in the science and procedures at hand.
Why are you citing a research scientist on this matter as though they are in any way trustworthy?
Why are you banging on and on with sometimes-incoherent walls of text as if sheer quantity of comments and repetitive assertions of already-debunked claims makes YOU in any way trustworthy?
Oh, and the ORIGINAL SUBJECT OF THIS POST was the lab-leak theory and the lying bigoted con-men keeping it “alive” (undead?) for malicious purposes. Lab safety and security issues are a totally different subject. I suspect you have some ulterior motive for changing the subject so aggressively…
[meta]
Nope.
Lab safety and security issues are at the heart of the lab-leak theory, whether or not malicious or intentional.
An unwarranted suspicion. Gerrard is entirely on topic, no subject has been changed.
And no ulterior motive, either; I’ve interacted here and elseblog with Gerrard for quite a few years now, and earnestness is his mode.
He means what he says and he says what he means, generally speaking.
Liberties at times, but vehemence ensues when he finds himself one against many.
Anyway, I do like you, so I advise you that you’d do far better to argue the merits of his position than to insinuate about his (suspected) scheming and speculate on its basis.
At least for me, that is counter-productive. Sniping at the person. Not worth it.
—
That’s what makes it a conspiracy theory. It’s basically unfalsifiable.
Lab safety and security issues are at the heart of the lab-leak theory, whether or not malicious or intentional.
Bullshit. First, the lab-leak “theory” or “hypothesis” (scare-quotes because it’s really neither of those things) is driven more by plain old bigotry and desperate diversionary scapegoating than by any actual informed safety concerns. Just like “Satanic panic” was (and still is) driven more by much the same things than by sincere concern for children’s safety. (Do you really think the Republicans who are ganging up on Fauci and our entire public-health establishment (such as it is) want to have MORE big-gummint safety regulations?)
And second, the lab-leak claims have been debunked, so it really does no one any good to say that valid concerns about lab security are, or should be, in any way connected to debunked and malicious claims.
Really.
I dare you to attempt to try to elaborate upon this claim.
So. Let’s take Orac’s opening snippet in what PZ quoted: “Even so, before I close, let me just reiterate that it is not impossible that SARS-CoV-2 arose in a lab, either due to scientists carrying out modifications on existing coronaviruses or from a collection of natural coronaviruses, in which the virus escaped.”
So, “either due to scientists carrying out modifications on existing coronaviruses or from a collection of natural coronaviruses, in which the virus escaped.”
(All these quotations are from the OP)
How, without lab safety or security issues being a central factor could such a theory be sufficiently plausible that even Orac (used to blog in SB, back in the day — Oracknows) acknowledges it’s unfalsifiable?
You’re basically doing the same as the person about whom you insinuate, just from the opposite direction.
Um. If you think so, then so it is for you.
Of course, you earlier wrote that “Lab safety and security issues are a totally different subject”, in reference to the lab-leak claims.
Which means that you must perforce believe that evaluating those claims do not require considerations about either lab safety or security issues, lest you yourself seem disingenuous.
John Morales
For what you said to Raging Bee, thank you.
For the correction as well, thank you.
Have a good day.
Which means that you must perforce believe that evaluating those claims do not require considerations about either lab safety or security issues, lest you yourself seem disingenuous.
These particular lab-leak claims were indeed evaluated based on known differences between COVID-19 and what was in the lab, without having to consider safety or security issues specific to the particular lab in question. And the people still pushing such claims aren’t doing it to highlight specific safety concerns either.
Right, right. And therefore, there is no need at all to consider safety or security issues (specific to the particular lab in question!) when evaluating the lab-leak claim.
It could not possibly be that, say, a novel and unique strain was taken out of the lab so that no sample of that strain remained in the lab, for $NEFARIOUS$ or $MADSCIENCE$ purposes.
That is just, how do we express that? Ah yes, inconceivable!
Definitely debunked, because you say so.
(I mean, what would Orac know? ;) )
[btw — this made me sad: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-12/animals-killed-as-fire-rips-through-bangkok-pet-market/103967154 ]
Following on (sorry): The reason I say there’s no connection between these lab-leak claims and specific security concerns, is that (AFAIK at least) the people pushing the claim never made any such connection themselves. As Gerrard has admitted, all they have is “it’s possible, therefore we shouldn’t discount it.” (Which is a wee bit like saying “murders are known to happen, therefore we shouldn’t discount the possibility that Gerrard may have murdered…someone or other at a date I don’t feel I have to specify…) I don’t recall hearing anything to the effect of “evidence suggests that on [date] [time], viral matter inadvertently got transported outside on a lab-tech’s shoes due to [failure to follow procedure X]/[some action that wasn’t sufficiently covered by our rules]/[whatever else]. Specific allegations like that would (and should) indeed have led to serious discussion about safety protocols. But in the absence of any such specifics, these particular lab-leak claims aren’t really connected to specific safety/security issues.
Whoever has actual knowledge/experience of lab-safety issues and procedures can bring it up and get a debate going. But Gerrard isn’t in that group, and neither are any of the Retrumplitarians flogging this lab-leak BS, and AFAIK neither are you or I (though maybe someone else on FTB is?).
PZ, for one. Used to stick electrodes in cats’ brains, and dissect specimens and stuff, back in the day.
Before he moved on to the cute creatures.
cf. ” Spinal motoneurons of the larval zebrafish
P Z Myers PMID: 4056102 DOI: 10.1002/cne.902360411 “
[can’t resist]
—
Abstract
Application of horseradish peroxidase to lesions of the muscles and the central nervous system of larval zebrafish Brachydanio rerio was used to identify several types of neurons present in the spinal cord. The spinal cord was found to contain three distinct motoneuronal types: primary and secondary motoneurons that innervate the axial muscles, and pectoral fin motoneurons that innervate the muscles of the pectoral girdle. The cell types are similar to those described in larvae of other anamniote vertebrates. The axial muscles of a given hemisegment are innervated by two or three primary motoneurons and a larger number of secondary motoneurons in the corresponding spinal segment, whereas fin muscles are innervated by a pool of motoneurons spanning several spinal segments.
—
That’s some mad scientist stuff right there. For sure.
(Herbert West types, they are)
Yes and no. Had they found direct precursors in animals in the wet market, that would be compelling evidence. Similarly, had they found a direct precursor in the lab, that would also be compelling evidence. As it stands now, it seems unlikely that we’ll rule out either explanation. However, I don’t like referring to either position as “unfalsifiable”, because that sneaks in additional baggage. They are falsifiable, and also it seems unlikely that we will find enough evidence either way to falsify either position, in large part to the coverup and stalling tactics of the CCP during the early stages of the pandemic.
Well, most people acknowledge it’s possible (obs, some don’t) but not everyone acknowledges it’s plausible.
Suspicion and possibility don’t plausibility make, and I’ve noticed that the more relevant expertise someone has, the less likelihood they assign to that possibility.
—
In passing, notice the OP refers to “the “lab leak” nonsense promoted by Alina Chan and the NY Times”; that specificity is necessary because there are multiple such “theories”.
Some are more plausible than the others, and I reckon that those that rely on the USA and China collaboratively researching the weaponisation of viruses in a China lab as minimally plausible as could be.
This is just an argument over priors. Lab leaks are depressingly common according to the wikipedia article that I cited above. Those are lab leaks of existing diseases, and not novel pandemics. The thing is, the number of novel pandemics in recent human history is really small, and so it’s hard to get precise priors. I do know that lab leaks of diseases happen all the time. I don’t know how you would form really strong priors in favor of a zoonotic transfer compared to an iatrogenic transfer (which I mean to include accidental lab leaks of samples collected from the wild, and accidental lab leaks of samples that were modified, such as through passage of ACE2 mice).
Again:
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/u-s-intel-report-identified-3-wuhan-lab-researchers-who-n1268327
The Chinese official lied about this. The Chinese official said that none of the researchers were sick at the time. And yet US intelligence says that they were sick at this time. This is still extremely circumstantial, but it is specific to the alternative hypothesis. It also supports the premise that we should have had from the start: which is that if the CCP denies something which would be embarrassing to the CCP, then they’re just as likely lying about it compared to telling the truth, aka the word of a CCP-aligned official is worthless. Loosely, we should assume that they are willing to lie about anything and everything until proven otherwise.
That’s not the way that our democracy works. It is incumbent upon all of us to do enough research to be at least somewhat informed in our voting decisions. This is a very important issue to me if I go to the polls. Nowhere near enough to vote Republican, but enough to make a big difference between Democratic candidates in a primary. So, I’m trying to educate myself through research and conversations like this so that I can make a better, more informed, decision. Again, I think it is completely unacceptable to say that the scientists should have zero legal oversight. As to what sort of oversight and rules are needed, I admit ignorance. That’s why I’m here asking those questions to try to fill the gaps in my knowledge.
Gerrard: the article you cite does not establish that those lab employees got sick from viruses that were in the lab; and (again) it flatly admits up front that “the evidence is far from conclusive.” TWICE. That’s still nowhere near the specific chain of events I was asking for. And no, “the CCP lies about stuff” doesn’t count as evidence either, even though we know they do.
…I think it is completely unacceptable to say that the scientists should have zero legal oversight.
Has anyone here said that? I never did.
It is incumbent upon all of us to do enough research to be at least somewhat informed in our voting decisions.
That’s exactly what I’m doing here: trying to stay focused on the actions of a party of dangerous fascists, who want to both retake power and avoid accountability for their actions. And I’m pointing out that their lab-leak allegations are part of that campaign for power, and that therefore, we should recognize it as such and not let them control the public dialogue, or incite indiscriminate fear and hysteria with bogus scapegoating allegations. Given how those fascists managed COVID-19 before, I’d say this is a much more immediate and pressing security concern, at least this year, than safety-procedures questions in virology labs (which I’m less competent to talk about anyway).
And if you really care about better regulation of dangerous enterprises, you would join with me to make sure the anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-science party doesn’t get to power again. ‘Cuz trust me, they really don’t give a shit about public safety or disease control — that’s not why they’re talking about a lab leak. You want a serious debate about lab safety? Vote the bigots and loonies out first.
Loosely, we should assume that they are willing to lie about anything and everything until proven otherwise.
Shouldn’t we be making the same assumption about the Republicans who are pushing the lab-leak allegations? When have they ever been more honest than the CCP?
Again, even Hitler or Trump can be right about something. Just because they said it first does not make it automatically wrong. It might be that, and it might also be true. I care about whether it’s true. Moreso, I care about the risk of it happening (again) in the future, and what can be done to prevent it, and I currently strongly distrust the people in power to be able to make the correct decisions due to their obvious biases and complicity in the cover-up. They still covered it up whether or not the lab leak actually happened. There can be a cover up without an actual underlying incident.
And again, you speak as though that I’m going to vote Republican over this. I’m not.
Or do you mean I should shut up because it hurts our chances in the election? No. First, even if it was true, I disagree. We need to be better than them. We should not adopt such a low standard for lying for our benefit, or staying silent about a very important issue because it’s inconvenient.
Second, I think it hurts our side to do that because it makes us look like partisan hacks and that turns off the undecided middle. As a general belief, I believe that lying is almost always counterproductive for our side with regard to winning elections.
I simply do not like how you have taken it up ok yourself to decide what issues we can and cannot speak about. You are baby steps away from doing a Dear Muslima.
You simply are not honestly engaging with reality. Fauci and friends made it into a partisan issue. It’s not just Republicans who are pushing the lab leak theory. It’s our entire intelligence community. It’s not just Republicans saying that Fauci lied under oath to Congress and organized a cover-up. But you’re too much of a partisan hack to see it, and you’re going to turn off the undecided middle with your flagrantly dishonest antics. We must be better.
Not just Republicans pushing the plausibility of the lab leak theory…
Get fucking lost Gerrard. Nobody is interested in reading your delusional ramblings. You need help. Fuck off. You have lost any good will and credibility long ago.
Thinking of spreading info – and misinfo, this has just come to lightand is utterly sick :
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2024/04/07/infinite-thread-xxxi/comment-page-5/#comment-2224375
@ GOTS : “Fauci and friends made it into a partisan issue.”
That’s a pretty appalling disgusting lie and bit of victim blaming there GOTS.
Again, even Hitler or Trump can be right about something.
Yes, and we acknowledge this when the something is already well-known or independently verified. Neither of these has happened for the lab-leak “theory.”
Just because [Retrumplitarians] said it first does not make it automatically wrong.
The fact that it’s been shown (both here and elsewhere) to be utterly lacking in supporting evidence does make it manually wrong.
Fauci and friends made it into a partisan issue.
Kindly take your standard Republican projection and shove it back where it came from.
It’s not just Republicans who are pushing the lab leak theory. It’s our entire intelligence community.
YOUR OWN CITATIONS admit otherwise. Do you even CARE what the articles you’ve cited actually say?
First, even if it was true, I disagree. We need to be better than them.
How is letting Retrumplitarians redirect and misdirect our attention whenever they want “being better than them?” How is letting them put us on the defensive and control the dialogue “being better than them?”
We should not adopt such a low standard for lying for our benefit, or staying silent about a very important issue because it’s inconvenient.
What, you don’t think Retrumplitarian incompetence, bigotry and scapegoating is a “very important issue?”
Now you’re starting to sound like the last active shill for the Democratic Losership Council. Do I need to remind you that Joe Lieberman is dead and his fellow “moderates” have all given up and slunk off into comfy irrelevance? You should follow their example.
Not just Republicans pushing the plausibility of the lab leak theory…
Oh yeah, a groundswell of millions of people all over the world admitting a lab-leak is not physically impossible. Color me impressed!
Annual Review of Virology, “The Emergence and Evolution of SARS-CoV-2”: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-virology-093022-013037
The above is a very interesting read, linked by Orac. Some interesting excerpts:
Also interesting:
(my emphasis).
Thanks for the cite, lotharloo.
Oh, and…”humanized mice?” Like…Pikachu?
In the news: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/15/anthony-fauci-job-offers-pharm-industry
This relies on the assumption that the CCP didn’t try to cover it up. They might have found earlier cases and confirmed them with blood tests, but they could have hid this information.
Again, the three sick researchers one month earlier that worked at the Wuhan lab. Their symptoms were consistent with (but not proof of) COVID. Before this knowledge became public, the Chinese officials said that no researchers were sick at that time, which we know now is a lie. They covered this up. Was it COVID? Was it not? We’ll never know, because any blood samples that might have been taken were “accidentally” lost, I’m sure.
This relies on the assumption that the CCP didn’t try to cover it up. I hope you’re seeing a trend here.
So, they hadn’t published any results yet, and the CCP hid any pre-prints and any earlier work.
You’re ignoring evidence that contradicts your preferred narrative, and your argument rests almost entirely on the assumption that if it was a lab leak, then the CCP would not cover it up, which is preposterous. On the contrary, if there was a lab leak, the chances that the CCP would cover up this information is near 100%. You have to interpret all of the evidence in light of this – presumably non-controversial – fact. Remember, it’s official policy of the CCP to push the (ridiculous) idea that the outbreak did not start in the Wuhan wet market, and instead it came from frozen food from some other country. Anything that the Chinese government says is equally likely to be a lie as the truth, which tears down almost all of the arguments that you just brought
Why are you being such a shill for the CCP?
Yep, that’s a hallmark of a deranged conspiracy-theory: “Lack of evidence proves there’s a cover-up, and coutervailing evidence proves how powerful and pervasive the cover-up really is!”
John
Fauci’s household net worth increased by 5 million USD from the start to end of years, and he was making nearly 500,000 USD in just yearly salary IIRC in his last year at the job. Combined with the obvious benefits of being in the highest positions of government power, and it’s pretty clear why an arrogant slimy asshole like Fauci stayed in government.
But there is plenty of evidence. I’ve cited it. Such as the three sick researchers which contradicts the prior CCP narrative. We’ve already caught them out in at least one clear lie, showing that they did indeed cover up some evidence that circumstantially implicated the lab.
I’m sorry. You’re simply wrong. Conspiracies happen all the time, and the fucking Chinese Communist Party covers up things all of the time. Far from an extreme ad hoc assumption, this is a common, mundane assumption.
You have been wrongly trained to believe that humans never lie, or that humans never work together to lie to protect their own power, and worse, you’re applying this reasoning to the fucking CCP. You need to get out in the real world and touch grass, and see that humans lie all of the time. Eye witness testimony is one of the worst kinds of evidence, and worse, you’re relying on the eye witness testimony of an accused party which the biggest track record in history the planet of engaging in widespread conspiracy coverups.
Are you saying that the CCP wouldn’t have covered it up? Or are you saying that the proposed coverup exceeds the reasonable abilities of the CCP? Or are you saying that claims of coverup are always crankish? I don’t even.
Paraphrasing your arguments: “Yea, we know it wasn’t a lab leak because all of the evidence that the CCP provided indicates that it wasn’t a lab leak”. Jesus Christ.
I remind you that at the start of the outbreak, China was already in full damage control mode, silencing anyone who even suggested that there was a new virus spreading in the population. So this is the group that you’re going to place any trust in whatsoever? I just don’t understand.
You have been wrongly trained to believe that humans never lie…
God’s balls, you’re an idiot. Go the fuck to bed.
Either there wasn’t a lab leak, and the CCP is trying to cover up anything that might (wrongly) implicate them, e.g. lying about the 3 sick Wuhan lab researchers, or there was a lab leak, in which case it’s almost certain that the CCP would have tried to cover it up. That’s how proper evidentiary reasoning works, rather than starting with these completely asinine positions “one should always discount a conspiracy unless you have overwhelming evidence otherwise” plus “the natural zoonotic crossover is the default position unless you have overwhelming evidence that it a lab leak”.
Regarding the second assumption, how did you even arrive at that assumption? Lab leaks of diseases are very common. Why do you think that a zoonotic transfer is the more likely outcome on mere background knowledge? How many zoonotic transfers of novel viruses have there been in the last century vs transfers via human medical practice? For novel viruses in particular, HIV-AIDS and SV-40 crossed over from animals to humans because of polio vaccines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SV40
How many happen with zoonotic transfers?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4629502/
So, 2 known iatrogenic transfers in the last 100 years, and like 200-300 zoonotic transfers in the last 100 years. So, sure, I grant that zoonotic is a good default assumption without any other evidence. So, that suggests 100 to 1 prior that it’s zoonotic.
However, we know that one of the few labs in the world working with Coronaviruses is there, and we know that 3 researchers working at the lab got sick with COVID-like symptoms a month before the outbreak at the wet market. We also know that they were in fact doing gain of function research on COVID-like viruses, such as passing them through ACE2 mice (which is an absolutely great way to take a bat virus and make it able to easily infect humans). This is just what we know – they might have been and IIRC were using other techniques to make COVID-like viruses be more infectious to humans.
I would say that this is about all we know for any certainty. Anything else comes to us from the filter of the CCP. So, how much do you value those two highly circumstantial pieces of evidence? That’s the question. It’s hard to put numbers to it, but I think these pieces of evidence come close to, or IMO exceed, our 100 to 1 prior that it was zoonotic.
“Russia isn’t using Facebook trolls to try to subvert the election. Authoritarian governments like Russia and China never try to suppress the truth and replace it with a false narrative.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/covid-early-cases-wuhan-china-mystery/
.
.
.
.
.
What more do you need to accept that the CCP was covering it up, whether or not it was a lab leak? The only question is whether they were covering up a lab leak or covering up a zoonotic transfer at the wet market.
Either there wasn’t a lab leak, and the CCP is trying to cover up anything that might (wrongly) implicate them…
Well, the lab-leak claims are, at best, unsupported, and you said yourself that the CCP can always be counted on to lie through their teeth about everything, as totalitarian regimes are known to do. So yes, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to suspect.
Final one for now: But seriously, it looks like your position is “Oh yea, the CCP was covering up the wet market zoonotic transfer. That’s not crankish. However, the idea that the CCP was covering up a lab leak? Crank!”
Also, Gerrard, whose words are in your scare-quotes @130? They’re not mine. Seriously, what the fuck’s wrong with you?
…it looks like your position is…
It looks to me like you need better reading-glasses. AND professional help.
So too is the wet market zoonotic transfer. We have maybe 100 to 1 prior probability that it’s a zoonotic transfer as opposed to some accident of human medicine practice, and we have very interesting circumstantial evidence favoring the accident of human medicine practice, specifically: the location of the Wuhan lab working on coronaviruses and the relative lack of other such labs around the world, and the 3 sick researchers with COVID-like symptoms at the start of the outbreak who also worked at the Wuhan lab, and knowledge that the Wuhan lab was doing work to make coronaviruses that were more infectious to humans. You have to weight that circumstantial evidence against the 100 to 1 prior. As far as I’m aware right now, there is no other relevant trustworthy evidence which has not been irrevocably tainted by the CCP.
It’s called mockery. I’m mocking you.
Oh yea, the CCP was covering up the wet market zoonotic transfer. That’s not crankish. However, the idea that the CCP was covering up a lab leak? Crank!
Dude, you’ve flat-out claimed the CCP lie about damn near everything — so why would you not accept that they might have lied about zoontic transfer at that wet market?
Once again: “the CCP lies about stuff” doesn’t count as “evidence” for any accusation.
We have maybe 100 to 1 prior probability that it’s a zoonotic transfer…
Yeah those are pretty strong odds.
In passing, it’s been decades now that people who know about this stuff have been warning of the rapidly-increasing risk of zoonotic transmissions due to climate change.
(Mozzies, too)
<clickety-click>
Ah, still going on. Of course.
https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=zoonotic+risks+climate+change&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart
John Morales @#140
Yup I learned about it, and about the probability of a major pandemic roughly every hundred years I think first at school, but certainly at university back in the early 1980s and it wasn’t new or contentious then.
…we have very interesting circumstantial evidence favoring the accident of human medicine practice, specifically: the location of the Wuhan lab working on coronaviruses and the relative lack of other such labs around the world…
First, what the fuck do you mean by that silly vague phrase “relative lack?” There’s PLENTY of other such labs around the world, you dimwit. And second, lotharloo @130 already addressed that “funny coincidence,” and your only response was “yabbut the evil Chinese might have covered other cases up!”
…and the 3 sick researchers with COVID-like symptoms at the start of the outbreak who also worked at the Wuhan lab…
You’re repeating a claim that’s already been refuted several times on this thread alone. Most of the initial cases were clustered around the wet market, not the lab; and the mere fact that people who worked at the lab got sick, isn’t evidence that they got their disease from inside the lab.
You can’t prove shit, and you have no credibility, so why don’t you just SHUT THE FUCK UP AND MOVE ON ALREADY? Maybe because you don’t WANT to move on…?
In passing, it’s been decades now that people who know about this stuff have been warning of the rapidly-increasing risk of zoonotic transmissions due to climate change.
Funny thing, the people trying to push this lab-leak story, and discount the zoontic transmission story, just happen to be the party who’ve been tying themselves in knots trying to deny that global warming is real. Wow, what an amazing coincidence that probably isn’t!
@gerrardtheclown:
Yeah three researchers out of tens of researchers and possibly hundreds of employees catching cold a month before the pandemic is a sign of cover up. Fucking clown.
Fuck off Gerrard, you have written at least 50 posts on this thread and roughly a third of all the comments. Nobody wants to read your drivel. Seek help.
More from the clown:
The Reality: “There is no evidence, either in published or unpublished works, that WIV had any virus that was remotely related to sars-cov-1 viruses.
The clown: “So, they hadn’t published any results yet, and the CCP hid any pre-prints and any earlier work.”
100% Crack logic, I mean after all, if the lack of evidence doesn’t prove a cover up, what does? srsly
Ok the above should be cov-2 virus. They only had cov-1, but of course we know that’s because Chineeze guvimment did cuve4 up, leik Twooo Monthrlz before the demic!!!!!!!!!! How else u splain 3 sick ppl? It’s all cover up, I telz u.
This is apparently a lie.
Orac, among others points this out.
.1. There is no source for those 3 researchers from WIV who supposedly got sick in late 2019.
It is from an “American Intelligence source” who don’t give their source. It is an anonymous source and could well be just something made up to make the Chinese government look bad. It originally appeared in…the Wall Street Journal, an unreliable far right wingnut newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch the Fox news owner.
.2. Those 3 researchers who supposedly got Covid-19 in 2019 are still very much alive. You can talk to them right now.
They deny that they were ever sick and were ever in the hospital.
This means that the claim that “3 WIV scientists were sick and patients zero in 2019” is unproven at best and probably a lie.
.3. Orac points out a huge contradiction with that claim. “I also cited Michael Hiltzik, who quite reasonably pointed out:
Virologists point out, moreover, that it would be unlikely for COVID to affect only three people seriously enough to warrant hospital care without infecting hundreds of others in the lab or their households. The other victims might have had milder symptoms, but an outbreak of that magnitude would have been difficult to keep under wraps.
The virus, apparently, is exactly as transmissible at every time point as lab leak conspiracy theorists need it to be, no more and no less.”
Those 3 researchers supposedly had a novel, highly transmissable and lethal virus and somehow never managed to infect the Wuhan Institute of Virology, their families, and the local hospitals. This isn’t what you expect from patients 0, 1, and 2.
.4. All of the known early cases of Covid-19 virus do cluster.
They cluster around the Wuhan Seafood Market where they were selling a variety of live mammals. They don’t cluster around WIV which is quite a ways away.
The 3 sick scientists claim is from unreliable sources, not confirmed, denied, and not very plausible.
It isn’t evidence for anything much less a lab leak of Covid-19 virus.
Science magazine, a source far more reliable than the Wall Street Journal, shreds the 3 sick scientists claim. It is just a lie.
Here is the full article from Science, 2023.
It’s a bit long for a comment but it shreds the 3 sick scientists claim so I’ll copy the whole thing.
@raven:
Yes, you are absolutely right. The “3 sick researchers” claim is unverified which confirm it is a cover up by the Chinese. And why do they deny that they were sick? I guess because the chinese government has threatened them to cover it up. But how come there are no reports of clusters of sick people which should have been there if the virus was running rampant? You guessed it, more cover up by the chinese!!!!!
It’s amazing that the evidence that COVID was intentionally engineered is so obvious that non-molecular biologists can see it, but the qualified scientists can’t.
This is the tl;dr version of the article from Science I just posted.
I know it is long and many won’t read it.
It is basically beating a dead horse anyway. The real world discarded this claim years ago.
.1. “Ben Hu denies he was sick in late 2019, or that his coronavirus work led to COVID-19, and newly declassified U.S. intelligence doesn’t substantiate allegations against him.”
.2. “A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article on 20 June that said it had “confirmed” the allegations against the three, without referring to any public evidence or named sources with direct knowledge, ”
This is a lie. The WSJ might have claimed they confirmed it, but it is obvious they didn’t and couldn’t. US Intelligence agencies couldn’t even confirm it.
.3. ” ODNI’s (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) report does not substantiate Public’s or WSJ’s accounts in any major way. ”
.4. “As for Hu, he categorically denies having anything to do with the origin of SARS-CoV-2. “I did not get sick in autumn 2019, and did not have COVID-19-like symptoms at that time,” Hu wrote. “My colleagues and I tested for SARS-CoV-2 antibody in early March 2020 and we were all negative.”
These 3 scientists who were supposedly sick with a novel, highly transmissable virus, one that can be lethal or permanently disabling, seem to be remarkably healthy.
They deny that they were at death’s door in a hospital in 2019.
They should be presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
There is no such proof.
There isn’t even a real source for the claim. It’s anonymous all the way down.
The 3 sick scientists claim has so many holes in it as to be worthless. It’s most likely a lie.
I’ve seen reports that four WIV staff members ended up in hospital in September, three with symptoms that included those of pretty much every respiratory virus going, and one with an unrelated condition. This may well be true and not in conflict with any of Hu’s statements depending on how you define when ‘fall’ is or if they were other employees not the ones that have been named. However if it is true it actually speaks against the Lab Leak conspiracy as it would require COVID to have been spreading during the autumn because we know that the longest time from infection occurring to symptoms showing is 14 days, and we know that the respiratory patients with unusual presentations didn’t start showing up at the hospitals until December.
…symptoms that included those of pretty much every respiratory virus going…
Yeah, I’ve had the flu twice since March 2020, and maybe a couple of bad colds too. Each time I either tested myself or got tested for COVID, and always came up negative. A big city like Wuhan probably always has LOTS of people down with respiratory conditions of all sorts at any given time — and all of it looks like COVID if you squint at it right.
If anyone is interested, I located the old thread where I remember previously engaging GoTS’ silly HIV conspiracy theory: Ironically enough, it’s also starts out as a post about the New York Times flubbing the Covid origin question, almost exactly three years ago. The more things change…
The debunking of GoTS (or, really, journalist Edward Hooper and his book “The River”, whose work GoTS is more or less just uncritically parroting) starts about halfway down.
I think it’s quite a good read actually, and very thorough. Commenters more knowledgeable than myself contribute, and Hooper’s fundamental scientific illteracy and bad faith are exposed very clearly. By the end, even GoTS is forced to concede, sort of, that they have fatally misunderstood the phylogenetic picture and how it comprehensively precludes an OPV origin:
Color me shocked — shocked, I say — that they’re back confidently repeating the same debunked claims three years later as if all of that never happened. It’s almost like the behavior of a crank or something.
“Hey, that sounds like me!”
And over there is Dan Fincke.
I would be no longer confident as asserting it as likely true. However, I’d still assert it as plausible.
Translation: “Okay, I really have no evidence that it happened, but I still want to believe it happened, so I’ll just keep clinging to the mere fact that it’s not physically impossible for it to happen. So there!”
Definitely a delusional crank driven and blinded by prejudice.
lecou: I went to that thread and found this quote by Gerrard:
…given the available evidence, I agree that the lab leak hypothesis seems to be pretty unlikely compared to the “natural crossover” hypothesis.
So he was actually saner back then. WTF happened to him between then and now?
@ ^ Raging Bee : Cranmk magnetism in action? Seems he’s fully jumped aboard the demonise Dr Fauci reichwing hate obsession for some reason rather than assigning blame for the US of A’s covid failures to Trump and the anti-vaxxers where its most deserved.
GoTS seems very heavily invested in Hooper’s OPV story, where “scientists are villains (and know they are, so act to pro-actively conceal their villainy)” is a key component of the narrative structure. It’s not entirely surprising that they’re now casting those same fictional characters in new situations. I’m sure this consistency in narrative really helps with the cognitive dissonance. So the COVID narrative has evolved inside their head to hit the same beats, and now apparently even Fauci is actively engaged in covering up his “crimes” (like personally funding GoF research apparently). I haven’t looked into the HeLa stuff, but no bets as to whether it repeats the pattern, or how much GoTS’ insinuations there match the real story.
I suppose some variation on “scientists are villains” is at the core of most crank-y narratives though, so perhaps crank-magnetism is the shorter way to say that.
Hey, here’s a funny coincidence: Republicans are now calling for a major reorganization of NIH…
https://www.axios.com/2024/06/17/nih-congress-funding-gain-of-function
Which confirms my suspicion that GOTS is (knowingly or not) part of this Retrumplitarian mass-distraction campaign.
In real life, Dr. Tony Fauci is one of the heroes of the Covid-19 virus pandemic fight.
All the scientists involved at NIAID, the CDC, and elsewhere had to fight a novel highly transmissable virus, while a lot of the politicians around them got in the way and sometimes actively hindered them.
He has also spend decades fighting the HIV/AIDS pandemic. We’ve made a lot of progress on that one, to the point where HIV is now a survivable disease. New infections peaked in 1995.
“New HIV infections have been reduced by 59% since the peak in 1995.”
The people attacking Tony Fauci are the same people who facilitated rather than fought the spread of the Covid-19 virus in the last few years.
The usual kooks, antivaxxers, anti-maskers, anti any public health measures to limit the spread of the virus.
Strangely enough, Fauci had to step in because the US agency in charge of fighting disease outbreaks, the US CDC was Missing In Action.
The CDC had been decimated by the GOP over many years to the point where they could no longer do their job. They really failed at the beginning of the pandemic.
NIAID had to step in because someone had to coordinate the Covid-19 virus response before millions of people died.
The death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic was US 1.4 million.
If we had done nothing, it would have been more like 5 million dead.
Raven
Says that “There is no source for those 3 researchers from WIV who supposedly got sick in late 2019”, and then gives a source for it in the next post. Bravo.
“They deny that they were ever sick and were ever in the hospital.” — Have you ever heard of this thing called “lying”?
“Virologists point out, moreover, that it would be unlikely for COVID to affect only three people seriously enough to warrant hospital care without infecting hundreds of others in the lab or their households. The other victims might have had milder symptoms, but an outbreak of that magnitude would have been difficult to keep under wraps.” — See comments elsethread suggesting that there were dozens or hundreds of other people sick with COVID much earlier than the supposed wet market outbreak.
“They cluster around the Wuhan Seafood Market where they were selling a variety of live mammals. They don’t cluster around WIV which is quite a ways away.” — Because the CCP covered up the known cases, probably.
“They should be presumed innocent unless proven guilty.” — This is ridiculous in the extreme. We have plenty of general backgorund evidence that the CCP engages in coverups all the time, and we have plenty of evidence in this specific case that the CCP was trying to cover up the initial COVID outbreak. Even today, they won’t release much of their original data. The default assumption should be that anyone associated with the CCP is lying, not that they’re telling the truth.
“we know that the respiratory patients with unusual presentations didn’t start showing up at the hospitals until December.” — We do not know that. We have evidence that the disease was spreading for several months earlier than that.
“In real life, Dr. Tony Fauci is one of the heroes of the Covid-19 virus pandemic fight.” — And also perhaps the person most responsible for i happening in the first place.
…
Raging Bee
“Definitely a delusional crank driven and blinded by prejudice.” — I’ve followed up on that research since then and changed my mind again.
…
Dr Myers
The FBI and the DoE have plenty of qualified scientists on staff. Arguably the FBI is one of the world’s foremost scientific authorities regarding pandemics due to their expertise and focus on bioweapons. The DoE is no slouch either in this department, having plenty of properly qualified scientists on staff. And these are the two US intelligence agencies that rate “lab leak” as the most likely hypothesis.
And this is also a rather dishonest strawman. I have consistently claimed that the broad umbrella term “lab leak” could include a leak of a virus that was collected from the wild and that was no modified in any way. Moreover, your use of the term “engineered” has a lot of nuance that and implication which carries the subtle meaning of “purposefully created bioweapon”, which I have not claimed. Rather, I have said that the most likely possibility is an accidental lab leak of a wild virus sample or an accidental lab leak of a virus modified with gain-of-function research techniques as part of the standard techniques championed by Fauci to learn more about potentially human-infectious diseases.
Why do you have to be so dishonest?
And I don’t understand how we can read the same thing, and yet come away with wildly different conclusions.
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-on-Potential-Links-Between-the-Wuhan-Institute-of-Virology-and-the-Origins-of-COVID-19-20230623.pdf
So, ODNI knows the exact identity of which researchers were sick – how else could they say “While some of these researchers had
historically conducted research into animal respiratory viruses”? – they have withheld their identities in this summary.
So, there were sick researchers, and thus the CCP and the Wuhan officials lied about it. The report itself is needlessly vague and reads like it’s trying to stay within the bounds of the truth while also desparately trying to debunk it. Ok, so if one person had allergies, then they could truthfully write that paragraph that I cited, but it’s also incredibly weasely for them to do.
Too bad we’ll never reliably get those blood samples.
PS:
Raging Bee is also dishonest for denying that the WIV is not special w.r.t. coronaviruses.
From the ODNI summary:
Like that? Sure.
(My fixup and markup)
If you saw what I just did there (I introduced no new information, merely changed emphasis) then you will understand how we can read the same thing, and yet come away with wildly different conclusions.
No fixup this time. I’m feeling as lazy as the person who could also not be bothered.
So.
I see. Probably maintains one of the world’s largest [break] repositories of bat samples makes it special. Every bit as special as each and every other member of one of the world’s largest [break] repositories of bat samples.
How many and how large this constituency of the world’s largest [break] repositories of bat samples is not worth mentioning. They’re all special!
—
Wake up, Gerrard.
With you, it’s insinuation all the way. And projection. And hypocrisy.
And (unwarranted) self-righteousness.
(Not really working either for you or for anyone else, is it?)
[unique, or very unique? That is the question!]
[Obs, smaller repositories are less special. And non-repositories are the least special]
Gerrard @ 163
You hear that? Gerrard the definitely-not-a-conspiracist states that some poor sod catching and transmitting a zoonotic virus in a Wuhan wet market is a lab-leak situation.
Spoing.
[badland, also to you basically what I wrote to another, earlier]
Or, ” have consistently claimed that the broad umbrella term “lab leak” could include a leak of a virus that was collected [by that lab] from the wild and that was no [sic] modified in any way.”
FTFY. Your elision is telling, no?
—
Anyway, you merely expose yourself when you use meretricious rhetoric such as that.
(Tsk)
John, I usually skip your tedious wankings. Don’t take it personally.
badland, no worries. “Dear John” letters are not unfamiliar to me.
And, of course, whyever would I take a missive specifically addressed to me personally?
(heh. So weak!)
Oh dear, Gerrard’s all triggered and making a fool of himself again…
I have consistently claimed that the broad umbrella term “lab leak” could include a leak of a virus that was collected from the wild and that was no modified in any way.
In other words, you’re stretching that phrase as far as you have to to insinuate the lab was at fault, regardless of where the virus came from. Which is at least as dishonest as calling mustard-gas a “condiment.”
Also, if the virus “was collected from the wild and that was not modified in any way.” how are you going to prove the lab had anything to do with it? Oh wait, you already admitted you can’t prove shit, and have to fall back on stretching word meanings and eternally yapping “yabbut they cover things up so we have to believe my story by default!”
And let me remind you one more time (like it’ll do any good) that pointing to the Chinese government’s history of covering things up doesn’t really reinforce any particular claim. Yes, Chinese officials would have motive and incentive to cover up a lab leak, if one happened — but they would also have motive and incentive to cover up a wet-market outbreak if that happened as well. You said it yourself: they’re well-known to lie about anything and everything, not just things that happen in high-security government facilities.
Also, I notice you’re claiming a really dastardly effective coverup of possibly HUNDREDS of early COVID cases, which somehow failed to cover up those initial three infected lab workers we know of. That’s just as fucking asinine as every other wild-ass delusional “coverup” claim I’ve ever heard, from the flat Earth to the Queen’s drug-smuggling ring to Hillary’s child-sex-trafficking ring and many more. As usual, the evil genius cabal managed to hide everything from experienced experts on site, but not from some random loony crank on the Internet.
To sum up: Fuck off, Gerrard, PRATTs dismissed.
Heh.
So John makes a smugly stupid claim with dangling stupid accusations of meretriciousness, is told he’s wrong, and asserts weakness to cover said stupidity.
That boomer-type shit is why you’re going back into my mental killfile John. Wank soggily away as is ever your wont but next time don’t assume I’ve read your wankery.
What is this claim you (who usually ignores me, nothing personal) claim is “smugly stupid”?
Why do you think that’s an “accusation” intead of a report in a retort?
What is it you imagine I am “wrong” about, and where do you imagine you told me that?
What weakness do you fancy I assert, and wasn’t the alleged stupidity the smugness?
Does that mean that the smugger I am, the more stupid?
Because then, the more stupid, the smugger, no?
“That boomer-type shit (nuclear subs FTW!) is why you’re going back into my mental killfile John (your mental killfile is very nice, and all). Wank soggily away (such wishful imagery!) as is ever your wont (snicker) but next time don’t assume I’ve read your wankery.”
Mate! You’re dripping with it! :)
But, hey, have a go at quoting this supposed statement from Gerrard?
(So many questions, badland!)
Heh.
Heh. I sees my names, I skips the John.
Too easy!
Way to ignore me, badland!
Terrible it is it be thus ignored!
BTW, you ostentatiously did not have a go at quoting this supposed statement from Gerrard.
Pretty obvious why.
Because when you essayed “Gerrard the definitely-not-a-conspiracist states that some poor sod catching and transmitting a zoonotic virus in a Wuhan wet market is a lab-leak situation.”, you were bullshitting.
That’s obviously why.
But hey, do try to concoct some excuse as to how Gerrard imagines a lab leak outside a lab context in his statement.
(Easier to bluster than to sustain, no?)
Raging Bee
Again, it matters where it came, and where it might have come from, because that should influence our future decisions about this very dangerous research and how it should be regulated and/or banned.
I don’t know. Why do I have to “prove” it? I didn’t say I could prove it. I don’t need to prove it in order to make any of the arguments that I’ve been making.
Yes. Because the US intelligence agencies are very good. However, we’re still missing data on the earliest cases, and the available data indicates that the Chinese government censored the data and removed details about dozens or hundreds of the earliest known infected cases. Why? We don’t know for sure. It seems to me that the most likely explanation is that they had access to data that would have showed that it did come from the lab, and they erased it.
I don’t get it. Do you think coverups don’t happen? Do you think that the CCP doesn’t do coverups? You go from “of course the CCP does coverups” to “it’s asinine to say that the CCP covered it up”. Could you pick one please and stick with it?
…
Also:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html
But sure. Keep calling this a debunked conspiracy theory.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins
Again, a vast difference between traditional conspiracy theories and this conspiracy theory is that traditional conspiracy theories are considered to be ridiculous because it would be impossible for not one person out of a thousand people to eventually tell the truth about the conspiracy. For example, not one person involved in the moon landing hoax has come forward describing how it was a hoax, and that’s a big part of how we can be so confident that we landed on the moon (among many, many other lines of independent evidence and reasoning).
By contrast, we have plenty of people who were deeply involved saying that there was coverup and conspiracy-theory like behavior from Fauci and his dozen colleagues. This includes the former CDC director in testimony to congress under oath.
But many people here keep adamantly saying that the the lab leak conspiracy theory is the same as the moon landing conspiracy, which is simply ridiculous.
Conspiracies and coverups like this are unfortunately commonplace, such as the coverup of HeLa contamination by practically the whole medical community, and the coverup of the Tuskegee Experiment, and so on. Again, what makes traditional conspiracy theories ridiculous is the complete lack of involved persons exposing the conspiracy, but here we have involved people exposing the conspiracy, and a long papertrail documenting the conspiracy, and lots of other strong circumstantial evidence such as the evidence I posted just a comment above from the NY Times editorial.
I don’t need to prove it in order to make any of the arguments that I’ve been making.
Exactly: you just want to wave a bloody shirt and keep on blaming China, and you have no desire to be at all responsible in your scapegoating accusations.
I don’t get it. Do you think coverups don’t happen? Do you think that the CCP doesn’t do coverups? You go from “of course the CCP does coverups” to “it’s asinine to say that the CCP covered it up”. Could you pick one please and stick with it?
I only said one of those things. You really can’t respond to my arguments without blatantly misrepresenting them, can you? I’ll just take that as your admission that you know you’re wrong.
PS: That NYT opinion piece has already been debunked in more than one TWiV discourse. PRATTs dismissed.
@178. GerrardOfTitanServer : “But sure. Keep calling this a debunked conspiracy theory.”
We will.
Because it is.
Evidence provided upthread by almost everyone but you.
What evdience you have has aleady been revutted so.. yeah. See my opening five words here.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins
“They should be presumed innocent unless proven guilty.” — This is ridiculous in the extreme.
You know what’s really ridiculous? Presuming they’re guilty unless proven innocent. Especially when every bit of evidence they offer is dismissed and rejected on the grounds of “I’ll ignore that because I’ve already presumed there’s more evidence out there that you’ve destroyed or covered up.”
Wall ‘o’ PRATTs dismissed. As in, fuck off, Gerrard, you’ve already shown yourself to be embarrassingly unhinged and dishonest, so you have no credibility, and relentlessly posting walls ‘o’ text just to bury everyone else’s comments won’t make you more credible.
I remind you of the full context of your quote:
Again, you’re saying that we should presume the trustworthiness of CCP associated persons when they said “it wasn’t our fault; it wasn’t the fault of China”. This position is ridiculous. The CCP is not a normal reasonable person. The CCP is a well known machine that lies and covers stuff up as easily as you or I breathe. The words of a CCP adjacent person saying “it wasn’t my fault / it wasn’t China’s fault” is absolutely worthless. Suggesting that we should give it any evidentiary value is the ridiculous position.
Seriously, do you even know anything about China at all?
Again, do you know that China’s official position still to this day AFAIK is that COVID’s origin is in some other country and arrived in China, in Wuhan, on frozen food, and spread from there?
I don’t even know what to do with you and this foolishness of giving any benefit of the doubt or trust whatsoever to a Chinese person under CCP pressure to lie about something that is embarrassing to China.
Of course this person was sick. We have USA intel that he was sick. Who are you going to trust? USA intelligence? Or the fricking CCP? Jesus Christ.
The CCP covers stuff even when it doesn’t have to, when covering it up makes it far worse, because that’s just their default operating procedure. Example:
https://proxy.freethought.online/intransitive/2023/08/08/a-flood-of-anger-washes-over-kill-the-poor-to-protect-the-rich-in-china/
CCP floods some less populated areas around Beijing rather than allowing Beijing to flood. CCP officials purposefully open floodgates and such to divert floodwater to less populated areas around Beijing to avoid flooding in Beijing. The CCP knew that these less populated areas were going to flood because they were opening the literal floodgates, and they didn’t warn anyone about it.
To quote another commenter from that thread who is totally correct:
Again, you’re saying that we should presume the trustworthiness of CCP associated persons…
And again, you KNOWINGLY lie about what I actually said. Go fuck yourself, and take your deranged Retrumplitarian hatemongering with you.
I did not lie about what you said.
You are now lying about me. I am not Republican. I am not pro-Trump. You know this from our long association together. In case it needs to be said again, Trump is a clear and present danger to western democracy, and the January 6th insurrection was the greatest threat to American democracy since the US Civil War.
But in your tiny little mind, you have to divide up everyone into one of two tidy little camps, and because I’m endorsing something that you “know” carries the label of the outgroup, then I become a member of the outgroup, and then you assign every belief and motivation of that stereotypical member of the outgroup to me. It’s pathetic really.
Again, I’m not saying that it’s proven beyond a doubt. I also have basically the entire US intelligence apparatus on my side saying that it’s plausible, and moreover I have the FBI and the DOE on my side saying that it’s more likely than not. Do you really think that all of these intelligence agencies are “Retrumplitarian hatemongers”? I’m serious – could you please answer this question directly?
To summarize some points and bring in some new points.
We have no direct evidence of precursor viruses existing in non-humans. Because the CCP destroyed the evidence, if any, by thoroughly cleaning and disinfecting the Huanan market before any samples could be taken.
https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-53569400https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-originsWe have no direct evidence of precursor viruses in the Wuhan Institute. Because the CCP took down the virus database.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2022-000608_EN.htmlMoreover, the database of viruses (supposedly) being worked on at the Wuhan lab was taken offline at 12 September 2019.
There are only three places in the world that were doing gain of function research on bat coronaviruses. The Wuhan Institute was one of the three.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-originsThere was a 2018 grant proposal named DEFUSE described proposed experiments that included insertion of a Furin cleavage site into SARS-related bat coronaviruses. The proposal was written by EcoHealth Alliance. It was a proposed collaberation between EcoHealth alliance, the Wuhan institute, and Ralph Baric at the University Of North Carolina.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-grant-darpa/And less than 2 years later, we see a novel pandemic happening in Wuhan, caused by a virus that is virtually identical to the virus that they proposed to create.
We know that three researchers, including Ben Hu, working at the Wuhan Institute were sick with symptoms compatible with COVID in November 2019. “Bat Woman” Dr Shi, Ben Hu, and others lied about it.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-originshttps://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-on-Potential-Links-Between-the-Wuhan-Institute-of-Virology-and-the-Origins-of-COVID-19-20230623.pdfhttps://nypost.com/2023/06/13/wuhan-scientists-were-the-first-to-contract-covid-19-report/We know that these three researchers would have had regular blood samples taken and stored as standard operating procedure for working at the bio-safety labs at the Wuhan Institute. These samples could have proved whether they were really sick with COVID or not. We know that these samples were ordered destroyed by the CCP.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-originsDocuments obtained from the Wuhan Institute of Virology showed that they suffered an acute panic over bio-safety in November 2019.
https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-origin-wuhan-labPatents were filed by a Dr. Zhou Yusen, a researcher at the the Wuhan Institute, on 24 Feb 2020 for applications for a vaccine to COVID.
https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-origin-wuhan-labhttps://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/inside-wuhan-lab-covid-pandemic-china-america-qhjwwwvm0It would have taken at least 3 months to do that work. Thus this work was started on or before November 2019. November 2019 is also the same time that was a panic over bio-safety at the Wuhan Institute (see earlier point).
https://www.rubio.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/_cache/files/4f6bb786-504e-443d-8904-974dafc1cd0e/CD3BC3317D197A25E9FF01EBFB869357.rubio-covid-origins-report-final.pdfDr. Zhou Yusen died 3 months later by “falling” off the roof of the Wuhan Institute.
https://www.rubio.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/_cache/files/4f6bb786-504e-443d-8904-974dafc1cd0e/CD3BC3317D197A25E9FF01EBFB869357.rubio-covid-origins-report-final.pdfhttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12205705/Chinese-military-expert-filed-patent-Covid-vaccine-died-mysterious-circumstances.htmlThe CCP has tried to remove him mostly / entirely from the historical record.
(Same sources)
We know that China manipulated much of the evidence surrounding COVID origins, including suppressing and hiding positive samples from the beginning of the outbreak.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/science/coronavirus-sequences-lab-leak.html(many other sources omitted)
This renders it almost impossible to use the evidence that they shared to reliably draw conclusions about where the pandemic started.
There are widespread reports of coverup in American institutions.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-originshttps://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/08/trumps-cdc-director-says-fauci-shut-down-debate-on-covids-origin-00086112Remember that this includes a massive among of internal communications at the time involving Dr Fauci and close associates talking repeatedly about how to avoid future FOIA requests, and the testimony of the former CDC director, testimony from a a (supposed) CIA whistleblower, and much more.
Missing additional link for last point.
https://oversight.house.gov/release/testimony-from-cia-whistleblower-alleges-new-information-on-covid-19-origins/Also this source:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/covid-early-cases-wuhan-china-mystery/
is really important for showing how the CCP manipulated the data that they shared about the earliest cases, which means we cannot make any reliable judgment about if the outbreak started at the Huanan wet market or not.
We have no direct evidence of precursor viruses existing in non-humans.
WTF are you talking about? We’ve known for a LONG time that coronaviruses exist in non-human species.
Because the CCP destroyed the evidence, if any, by thoroughly cleaning and disinfecting the Huanan market before any samples could be taken.
So FINALLY you’re admitting there may have been something in the Huanan market to cover up. Which means, BY YOUR LOGIC, we have to consider a zoontic jump to be AT LEAST as plausible as that other possibility you’ve been banging on about, for the same reasons you use to cling to your preferred theory. And since the wet-market transmission is back on the table, we then have to acknowledge that such an event is both more likely to have happened, and more supported by currently-available evidence, than your other favorite theory. QEDuh.
Now fuck off and cry on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s shoulder.
Trump’s CDC director says Fauci shut down debate on Covid’s origin
Oh, well, Trump’s appointees can always be trusted, right?
The CCP covers stuff even when it doesn’t have to…
Yeah, we all know this. And that’s why we can’t safely conclude that there really ever was any lab-leak to cover up.
I said “precursor”. I meant “direct precursor”. Aka “we haven’t found the direct precursor virus in a non-human animal”. That kind of evidence would be very strong in support of the zoonotic model.
Translation: “Everyone against me is a lying pro-Trump partisan hack”. So, Dr Fauci is also a lying pro-Trump partisan hack as well because he was appointed by Trump? It’s blindingly obvious to everyone else what you’re doing here. You have an a priori assumption taken on faith, and you’re doing the concord fallacy / sunken cost fallacy, and then you’re using backward reasoning aka motivated reasoning to reach whatever conclusions are necessary to support your a priori faith assumption.
For example, it is obvious that any official or scientist that disagrees with you will simply be label a “Trump appointed” and dismissed out of hand, and yet you won’t apply that same standard to those that are also Trump appointees that are on your side.
You have no specific evidence for the Huanan wet market model. You only have a 100 to 1 prior. By contrast, I have a lot of circumstantial evidence in favor of the lab leak which I summarize in #189 to #191. I believe this overcomes the 100 to 1 prior, as does the FBI and DOE.
I said “precursor”. I meant “direct precursor”.
And you’re still full of shit, as well as holding everyone else to a standard you yourself can’t meet. Coronaviruses in the wild are more similar to COVID-19 than those known to have been in the WIV lab. Even without finding THE “direct precursor,” we can still safely conclude that COVID-19 came from the wild, not from the lab.
Translation: “Everyone against me is a lying pro-Trump partisan hack”.
Once again you misrepresent what I said: which was that the person you’re citing is already known to be a pro-Trump partisan hack.
You have no specific evidence for the Huanan wet market model.
We have more evidence for that than you have for your lab-leak claim. That’s all we need, at least until more evidence comes to light — and it’s a lot more “specific” than what you have.
You only have a 100 to 1 prior.
Another obvious falsehood from you. We have PLENTY more evidence, and your only response to it is “but there might be something else the evil commies covered up, ya never know!” But hey, at least you’re admitting (again) a wet-market transmission is that much more probable than a lab leak.
That… is a very revealing bit of projection.
The CCP took down the online database of viruses being worked on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in September 2019. You’re simply trusting the CCP, and I do not. Their word cannot be trusted.
Why or how is he known to be a pro Trump partisan hack? Because he indirectly said that Fauci lied under oath and that Fauci was orchestrating a coverup?
Can you name any of it? What specific evidence do you have in favor of a lab leak that is not accounted for in the 100 to 1 prior?
Fuck off, Gerard, you clearly can’t stop misrepresenting what I’ve said. You’re not just wrong, obsessive and unhinged, you’re downright disgraceful.
Raging Bee
You never did answer, and I want an answer, please, so let me ask again:
Again, I’m not saying that it’s proven beyond a doubt. I also have basically the entire US intelligence apparatus on my side saying that it’s plausible, and moreover I have the FBI and the DOE on my side saying that it’s more likely than not. Do you really think that all of these intelligence agencies under Biden are “Retrumplitarian hatemongers”? I’m serious – could you please answer this question directly?
PS:
The latest evidence is that bats and pangolins were not sold at the Wuhan market.
Currently-available info from WHO:
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/origins-of-the-virus
(Of course, they too could be part of the conspiracy)
Morales
As mentioned, the only USA representative is
Straight from your source.
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/origins-of-the-virus
The one person the USA sent is also one of the two people most responsible for diverting USA funds to the Wuhan Institute to conduct this kind of dangerous gain of function research to make a bat coronavirus that are more infectious and pathogenic in humans. This is also the person on the DEFUSE proposal less than 2 years earlier in cooperation with the Wuhan Institute to conduct experiments of inserting a Furin cleavage site in a SARS-like bat coronavirus and make it more infectious and/or contagious in humans.
I couldn’t even make this up. It’s too obvious. If it was fiction, they would say that the conspiracy plot was too obvious to the public and characters in the story would have noticed it.
If you don’t see a giant conflict of interest problem here, then I don’t know what to say.
lecou: “Projection” is too kind a word. Gerrard is a flaming hypocrite. The only question in my mind is whether he’s sane enough to know it.
So, not going to do me the courtesy of answering my question? Unfortunate.
You’re not exactly in a position to talk about “courtesy,” asshole.
I can only conclude that you think that the entire USA intelligence apparatus under Biden is somehow pro-Trump Republican hatemongers. Who exactly is the conspiracy theorist again? My proposed conspiracy involved a dozen people. Your conspiracy theory is easily running into the hundreds or thousands.
That says a good bit about how your mind “works.”
[meta]
The answer to the question in the first sentence is explicit in the conjunction of the second and the third sentences.
The literal simplification: I think we are both conspiracists.
The intended meaning: my proposed conspiracy much more likely than your conspiracy theory.
[Me: this comment]
You know you’re being a much, much bigger asshole and troll than John Morales right now. Are you sure that’s who you want to be? Do you want to be the new resident troll? But anything goes as long as you go pwn those Trumpers, right? /s
Geeze. This thread won’t die, eh?
Oh, you poor gullible twit.
1. What do you think the phrase “known to be” means? Hint: it does not mean anyone is trusting the word of the CCP.
Like it or not, the brute fact is that there is no evidence of any close relatives of SARS-CoV-2 being present in the lab prior to the outbreak.
Maybe that’s because “the CCP” covered it up, maybe not. Either way, the evidence is simply not there, and no amount of suspicion about the CCP, however justified, will change that fact. The only thing that would change it is…evidence of a sequence in the WIV archives. (If not having evidence of something is actually evidence of something, then there’s evidence for EVERYTHING. I mean, why not suppose that GerrardOfTitanServer produced SARS-CoV-2? The evidence is so clear: their public database of all viral samples has disappeared so completely, it’s like it never even existed!! Suspicious!! ZOMG — even their lab has disappeared!! GUILTY!!! )
2. Your conspiracy theory has too many plot holes.
Why would the “CCP”[1] take down this website as part of a coverup? That seems like an absolutely terrible idea.
It’s quite obvious that no incriminating genomes had YET been made public there ca. September 2019, since if they had, they would have been available to their colleagues in the US and elsewhere, and we would have evidence of it. They hadn’t uploaded anything yet, QED.
Then, if in fact SARS-CoV-2 (or an immediate antecedent) was present in the lab, and WIV staff (or “CCP” higher ups) wanted to hide that fact for whatever reason, the expedient thing to do would be to simply NOT UPLOAD those sequences in the first place. It’s well known that they had private, WIV-only, databases where they could keep them. There’s no reason to touch the public database with anything shady.
So…Why invite suspicion by nuking a public database? The much more parsimonious answer is that the outage, if any, was simply mundane[2].
-——
[1] I keep laughing whenever I write “CCP”, because, well, whatever happened, it wasn’t the “CCP”. For one, believe it or not, people in China are not a CCP hive mind, so even if it had been taken down under the authority of the CCP, the order would be given and the actions taken by specific individuals. However, the original source for this claim says the website in question was administered by Dr. Shi — known to idiots as “Bat Woman” — so it is likely she, or one of her staff who did this. Not the Communist party.
[2] There are in fact a million boring reasons it might have been taken down. Or simple gone down. Technical issues, upgrades, funding uncertainties, etc. And if there was a technical issue, or a rollout problem, or whatever, fixing it could well have fallen off the priority list in the following months. It’s quite understandable that WIV administration was overwhelmed, with not only Covid itself, but also all the extra bullshit from the lab leaker crowd, by which time there were compelling reasons NOT to put these sorts of databases out there to be abused.
But that’s assuming it was up in the first place, which is actually not entirely clear to me. There never have been anything to really be “taken down” in any meaningful way at all. AFAIK, the sole source for this “fact” is the collective of
basement dwellersamateur internet sleuths calling themselves DRASTIC. Said yahoos were basically the only “source” for a lot of the early (2020, 2021) lab leak “coverage”, with gullible reporters like Katherine Eben regurgitating their bullshit for suckers like yourself by the tanker car full.And one of the issues there is that their “investigation” into this issue is entirely online, and didn’t begin until sometime in 2020 or 2021. By which time the site in question had already been “offline” for more than year: so all of this is entirely retrospective, and nobody in DRASTIC has ever even visited the magical site full of full genomes that was supposedly taken down. Since it also turns out obscure government research databases like this aren’t extensively indexed by archives like the wayback machine, nobody (outside of the Chinese research community, natch) can really say what this “database” even looked like on, say, September 10, a couple days before it was “taken down”, or what was actually available there (in reality, rather than in theory).
DRASTIC’s source for the fact that it was up and then down is not just second but third hand, via an archive of a different Chinese government site that apparently does reachability or status checks on such databases. It isn’t entirely clear how to tell that we’re looking at the right database, but we’ll assume the boys at DRASTIC got it right. What we see is a grid with hour on the X and date on the Y. The green squares (available, presumably), switch to red boxes (unavailable) at about 3AM on the 12th.
But there are obviously a few problems with all of this.
First of all, the existence of a tool to monitor this kind of thing in and of itself suggests that outages might not be a particularly uncommon issue with para-governmental technical sites of this sort. That’s easily confirmed in this case if you change the ‘month=9’ in the URL above to look some of the previous months. It wasn’t up in May at all, and June/July/August have literally hourly outages. September was not the first time this database went down that summer, even if it was the last. There is a couple weeks of anomalous stability before it goes down for good, but prior to that, it had had a very short and troubled 3 month life, where being up was the exception not the rule. This all adds up to a site/database that was having some severe teething issues.
So I think it seems very possible that this database was never really “up” at all, at least in the incarnation that nominally existed in September of 2019. There might have been an intention to put it up, but the implementation was not entirely satisfactory. Maybe someone simply finally got fed up and pulled the plug in September, or maybe it finally suffered a fatal fault. In my day job I’ve seen enough shit to know that it’s very easy for everyone to be all “open data initiative” this, “online database” that, until the stupid thing goes down for the third time in a month, at which point going back to email attachments for a time while the IT boys sort it out seems like a better use of time.
Speaking of which, aside from DRASTIC, I’m not aware that anyone in the actual relevant scientific community has been complaining about this. For one thing, the published sequences appear to get uploaded to the usual Western databases. And I suspect if you are a legitimate researcher in Texas or North Carolina or whatever, getting something unpublished from WIV is (or at least was) probably as simple as sending a couple of emails. Which may well be the way it worked in practice all along anyway. DRASTIC’s implicit assumption that just because it’s not online, it doesn’t exist is very childish.
Failed IT projects aren’t quite as sexy as international conspiracies to bio-engineer super viruses, but, much like zoonotic spillovers, they do have the advantage of being a lot more likely…
Look, I don’t know why you’re posting here. If it’s just to help keep the demons in your head quiet, more power to you, I guess. But if it’s anything else, you should know you’re not as informative or convincing as you seem to think you are.
The only thing you’ve convinced me of is that you are a deeply credulous fellow who’s very eager to swallow the worst kind of pop-sci hype and fall for any con job, provided it fits a particular emotional narrative you find congenial.
What I would encourage you to do — strongly — is to start exercising a little bit of common sense and apply a little bit of critical analysis to ALL the stuff you read. That means actually understanding it, for a start, not just quote mining and parroting it for “points”. It also means trying to look for holes in the stuff that confirms your viewpoint as well as the stuff that doesn’t. As an exercise, I think you could start by looking through the stuff you just posted there.
Because you need to understand that what you posted 189 (and all the others as well, I’m sure, but I usually can’t be bothered to read them) is a wall of absolute horseshit. Even looking past the hostile stylistic issues — and by Atuin’s mysterious plastron, man, looking past that is hard: the inaccurate paraphrase, the bare urls, the incorrect use of “moreover”, the fact that fully half of those urls point to the same stupid Vanity Fair article from 2021 — ahem, looking past all that, that wall of text is not “some points”, it’s a bunch of disconnected, discredited garbage, and you should have been able to work that out for yourself before you posted it.
So, as an exercise, why don’t you go back to the points in 189, check your sources, think about them critically, and think about what you did wrong.
Let me do a couple to show you how it’s done:
Plot holes. As Bee said, wouldn’t this suggest a coverup of a zoonotic event at the wet market?
More charitably, there’s no conspiracy or “cover up” motivation necessary. Put yourself in the shoes of a local public health official in the first few weeks of the outbreak in Wuhan. You’ve got to do something, and you’re painfully aware that the wet market is at least a very likely source for whatever is making everyone sick. So you make the call to clean up an obvious public health hazard in the hope that it will help limit additional infection. Remember, the degree of human-to-human spread, if any, was still unknown at the end of 2019, so it’s not unreasonable to think cleaning up environmental hazards might help. Preserving a “crime scene” is not at the top of the priority list if a component of that scene is potentially an active hazard. (This is true of any crime scene — paramedics move shooting victims, fire fighters blast potential evidence at arson sites with high pressure streams of water, etc..)
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s unfortunate that samples weren’t preserved first, of course. But that’s actually all we can say about it — unfortunate. There’s no evidence of a cover up, let alone what exactly might have been covered up. This is entirely neither here nor there. As is all the other “cover up” stuff.
Irrelevant/false — see above.
I’d actually be surprised if that was true. Definitely not if we drop the bat qualifier. The kind of techniques they were using are not really that uncommon.
Also, note that this is only really relevant if you’re staking a claim that the virus was modified. Are you? Most lab leak theorists have dropped that part of the theory, since the biomolecular evidence hasn’t born it out. But if you’re not making that claim, then this and many of your other “points” support exactly nothing. You have to pick a theory and argue for that, not all of them simultaneously.
Absolutely false.
We can read the leaked proposal, courtesy of those idiots at “DRASTIC”, so we can check that claim.
And no, there’s no usefully specific description of SARS-CoV-2, or a recipe for making it, in there. Just a general description of how they’re going to try to predict oronavirus spillover threat potential based on a model that will predict spike protein phenotype from genotype. To do that, they will sequence some viruses, and also perform tests to look at the corresponding spike protein function. Some of the tests involve grafting virus components together. And all that makes sense: coronaviruses that can infect humans are always going to share certain characteristic spike and cleavage functionality, which you might be able to watch out for (or things close to it). But they didn’t predict the exact form it would would take with COVID.
I mean, you might as well say this paper from 2006 is about designing pandemic COVID. Oh no, I guess COVID was made in Montana… Umm, of course not. Yes, it’s mostly the spike protein and the cleavage that matter, but these are basic features of this whole family of coronaviruses, not something dreamed up for SARS-CoV-2 specifically. The actual specifics of that virus are not something anyone would have designed. That stupid “virtually identical” assertion only works if you define “virtually identical” in a very general way that means “any member of a class that includes a significant fraction of all possible coronaviruses that might infect humans.”
(An analogy: imagine you’re medieval knight trying to determine how much danger different kinds of weapons pose to you in the armor you’re wearing. You know there’s a vulnerability in the armor that can be penetrated by long pointy weapons. You make a research plan for producing some test articles to see if you can predict exactly how long and how pointy they have to be.
Later, you’re found dead, killed by a spear. Since spears are long and pointy, it stands to reason that you were killed by one of your own weapons, right? Even though the longest, pointiest weapon previously known to be in your position was a rapier.
Do you see how silly that reasoning is?
Just to repeat, again, the analysis we have so far shows a virus that looks naturally evolved in every respect, and doesn’t really even look especially possible to produce using known laboratory techniques. A fact which you could readily learn from the primary literature, if you weren’t so assiduously trying to avoid anything contradictory to your pre-determined position.)
False.
It’s been pointed out dozens of times to you already that “symptoms compatible with COVID” is meaningless. A touch of asthma or allergies might produce symptoms “compatible with COVID”.
But what’s worse is that your “source” for this (which I’m going to charitably assume is the DNI report, rather than the unreliable Vanity Fair or — yikes — NY Post pieces) actually says the opposite: “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. “.
So some people in a large workplace got sick — big whoop. There’s no specific evidence it was COVID. In some cases it definitely wasn’t. I hope you live in a country with relaxed libel laws, because that’s NOT the kind of evidence that would let you call someone a liar and get it to hold up in court.
As an aside, I would note that there’s actually a lot of other stuff in that DNI report you might find informative, if you weren’t so busy cherry picking. Might be useful while you complete the rest of the exercise.
Now, off you go. If you want an easy one to get started, this one is particularly stupid:
“Documents obtained from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?” Holy crap, all this time the CCP were running around covering up evidence of a lab leak all over the country, and someone just walked into the WIV and “obtained documents” from them? Once again, a colossal all-powerful dastardly coverup gets busted by some wanker on the Internet! Funny how those all-powerful conspiracies and coverups work, innit?
Once again, a colossal all-powerful dastardly coverup gets busted by some wanker on the Internet!
You haven’t seen that one before? It’s hilarious. I’m loathe to post spoilers to Gerrard’s homework, but who are we kidding. They won’t do it.
The short of it is that all of this is coming from some random Congressional intern (no bet on which party) who claims to be a priest of sorts to the CCP, able to divine the true meaning hidden inside otherwise banal statements and documents.
And if you click all the way through, you can find the original Chinese document that evidences this “acute panic over bio-safety”. You can overlay the machine translation. Basically, it’s some kind of press release type fluff relating to a routine visit or meeting something by a couple of officials around that time. Just some boiler plate pablum about being dutifully awed by all the important work and bunny suits and glove boxes and whatnot at this facility in their jurisdiction.
But obviously that’s only the surface meaning… [eyeroll]
So…basically this “panic” was just a bunch of visitors seeing all the containment protocols and reacting like “Wow, this looks like really dangerous stuff you’re working with here!” I guess that would count as “panic” by inscrutable-Chinese standards… :-/
I think the idea is supposed to be that the visit and fluff piece was staged after whatever incident occurred, to have something positive/expository to soften the blow when party higher ups were subsequently informed about the supposed bad news.
Which is possible, I guess, if a little far-fetched. The bigger problem, of course, is that I’d be willing to bet that if we look at the week prior and the week following, or the present week, there will no doubt be similarly fluffy pieces discussing meetings with local turnip farmers, or the ribbon cutting to open a new bus stop, or what have you. And somehow, the fact that no acute crises relating to turnip yields or public transportation ever manifest will not be taken as dis-confirmation of the predictive power of this sort of tea leaf reading exercise.
It’s all just hilariously concentrated empty speculation and motivated reasoning. Completely unfalsifiable.
…The depressing thing is how well this misinformation works. The foundation of that story is patently ridiculous, not even a full step above simply making stuff up from whole cloth. “Researcher” Toy Reid is simply a partisan fabulist.
And yet, this “scoop” was still happily picked up by the likes of Katherine Eban and published in Vanity Fair — complete with fluffy biographic background details and dramatic black and white photos of the brave, intrepid
researcherliar.Thence it worms its way into the heads of credulous characters like our friend Gerrard, who, even after being corrected here, will likely continue to regurgitate this vacuous gruel years from now as utterly incontrovertible proof that a “bio-safety” incident occurred in November 2019.
The most important word there is “partisan.” It’s not just crank-trolls like Gerrard regurgitating this stuff; it’s the entire Republican Party. It’s all part of a huge weapon of mass-distraction. And it’s far more destructive than the other kind of WMDs (if only because we know it exists).
On what basis do you justify such a claim which seems absolutely outrageous to me? I ask the same question to you that I asked Raging Bee: What do you make of all of the US intelligence agencies? Given that they still consider the lab leak at least plausible, that means that they strongly disagree with the assertion that you just made here. This just makes me think that you’re a crank, or so ideologically wed to a predetermined outcome because of tribalistic or other reasons that you might as well be a crank for the purpose of this conversation.
I see no reason to talk in detail about any of the other points that you raise until you address this point here: Namely, how would you justify that assertion, and second, how would you explain how the entire USA intelligence apparatus strongly disagrees with you?
GerrardOfTitanServer:
“How would you explain how the entire USA intelligence apparatus strongly disagrees with you?”
Can’t explain a counterfactual case.
Here, for you: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-on-Potential-Links-Between-the-Wuhan-Institute-of-Virology-and-the-Origins-of-COVID-19-20230623.pdf
• 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.
[whoops]
Oh hell with it. Here I go.
@jack lecou
I did not cite the lack of reliable evidence at the wet market or the Wuhan Institute as evidence for the lab leak hypothesis. I did not cite the cleaning of the Huanan wet market as evidence favoring the lab leak hypothesis. I merely included it in the background information to make sure everyone is on the same page. The lack of evidence in this case is IMHO close to neutral, favoring neither model.
Fauci IIRC said otherwise. The USA side had very little insight into what the people at Wuhan were actually doing. Don’t make me dig up the quotes.
Yes, there is. Go re-read my 189.
No, it’s ture, and it’s neutral w.r.t. the two competing hypotheses.
I quoted an expert who said this. Dropping the “bat” qualifier makes a huge difference – that’s a huge part of the circumstantial evidence. Dropping that drastically changes the strength of the evidence. And it seems like you’re just making shit up, “it seems right to me”, and you can go fuck yourself for that attitude. I quoted at least and IIRC several experts who said otherwise. These experts immediately thought of that lab when they heard about the COVID outbreak. Your ignorant armchair reasoning is not a substitute for that.
I am far from an expert. I am highly dubious of those claims. I admit that I don’t know. I also say that it’s not an integral part of the lab leak hypothesis, although it was shown to be true, then we should be even more concerned about the human practice of medicine where researchers actively seek out animals that contain viruses that are dangerous to humans, and bring the viruses back to the lab, and then make them even more dangerous to humans.
Are you saying that the evidence shows that it’s (extremely) unlikely that they used one of many techniques to insert a Furin cleavage site? Are you saying that the evidence shows that it’s (extremely) unlikely that they passed the virus through ACE2 expressing mice?
No, I don’t. You are trying to control the framing of the narrative, and I’m not allowing you to do that. You want to strawman me into this Republican caricature where it’s all about blaming China. That’s not what I’m doing here. I am expressing a grave concern about the human medical practice of proactively seeking out animals with viruses that are dangerous to humans (dangerous), and bringing those viruses back to the lab (more dangerous), and then making those viruses even more dangerous to humans (even more dangerous). I am gravely concerned about all three steps, and IMHO, I think the entire practice should be banned.
That the framing of the conversation that I am trying to have. In that context, I am wholly allowed to conflate different sub-scenarios, like whether they inserted a Furin cleavage site or not, and whether they passed the virus through ACE2 expressing mice, and whether it was a bio-weapon research program (or a defense against bio-weapon research program), and whether it was simply a leak of a collected virus, and whethre it was simply a person getting infected in the wild while gathering the virus and then infecting others back at Wuhan. All of these scenarios fit my narrative that I am gravely concerned about this particular practice of human medicine.
You must be from a parallel Earth, because we don’t speak the same language. “Absolutely false” implies there is zero merit. There is a lot of merit. Rather, your argument seems to be like “exaggerated / overrated”. Again, this is just another example that has convinced me that you are desparately motivated to do whatever you can to debunk the lab leak hypothesis, and you are willing to say any lie to do it e.g. you do not care about the truth.
Your summary is missing some key parts: They will genetically modify the virus to add a “backbone”, and then they will infect humanized mice with the virus.
Your supposedly comparable example paper does not deal with bat viruses (which you admit but somehow deny the importance of), and it does not involving passing the virus through any living host such as ACE2 expressing mice.
“The ability of the S glycoproteins to promote ACE2-dependent cell–cell fusion was detected using the recombinant vaccinia virus-based β-galactosidase reporter assay”
It’s not a bat virus, which means you’re ignoring the key element of circumstantial data wihch ties this to the Wuhan Institute in the first place. It also does not involve passage in humanized mice, which could and likely would make the resultant virus more dangerous (more infectious and more pathogenic) to humans.
You say false, and then you explain how it’s actually true. You lying fuck.
Also, it’s not just that they were sick, but Dr Shi lied about them being sick. She said that no researchers at the time had symptoms compatible with COVID.
You’re parsing that incorrectly. It simply says that at least one of the researchers didn’t have COVID. It does not say that each person had symptoms incompatible with COVID.
There’s no specific evidence that it wasn’t. And in context with the rest of the circumstantial evidence that we have amassed, it probably was. IMO, we convict murderers in court on less circumstantial evidence than this.
Just like they sued Rolling Stone magazine to cover up the origin of HIV-AIDS. Stay classy.
And so now you’re an expert in Chinese language, and Chinese bureaucratic language to boot? Are you going to cure cancer next? /s Another example of going well out of your lane and ignoring the experts who speak Chinese and who are familiar with the language of Chinese bureaucrats. Relying on machine translation? Jesus Christ you’re a crank. This is the best evidence yet that you’re so motivated to deny this that you would say anything.
I hope you realize that anyone who reads this who was undecided is not going to side with you after this. They’re going to see your absolutely atrocious and unethical behavior, which will create or reinforce their beliefs that there is a cover-up going on by American officials too like Fauci.
John,
I just quoted jack as saying that it’s basically impossible for it to have come from a lab. All of the USA intelligence agencies disagree with that assertion.
Yes, but then, I just quoted DNI (the summary of all intelligence agencies):
“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.”
BTW, the actual quotation: “Just to repeat, again, the analysis we have so far shows a virus that looks naturally evolved in every respect, and doesn’t really even look especially possible to produce using known laboratory techniquesdoesn’t really even look especially possible to produce using known laboratory techniques.”
Here, for you:
→ Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically
engineered. | the analysis we have so far shows a virus that looks naturally evolved in every respect;
→ Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted;
some are unable to make a determination. |
plus, of course
→ All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2
was not developed as a biological weapon.
Pretty congruent, I’d say.
Most certainly not lying, and to most people, not at all confusing.
[Good grief! Too much short shrift.
Anyway, anyone competent should be able to infer my second analogic similarity; the third is redundant but amused me]
They don’t give their reasons for that. Their reasons might simply be “we believe that it most likely came from a zoonotic crossover at the Huanan wet market, and therefore we conclude that it was laboratory-adapted nor genetically engineered”. It could be nothing more than synonymous with “we believe it wasn’t a lab leak” and might not contain any further meaning. Again, we’d have to look to see what reasons they have for that conclusion.
I am not an expert, but there are a lot of people making claims that are IMHO dubious, claiming that purely from the genetic sequencing, we can tell that it wasn’t genetically engineered or laboratory-adapted. I am starting to look more into these reasons, and see what the consensus of experts are on this matter. I know I’ve seen a few experts that dismiss such claims out of hand, saying that you can’t tell just by looking at the genetics unless you have the direct ancestor virus (or viruses) available for comparison, and we don’t have direct ancestor viruses available for comparison.
Missed a “not”.
Point being, Gerrard, that the summary and breakdown of what numerous intelligence agencies reported shows a disparity of assessments. That’s what #224 is noting.
Why you keep writing that “All of the USA intelligence agencies” are in accord, given that, is left to speculation.
I see
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-on-Potential-Links-Between-the-Wuhan-Institute-of-Virology-and-the-Origins-of-COVID-19-20230623.pdf
You should stop there.
Splicing together a novel DNA sequence leaves markers in place — the construct is designed with bits on the ends for rapid PCR expansion and for the splicing enzymes to recognize. We can spot the scars of the operation.
So it’s possible the Chinese have developed a radical new molecular technique, but it’s pretty damned unlikely.
In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s intense political pressure to find a way to blame our rivals, the Chinese, for this event. If you think “intelligence agencies” are immune to that, you’re a bigger fool than I thought.
Dr Myers
Can you explain this to me then?
https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748I can read the graphics, and I can see the before-and-after DNA strands. It looks very much like you can insert a furin cleavage site without such additional telltale markers. It’s just 4 amino acid codons, aka 12 nucleotides. Perhaps they used techniques other than what you are thinking about. What techniques are there for just brute forcing a few nucleotide changes as opposed to inserting a (long) sequence of DNA from somewhere else into an existing DNA strand?
Or am I missing something critical? My apologies.
Ok. I accept that. It could easily be true.
However, there’s clearly also political pressure to say it’s not a lab leak under Biden because it’s seen as racist and complicates the relationship with China.
Also, there’s comparable or greater political pressure on Dr Fauci because it threatens Dr Fauci’s personal life work as the leading advocate for this kind of dangerous research where researchers proactively search for viruses in the wild that might be (close to) dangerous to humans, and then take the virus back to the lab, and then try to make the virus be more dangerous to humans. Also, the political pressure on Dr Fauci might also be greater because he likely violated a prior administrative ban on funding such dangerous research in overseas labs. If that is proven true, is that criminal liability for Dr Fauci? That’s a strong motivator to cover it up. Also, being the person most responsible for the deaths of 10s of millions of people is probably something that most people would try to cover up.
I’m not sure if I’m reading these sources correctly, but it appears that you can make changes like this without tellmale markers of CRISPR(?); you can do it via “directed” evolution. For example, repeatedly passing the virus through humanized mice that expressed the human ACE2 receptor. Which is what they were planning to do less than 2 years earlier according to the DEFUSE proposal. That makes sense to me. Does that count as “genetic engineering”? Depends, I think.
Dr Myers
It seems that you are out of date; see:
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/amp/
Ex:
https://www.neb.com/en-us/applications/cloning-and-synthetic-biology/seamless-cloning
So, it could be serial passage, which they were planning to do according to the DEFUSE funding proposal, or it could have been one of a variety of new techniques that don’t leave tell-tale evidence of modification.
I refuse to read anything from Gerrard. His mind is gone and it is a complete waste of my time. It’s even worse that that, it is scary that people like Gerrard are allowed to attempt to cross the street without their minders.
His ignorance is endless and hopeless.
For the rest of you. FYI.
What is wrong with laboratory adapting viruses for research?
We do it all the time.
I’ve done it in the past, not viruses but eukaryotic human cancer cells for research purposes.
.1. Mammalian viruses grown in tissue culture, usually attenuate
This means they gain the ability to grow in cell culture and lose the ability to grow in live mammals.
This is how we develop live vaccines.
The chickenpox vaccine was developed by serially passaging the virus through several cell lines including guinea pig cell cultures. The virus gains the ability to grow in a different host, guinea pig cells and loses the ability to grow well in live humans.
A similar procedure was used to create the Sabin live polio vaccines.
.2. This is basic evolution in action.
The cell culture environment is a lot different and much more simple that a live organism. No immune system among other differences.
They gain one ability to grow in cell culture and lose another ability they aren’t using, the ability to grow well in live organism.
.3. This is an example of a gain of function procedure.
These viruses gain the ability to grow in the lab.
They usually lose the ability to cause disease in their original host.
The HIV virus strains we use in the lab are HIV strains that are adapted to grow well in the lab.
If we are going to study any viruses, they have to able to be cultured in the lab.
That doesn’t make them more dangerous. What it does is make us safer.
We used our knowledge of the Covid-19 virus to quickly come up with vaccines that saved millions of lives.
See also:
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/amp/
I believe in and trust in the scientific consensus. I do not believe that the scientific establishment could completely cover up something for decades. Eventually someone is going to speak out about it. Sometimes it does take a long time, such as during the HeLa contamination coverup.
“Science” and the scientific consensus is not established by the first few peer-reviewed papers published in a time of crisis. Scientific consensus is established over years, often decades. Anyone claiming that there is a scientific consensus is fooling themselves (or lying).
FWIW, the Covid-19 virus shows zero evidence for genetic engineering.
What is does is look like a normal and typical Corona virus.
We can even tell from the RNA sequence that it is a naturally occurring recombinant from two different but similar Corona viruses.
The whole genetic engineering claim is an example of ignorance.
It doesn’t explain anything and isn’t necessary to explain the origin of the virus.
Who genetically engineered smallpox, influenza, chickenpox, Zika, West Nile, or the original SARS virus? Viruses invade the human population all the time and have been as long as humans have existed.
We are dealing with a new one already right now, H5N1 Avian flu. No one genetically engineered them to infect cows. The virus figured that out all by itself.
PS:
John, remember when I said that there’s virtually no oversight on this kind of dangerous research? I think I can phrase the argument better now. Yes, some existing viral material is controlled in the US under that one agency (thanks again btw), but it does not control gain of function research (and by that I mean the research of proactively searching the wild for viruses in non-human animals that might mutate in the future to be dangerous to humans, and then bringing the virus back to the lab, and then changing the virus to make it more dangerous to humans). The problem is that you can take starting material that is only “regulated” at the BSL-2 level and (easily) create a new virus that is more dangerous than any of the viruses controlled by that agency. So, I think I was mostly correct with my original characterization that this kind of research is basically unregulated in the USA, and I think that’s a very serious problem.
Also, when Dr Ben Hu and the other 2 researchers got sick, they required hospitalization according to USA intelligence sources, and all within the same week. That’s not just allergies or “the flu”.
Either Gerrard is triggered again, or some Republican just woke him up and gave him another paycheck…
What do you make of all of the US intelligence agencies?
We’ve already discussed, AT GREAT LENGTH, what we make of those agencies: they don’t all agree, and the few that you claim “support” the lab-leak story…don’t. All they say is that it’s not physically impossible. Just like it’s not physically impossible that my dad coulda been the second shooter in the grassy knoll in 1963. (Or my granddad…?)
I am far from an expert…I admit that I don’t know…I am not an expert…
Then SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY, stop pretending everyone else is as ignorant and clueless as you are, stop talking down to people who clearly know more than you do (and who are clearly more honest to boot), stop refusing to listen to anyone isn’t as “concerned” as you are, and stop coming back again and again to repeat claims that YOU KNOW have already been debunked countless times.
You are trying to control the framing of the narrative, and I’m not allowing you to do that.
He’s already refuted all of your bullshit raving accusations, and there’s nothing you can do to “not allow that” but flood the thread with even more of the same shit, per Steve Bannon’s directive. Which is exactly what you’re doing.
You want to strawman me into this Republican caricature where it’s all about blaming China. That’s not what I’m doing here.
Yes, it is, and always was, you fucking ignorant liar. How dumb so you have to be, to think we’re dumb enough not to remember your previous comments?
…I think the entire practice should be banned.
In other words, you want to ban the very science that gives us vital information about dangerous diseases, based on NOTHING but hysteria and unfounded allegations about what mighta coulda maybe happened in one lab that you admit you can’t determine for sure. And what are you gonna replace it with? Horse-paste? Divining-rods? Trump-loving quacks pandering to hysterical anti-vaxxers?
Fuck off, troll. That’s the only response you deserve anymore. Maybe go find some other subject to be blatantly disgracefully insanely dead-wrong about…?
So, you want to argue that there are no signs of engineering, but you will continue to argue incessantly that it was engineered.
Brilliant.
Fuck off.
John, remember when I said that there’s virtually no oversight on this kind of dangerous research? I think I can phrase the argument better now…
Go back to bed, moron. You’ll have to do a lot more than that to get your credibility out of the red.
I didn’t make the firm claim that it was engineered. You made the firm claim that it wasn’t. And when I called you on your bad argument, instead of admitting fault, you resorted to name calling / ad hom. You’re better than this. You’re like the last hero that I have in the atheist / skeptic movie. I know you are better than this.
This is a lie. They say more than that.
@ ^ GerrardOfTitanServer : Do they eh?
What precisely do they say and is what they say backed up by the evidence esp versus what you say and if so what quality of evidence and logic?
PS. GerrardOfTitanServer : You don’t have to answer here and now – better for you if you don’t. I’m NOT actually trying to get you banned by responding when you’ve been warned not to do so. Just think about it a bit.
StevoR
Here:
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-on-Potential-Links-Between-the-Wuhan-Institute-of-Virology-and-the-Origins-of-COVID-19-20230623.pdf
Bolding added by me.
PS:
From the same source: A complete rebuttal of Dr Myers’ argument.
PPS:
It would be poetic to get banned by Dr Myers for calling him out on a flagrantly wrong argument, and then calling out his response as strawmanning, moving the goalposts, and (arguably) ad-hom, rather than just accepting and admitting his mistake. If he wants to ban for me that to protect the people in power, then so be it. My wife wants me to argue online less anyway. There’s a reason I’ve been absent for so long. If he does ban me for it, at least then I have no heroes; I would have lost my last one. I really expected better from Dr Myers, but it looks like he’s just as far gone in this tribalistic nonsense as most other posters here that he can’t recognize or admit when he makes extremely bad arguments and would rather double down with strawmanning, moving the goalposts, and ad-hom than admit any kind of error whatsoever. A ban would be validation to me that I’m right and he’s wrong.
I’m actually really depressed that this tendency of medical and scientific professionals to circle the wagons to protect their own is even stronger than I thought. Regardless of whether it’s a lab leak or not, Dr Myers’ behavior has been appalling. We saw such coverups before for HIV-AIDS OPV, and we saw it before for the HeLa contamination coverups, and now we’re seeing it for the COVD origin coverup (regardless of whether it was actually a lab leak or not, they are covering up the mere potentiality that it was).
“Dr Myers”
:)
PZ, forgive him, for he knows not what he does.
[this is not normal, and this is me saying that]
@246. GerrardOfTitanServer :
I do not think you make a very striong case with that – let me add my emphasis here to show why :
Both, plausible – not probable just plausible. Hypotheis -not proven or even supported by much evidence.
A complete rebuttal of Dr Myers’ argument?
Some, could, “standard techniques used advanced molecular laboratories..:: maybe. Perhaps – but w ecan’t actually show and haven’t actrually shown.
I do not think this is showing what you think it shows.
Yes. They’re plausible hypotheses. I know what those words mean.
We’re having a breakdown of communications, and I don’t know how I can be any clearer.
It’s not the most likely answer according to most USA intelligence agencies, but neither is it a conspiracy theory according to the USA intelligence agencies. The USA intelligence agencies all believe that both are plausible explanations. (So do I.)
I know that I believe more strongly than most US intelligence agencies in favoring one explanation more than the other, and I admit that, and I admit my position goes beyond what most USA intelligence agencies say, but not by that much IMHO, and again, I still believe that both hypotheses are plausible and deserve further research.
By contrast, anyone who says that a lab leak is debunked or a “conspiracy theory” is going much much further away from what the USA intelligence agencies are saying compared to me in the opposite direction. Such claims are tantamount to saying that the whole USA intelligence apparatus is somehow fatally compromised, which I think is a rather extreme and unlikely claim. I’ll trust the whole USA intelligence apparatus more than I’ll trust half a dozen scientists who published a few peer-reviewed papers, most of whom had strong conflicts of interest or political pressure from Fauci to change their minds.
PS: And I disagree with the implied position of Dr Myers that the pressure that the USA intelligence agencies are somehow under greater political pressure to find it was a lab leak compared to the livelihoods of these virologists whose funding would be directly threatened by the kinds of regulations, oversight, and bans that I want in place.
Again, this is the strawman. I never said it was engineered. I never expressed any strong degree of certainty that it was engineered. I said it might be, and I remain open to the possibility.
By contrast, Dr Myers said that the genetics shows that it was not engineered. That’s an affirmative claim that demands reason and evidence behind it. The reason and evidence that Dr Myers gave is just completely wrong. They could be using new seamless cloning techniques which are standard and widespread, including at the Wuhan Institute (as I showed above), and it could also be serial passage (in ACE2 humanized mice), which is exactly what the DEFUSE proposal called for. Dr Myers is just wrong, and obviously so.
What bothers me is how or why Dr Myers made such an obviously bad argument in his domain of expertise. Surely he knows better? Or is he that out of touch with modern genetics techniques to not know about the new seamless cloning techniques? Plausible, but unlikely, and that still wouldn’t explain why he didn’t think of serial passage as a possibility – maybe because that falls outside his technical definition of “engineered”? Rather, I think the most likely explanation is that his biases and motivated reasoning is leading to this very bad argument, which makes me really depressed for the reasons that I gave earlier.
Oh, I do. I know exactly what I’m doing. If Dr Myers wants to ban me over calling out his significant error and then doubling down on it by strawmanning, moving the goalposts, and ad hom, then bring it. If that happens, then I would decide that this place is not worthwhile for me to participate in because it would be too much of an echo-chamber because of explicit suppression of reasonable alternative viewpoints.
It’s his blog, and it’s entirely within the purview of Dr Myers to do it, and if that’s how Dr Myers wants to run it, then he can do it. That’s his choice. However, if he does that, then I want nothing to do with his blog, and that’s a choice that I can make.
I’m curious to see what Dr Myers does – triple-down on his error, or admit that he made a mistake like a reasonable adult.