Covid 48： The Long March

[Heartofice]

Just now, Raja said:

There's also no primary research or evidence to read here, compared to the primary evidence presented regarding the Huanan market being the epicenter and origin of the pandemic.

No interest in what the FBI determined in 2021 when these papers have been released in 2022.

Point being you are dismissing one theory as being low confidence, when the contrasting theory is equally low confidence. The paper you are citing is also pretty contested and I've seen enough people dispute it's findings to suggest none of this is clear cut at all. 

All we know at the moment is that we don't know. Your usual sniffy attitude basically backs up what Gorn was saying earlier. 

[Raja]

Ah, so there's no primary research for me to read is there? Thought so.

Also, the report they're talking about was released in 2021 whereas Worobey et al's paper was released in 2022

Edit - without reading any primary research, I'm not particularly interested, especially when the DOE is using evidence from the House Republican Intelligence Commitee report

Edited February 27, 2023 by Raja

[Fez]

Nah. I'm thinking the lab leak theory is perfectly plausible at this point and some people just don't want to admit it because it was generally crazy Republicans who were the first to talk about it.

[Raja]

Or some people have read most of the primary evidence so far which is quite clear.

Happy to read whatever the DOE have read and change my mind.

[Fez]

2 minutes ago, Raja said:

Or some people have read most of the primary evidence so far which is quite clear.

Happy to read whatever the DOE have read and change my mind.

I didn't say it was a lab leak, I'm saying it's plausible it was a lab leak. Which you, and plenty of other people, seem to be in denial about because so much energy was invested in 2020 in saying that the idea was racist.

[Heartofice]

Glad to see we have one of the worlds leading virologists on the board. Humbling experience for us all. 
 

Anyway, we might never find out the truth.. but going back to the old Jon Stuart joke, it does just seem such a coincidence that the virus was found in the one place in the world where they were studying SARS like viruses, where they had brought back the most closely related viruses to Covid 19 from caves thousands of miles away.
 

That for me will always make me raise an eyebrow if nothing else.

Edited February 27, 2023 by Heartofice

[Raja]

6 hours ago, Fez said:

 seem to be in denial about because so much energy was invested in 2020 in saying that the idea was racist.

I think it's very unlikely because of the evidence I've read, ie all the primary research released to date, not that it was 'racist' - what a strange comment to make.

Re: plausibility - sure, I can accept that with the caveat that there's much stronger primary evidence on one side than the lab leak side.

Edited February 27, 2023 by Raja

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, A wilding said:

Well anything is possible. But:

• There have been multiple well documented cases of respiratory viruses suddenly jumping from animals to humans before Covid.
• Many scientists had been saying for years that it was very likely that such a jump was going to cause a really dangerous pandemic before long. (Including one or two that I know personally, and to the extent that they had done some limited prepping for it.) There had been several near misses before Covid.
• The Wuhan market was just the sort of insanitary environment where such a jump is likely to occur.
• The Chinese hierarchical setup is one where cover up at all levels is the instinctive reaction to any situation. So their response to the outbreak proves nothing.

 

I don't disagree, I'm just saying like Fez that you can't dismiss the lab theory because a bunch of crazy right wing types jumped on it without any evidence early on. Now it seems a bit more credible and it's possible it did leak from the lab and also spread in the Wuhan market. We still don't really know, hence why again the Chinese government needs to be pressured to be honest. They could clear a lot of this up, but they refuse to because they're an authoritarian state that won't admit to any wrongdoing. 

10 minutes ago, Raja said:

not that it was 'racist' - what a strange comment to make.

It really isn't, at least here in the US. As I'm sure you know there's been a spike in racism towards Asians and a big part of that is due to COVID, with the underlying assumption from those fuckwads being that Southeast Asians spread the virus around the world.

[Fragile Bird]

Gee, I guess the bird flus spread by migration and the swine flu were also Chinese lab leaks, amirite? I mean, just why do all new forms of the flu originate in Asia anyway, <nudge nudge, wink wink>.

[Raja]

10 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

It really isn't, at least here in the US. As I'm sure you know there's been a spike in racism towards Asians and a big part of that is due to COVID, with the underlying assumption from those fuckwads being that Southeast Asians spread the virus around the world.

It's a strange comment to make to me when I haven't talked about racism, neither have I dismissed the theory because of the fact that people were wrongly doing what you state above. Attitudes like what you mention are abhorrent.

Edited February 27, 2023 by Raja

[Fez]

3 minutes ago, Raja said:

It's a strange comment to make to me when I haven't talked about racism, neither have I dismissed the theory because of the fact that people were wrongly doing what you state above. Attitudes like that are abhorrent.

I'll admit I don't know your posting history, so perhaps it was an unfair comment towards you. However, if you scan the likes of Twitter, you'll see that in 2020 there were an awful lot of blue check marked scientists who were immediately dismissing the lab leak as a racist conspiracy theory. Which led to media orgs doing the same and actions like Facebook outright banning discussion of it.

I'll freely admit that some of the people pushing the lab theory in 2020 did have racist intentions, especially the ones claiming it was intentional rather than an accident. But that doesn't mean the underlying idea was racist. And, with federal agencies now being decidedly mixed on the issue, I think it has to be accepted as a plausible alternate theory; rather than dismissed as the province of cranks.

[Kalbear]

I admit I am most curious about why the department of energy of all groups is doing any kind of analysis on this.

[Fez]

2 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

I admit I am most curious about why the department of energy of all groups is doing any kind of analysis on this.

DOE runs one of the US' national lab systems. And those labs aren't just energy related: https://www.energy.gov/national-laboratories 

I assume they were asked to look into this because of their presumed experience with lab safety protools.

[JoannaL]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

 

Anyway, we might never find out the truth..

This I find so very annoying.  You could have proven the lab leak theory to be true or false. With  a list of all staff of the labs and blood and serum and antibody titer of everyone it should have be easy in 2020 to clear this up. The Chinese could have put this idea to rest easily. They chose not to.

for me this makes this theory more likely.

And I think there should be consequences for the scientific comunity. To overhaul the safety standards, perhaps to reflect if this kind of research belongs in big cities. Perhaps start these kind of S4 labs only on islands with though security protocols and security gates/quarantine measures to avoid such a major incidents -to kill millions of people.

But no one is discussing this and I have not heard that anyone changed protocolls or lab sites. Whenever there was a nuclear power incident (and no such incident killed that many people, ever) there was always  much more discussion if this technology is safe. why are now no questions ask?

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, Fez said:

DOE runs one of the US' national lab systems. And those labs aren't just energy related: https://www.energy.gov/national-laboratories 

I assume they were asked to look into this because of their presumed experience with lab safety protools.

That may be, but they have little intelligence experience and very little in terms of infectious disease. I get that they would be consulted, but I don't see why they'd be the agency taking lead. 

It's also curious why this got leaked, but I'm guessing that's due to Republicans now being in charge. This is a classified report, after all; I'm pretty sure that no one was releasing this directly.

Edited February 27, 2023 by Kalnestk Oblast

[JoannaL]

in this article you can find a list with all S4 (biosafety level) labs around the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level

Currently there are 42 around the world. China has two, one of them the one in Wuhan, their first, opened 2015.

In Europe there are some eg.in Berlin ,Hamburg, London, Rome to name a few. I do not feel safe with this . in Germany we decided for example to put the lab for animal diseases on an restricted island. No idea why we didnt do this with human diseases as well- it cannot  be that they are more harmless , can it?

 

[Kalbear]

2 minutes ago, JoannaL said:

in this article you can find a list with all S4 (biosafety level) labs around the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level

Currently there are 42 around the world. China has two, one of them the one in Wuhan, their first, opened 2015.

In Europe there are some eg.in Berlin ,Hamburg, London, Rome to name a few. I do not feel safe with this . in Germany we decided for example to put the lab for animal diseases on an restricted island. No idea why we didnt do this with human diseases as well- it cannot  be that they are more harmless , can it?

 

Depends on the diseases they're studying, but in general due to our animal processing an outbreak of disease in certain animals would be significantly more dangerous to the overall world than human diseases. 

Also, realistically having it on a restricted island for human-borne illnesses doesn't really matter. The problem is that humans are still going to come and go into that lab one way or another. With animals an island makes more sense because it means you're limiting animals coming into that area, so things like deer and rabbits aren't going to be easily there or moving back and forth - but you can't do that with humans.

[Heartofice]

I do love this article from 2017, it's so optimistic! 

Inside the Chinese lab poised to study world's most dangerous pathogens
 

Quote

A laboratory in Wuhan is on the cusp of being cleared to work with the world’s most dangerous pathogens. The move is part of a plan to build between five and seven biosafety level-4 (BSL-4) labs across the Chinese mainland by 2025, and has generated much excitement, as well as some concerns.

What could go wrong.

[Kalbear]

As usual Ars Technica has a great overall summary on this, including significantly less alarmism:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/energy-dept-reignites-bitter-covid-origin-debate-with-shaky-lab-leak-stance/

Quote

 

Still, the Energy Department is in the minority. Of the eight elements of the intelligence community that have reviewed information on the origin of SARS-CoV-2, only two currently lean toward the so-called "lab leak" hypothesis. The other is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which concluded with "moderate confidence" in 2021 that the pandemic was ignited by a lab leak, according to the WSJ. It's unclear what evidence that assessment is based upon.

By contrast, four other intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council have assessed with "low confidence" that the pandemic was likely sparked by human exposure to infected animals, possibly via animals serving as an intermediate host between a natural reservoir for the virus (such as bats) before leaping to humans.

The two remaining intelligence agencies concluded that there was not sufficient data to coalesce around either the lab leak or spillover transmission hypotheses.

All of the intelligence elements agree that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon and that China officials did not have foreknowledge of the virus before its emergence in Wuhan at the end of 2019.

 

 

[Zorral]

Their so-called evidence hasn't convinced me at all, for all the reasons, Raja in particular, carefully explains to us.

I was counting the hours before this 'discussion' arrived here, with "I told you so."  I am surprised, however,  it took this long to show up.  Maybe true believers don't want to believe this report either, due to the reasons, again, Raja, explained?