Covid Origins: Lab leak hypothesis

[tantalus]

The one thing that has come out of this discussion is I fear a natural pandemic less than before.

A natural pandemic takes time for the virus to adapt and work its way through the population. In doing so it leaves a trail that can be picked up and can be realistically contained.

The odds of a regional pandemic becoming global are much lower. We see this with SARS, MERS, Ebola, Various bird & swine flu's. In spite of global travel were not able to break out the regions they originated from.

The flu pandemic of a hundred years ago isn't comparable today because we lacked the knowledge to handle it adequately so it spread globally. Until we knew this one was man made the comparisons were being made with the flu pandemic. They are no longer valid.

Man made viruses that speed up the evolutionary process are more dangerous. Spread faster and affect all age groups.

There have to be adequate safeguards in place that are ironclad with penalties if such research is to continue in the future.

My advise would be to fear a natural pandemic with every drop of fear you can muster.

I see where you are going with this but for me doenst fully follow. There is something important here to what you are saying but I feel its still an overreach.

A new flu pandemic while adapting would get lost in the noise of the exisiting flu season. Any disease that has symptoms with a strong overlap with endemic illnesses in society has a similar problem.

If we develop a global testing and monitoring network than maybe we can get a leg up, it will need to be highly senstivie. But I think its important to consider the possibility that it isnt obvious that an illness going back and forth will be the actual one that makes the breakthrough. So alot of false alarms, potentially an awful lot. The good news is the rapid decline in genomic testing costs means we will be able to apply orders of more magnitude of survelliance comparing 2005 to 2025. Big help.

Personally I don't agree man made viruses are more dangerous or spread faster per se. Worth noting that there are many natural diseases with higher mortality than covid 19 and some that are more contagious, some that are both. The worst modelled scenario being a 60% mortality flu pandemic, a disease that kills tooo many simply stops itself from spreading. But we will in theory be able to manufucature viruses in the future that do exceed natures capabilities, please god we never do, but one would feel with an indefinite timeline we will.

[tantalus]

The other thing I would say is the future problem runs much deeper than current labs. We have to consider the democratization of technology and the changing of the economies of scale. So that maybe even terrorist organisations or lone wolfs have the ability in the not too distant future to manufature diseases due to improvements in computing, ai, genomic data, synthetic biology. This could prove to be the most dangerous tech application in the world as a result.

[tantalus]

Cautious Scott has become brazen...

[Albany Rifles]

Confusing read

Pompeo-led effort to hunt down Covid lab theory shut down by Biden administration over concerns about quality of evidence | CNN | May 26 2021

A day after CNN reported this story, the State Department disputed that it had shut down the Trump-era inquiry and instead said that its work had been completed. Several sources involved with the inquiry who spoke to CNN said it was their impression that there was more work to be done.
State denied they shut down the earlier effort because they say it was already completed and now it seems more work needs to be done and a probe is being initiated. eh ?

The reason it was shut down is because it was a hack job being poorly done by an agency not qualified to do the investigation, nor chartered by US law to do so. The Biden Administration shut it down and moved it away from the State Department which has no jurisdiction and moved it to the USAMARID and other agencies qualified and chartered to do teh investigation.

Anything Pompeo touched was a political hack job.

[Double Edge]

The other thing I would say is the future problem runs much deeper than current labs. We have to consider the democratization of technology and the changing of the economies of scale. So that maybe even terrorist organisations or lone wolfs have the ability in the not too distant future to manufature diseases due to improvements in computing, ai, genomic data, synthetic biology. This could prove to be the most dangerous tech application in the world as a result.

Here is one approach. It argues along the same lines of banning nuclear tests in favour of simulation.

Gain of function or weapon of mass destruction? | Sunday Guardian | May 29 2021

Do keep in mind that the same response would follow as if a terror org got control of nuke and set it off some where.

We'd go after the country that harboured them.

Personally I don't agree man made viruses are more dangerous or spread faster per se. Worth noting that there are many natural diseases with higher mortality than covid 19 and some that are more contagious, some that are both. The worst modelled scenario being a 60% mortality flu pandemic, a disease that kills tooo many simply stops itself from spreading. But we will in theory be able to manufucature viruses in the future that do exceed natures capabilities, please god we never do, but one would feel with an indefinite timeline we will.

What gave me the idea was this post in the zoonotic thread.

Virus found in 46 countries yet they only have 7 poultry farm workers people in Russia with an infection.

Just one spillover event in Russia out of 46 countries.

Natural does not spread as fast as man made, particularly those engineered to better infect humans.

I am actually amazed we havent seen a flu pandemic out of our factory farms over last 3 decades. H1N1 came from pig factory farm in 2009 but it wasnt severe. There have been 9 flu pandemics in 3 centuries.

Bingo!

From time to time i see reports in press of fowl having to be culled in various poultry farms in the country. To the point that the chicken sellers have to advertise to people that what they're selling is disease free.

Am i going to stop eating chicken because there is an avian flu outbreak ? No.

[Double Edge]

very good, then undetected hospital outbreak is the plausible scenario in the early days in Wuhan.

Detected outbreak would leave a record.

No hospital outbreak is not possible given how easily transmitted the disease is.

One more piece of the puzzle

Wuhan Lab Researcher’s Wife Died Of COVID-Like Illness In December 2019, Former Lead US Investigator Says | Daily Caller | May 28 2021

[Double Edge]

If we develop a global testing and monitoring network than maybe we can get a leg up, it will need to be highly senstivie. But I think its important to consider the possibility that it isnt obvious that an illness going back and forth will be the actual one that makes the breakthrough. So alot of false alarms, potentially an awful lot. The good news is the rapid decline in genomic testing costs means we will be able to apply orders of more magnitude of survelliance comparing 2005 to 2025. Big help.

Dated Dec 2014

Back then they were lauding Fauci, today they're vilifying him.

14:59 This is something I want to just focus on for a second.

Tony and I were fondly reminiscing about SARS and H1N1.

(laughter)

That's what these guys do for fun.

(laughter)

And we were lucky with H1N1 -- that it did not prove to be more deadly.

We can't say we're lucky with Ebola because obviously it's having a devastating effect in West Africa but it is not airborne in its transmission.

There may and likely will come a time in which we have both an airborne disease that is deadly. And in order for us to deal with that effectively, we have to put in place an infrastructure -- not just here at home, but globally -- that allows us to see it quickly, isolate it quickly, respond to it quickly.

And it also requires us to continue the same path of basic research that is being done here at NIH that Nancy is a great example of.

So that if and when a new strain of flu, like the Spanish flu, crops up five years from now or a decade from now, we've made the investment and we're further along to be able to catch it.

It is a smart investment for us to make. It's not just insurance; it is knowing that down the road we're going to continue to have problems like this -- particularly in a globalized world where you move from one side of the world to the other in a day.

So this is important now, but it's also important for our future and our children's future and our grandchildren's future.

What happened to that investment

[Double Edge]

The reason it was shut down is because it was a hack job being poorly done by an agency not qualified to do the investigation, nor chartered by US law to do so. The Biden Administration shut it down and moved it away from the State Department which has no jurisdiction and moved it to the USAMARID and other agencies qualified and chartered to do teh investigation.

If it gets us further along then all the better.

Had CNN included that point about USMARID it would have been less confusing.

Anything Pompeo touched was a political hack job.

And whatever Trump's team found, not all of which has been declassified yet merited a further investigation

The original premise that a lab leak could not be ruled out still holds true.

I was wondering why Trump did not push the lab leak theory further at the time, made all the right noises but did not conduct a probe as Biden is doing until i realised Trump's team did not have enough to go on at the time.

Six months of legwork later there is a basis to go forward.

Whatever Pompeo asserted had legs but he was not at liberty to reveal more at the time.

So it sounded like rhetoric and did not get traction.

Without the earlier groundwork Biden would not have much to go on. Now Biden's team can focus better.

I'm happy to see the baton passed from one administration to the next.

[Double Edge]

Why we should welcome the lab leak hypothesis | Unherd | Jun 05 2021

The bat researchers aren't patient zero. It's those that retooled the virus and somehow got infected that are. He ends with the sorry state of organised science.

This failure of the scientific community would be easier to fathom if it were built on actual lies. But I don’t believe that is the case. In order to win at the funding and prestige game — in order to deliver a really great pitch – -you have to be a true believer. Indeed, I suspect the “Gain of Function” research community really thought they were racing against the clock to save the world; experimenting in a reckless manner was a risk they were willing to take. But they were like drunks behind the wheel, with the rest of the world unwittingly along for the ride.

Remedying this will not happen overnight. So in the meantime, we should concentrate our efforts on fixing the small list of places and activities that actually do increase the risk of another pandemic. The trade in exotic animals, both as pets and as food, seems an obvious place to start. Yes, Covid-19 did not begin in the Wuhan Seafood market, but many initially thought that it did because the story makes a great deal of sense.

HIV very likely came from a chimpanzee who fell victim to the bushmeat trade. It was a worst-case scenario; the pathogen had plenty of opportunities to jump to humans due to the blood inevitably splattered in the process of butchery, while the required retooling of the virus was minimal owing to the close evolutionary relationship between people and chimps.

The bushmeat trade is barbaric, and endangers the many to the benefit of the few. And we can say exactly the same about the trade in exotic pets. If you want the biggest bang for the pandemic prevention buck, ending these markets would be far more effective than creating superbugs in the lab — and far less dangerous.

But the biggest danger exposed by Covid-19 comes from our universally corrupted institutions. If SARS2 emerged from the lab, then the failure of our institutions is the root cause, and fixing them should be our top priority.

That will no doubt be a Herculean task.

Our virologists, the press, the international regulatory bodies and all the major social media platforms are already dragging their feet, doing everything in their power to avoid learning the lesson the virus’s likely origin. And in doing so, they are preventing us from learning it, too. In the coming years, if the world needs saving from anything, it is surely that.

[Double Edge]

This WAPO article says that the bat people are under scrutiny. But Brett Weinstein's essay in the previous post makes it clear they are less susceptible. He knows because he also did research with bats and does not believe he could become patient zero.

Which is why Bat woman says they did not follow security protocols as strictly in the caves

A scientist adventurer and China’s ‘Bat Woman’ are under scrutiny as coronavirus lab-leak theory gets another look | WAPO | Jun 03 2021

[Double Edge]

Why was the lab leak theory dismissed last May ? Fauci says he didn't dismiss it, he just promoted the natural origin theory

So its not Trump saying lab leak but Fauci saying natural that derailed things.

What Trump said didn't matter. No wonder Trump wanted to fire the guy but Fauci's reputation saved him.

Now why do we switch away from natural to lab leak.

Because the evidence for natural didn't stack up, six months later.

It took six months to call out natural. Its more diplomatically worded of course.

We still don't know if US taxpayer money went into gain of function research. Fauci has repeatedly denied it.

The Trump WH was unaware that Fauci restarted funding to the Wuhan Lab in 2017.

Fauci never mentioned it apparently

Obama stopped it in 2014 with the proviso that if the head of NIH thought otherwise they could proceed.

[Officer of Engineers]

Because the evidence for natural didn't stack up, six months later.

It took us 1500 years to understand influenza. In modern times, it took 9 years to find the root cause of leginaire disease. AIDS was running amok for 10 years before people even knew it existed and then another 6 years to identify the virus. And people are complaining about 6 months?

[DOR]

It took us 1500 years to understand influenza. In modern times, it took 9 years to find the root cause of leginaire disease. AIDS was running amok for 10 years before people even knew it existed and then another 6 years to identify the virus. And people are complaining about 6 months?

It took 10-20 years get a handle on AIDS, at a time when rewinding VHS tapes was a thing, and streaming wasn't.

Now, people expect things to move a bit faster.

[Double Edge]

One word from the man and the doors shut quickly

Fauci described Indian research on ‘man-made Covid’ as outlandish | Sunday Guardian | Jun 05 2021

I remember this paper coming out in Feb last year but then had to stop talking about it because it was withdrawn. Why was it withdrawn ?

“They approached seven journals over a period of six months to peer review their work and publish it in their journals, but each one of them refused as they did not want to get embroiled in the controversy. They didn’t even agree to peer review and publish it even after they told them that they will tone down their paper,” the associate added, while stating that it took them around 20 days to reach their findings.

So when a paper is considered without basis because it has no peer review. Do people realise that the peer review was refused ?

Seriously WHY ?!? if its outlandish CALL THE BLOODY THING OUT in a peer review.

Was arguing with people into last May who were adamant the paper was right. I pointed out the authors withdrew the paper back in Feb. So its untenable.

Now we know why.

[Officer of Engineers]

Ok, let's back up a few steps. Science is based on observations, not rumours. While there are some facts that points to gain-of-function mutations, there are a hell of a lot more facts supporting the zoological mutation. You go where the facts lead you. Far, far, far more facts lead to the zoological than gain-of-function. In fact, there are the same number of facts supporting Wuhan gain-of-function as there are supporting Martian involvement. Is it possible? Yes to both. Are there any facts suuporting Wuhan over Mars? Nope.