Covid Origins: Lab leak hypothesis

[Officer of Engineers]

To do what you're saying the virus has to learn to infect humans and then it has to learn another trick, jump to another.

No. The theory is that we are the intermediate host. The first infection was non-lethal, maybe didn't even get the infected sick, much like bubonic plague and ticks. Through subsquent variants, it's contagious abilities increased and at some point, got people sick. COVID-19 has been observed to infect cats and dogs without affecting them.

Think about it. No one got sick. No one went to see the doc but people carry the bug without knowing it ... until people did get sick.

[Officer of Engineers]

Vaccine. Won't prevent you getting infected but will vastly improve your chances of recovery.

Doesn't matter. We're all doing the delaying action. Each and everyone of us will die. Immortality is not an enshrined right. Mother Nature got all of us by the balls. Only a fool thinks he has a chance to beat Her.

Where's the PPE OOE ? According to Brett she does not need any.

Stupidity knows no bounds. If not SARS-COV-2, Cholera and rabies run amok amongst bats.

[Albany Rifles]

You mean like Cheney. After that we accept this is how things work. He can if he wants to. The fact sheet is official USG. It counts.

CIA is a force to reckon outside the US, but inside is another matter.

What Cheney ran from the White House was illegal and unethical...and was proven to be horribly wrong.

And the CIA is expressly forbidden to operate within the US...it is against the law. FBI and other Federal law agencies are chartered to do that.

For health it is DEPT of HHS, NIH & CDC assisted by USAMIRID.

And just cause the State Department published a document outside its purview or doesn't make it a valid document. I would no more believe a document published by the Department of Labor on the readiness posture of the US nuclear weapons status than I would on the State Department issuing an intelligence report.

And as for a call for aninvestigation....so what. It's due diligence. It is what happens by governments all of the time.

And as far as Doctor Fauci being in charge? That is laughable....he was in charge of nothing until the Biden administration. He was a staff officer who ran his department who could give recommendations. The President and Administration was in charge and refused to follow and institute most of what Fauci recommended or fought him at every turn.

And like Fauci, I follow the science, which to this point has indicated a natural vector. Now, it may have escaped from a lab at Wuhan but that is not the same as a weaponization of the virus.

Folks who have had professional careers dealing with weapons of mass destruction....i.e., Officer of Engineers as well as myself, have already stated what an incredibly bad choice this virus was for weaponization. There are so many more virulent and lethal agents to use which would not have left a trail back to China.

[Double Edge]

Oh...you mean the fact sheet put out by the hyper-political secretary of state who was running his own shadow...and frankly unethical and illegal...intelligence operation by people with questionable credentials.

What surprised me about the DNI's statement is its counter to what goes on in other countries.

The foreign office is not always on the same page as the security people. The security people are always pushing for caution and hesitation. The foreign office wants to improve relations and looks negatively at anything that makes their job difficult. And will even at times act in ways detrimental to security.

Here your top diplomat is going on the offensive and its your security people that are down playing his efforts.

in the US system power politics can over rule even the security people it seems. Business interests have long done it so i guess this is the same thing from a different quarter.

I'll trust intel reports when it comes from DNI and not the State Department. If the State Department wants to talk about the impact of COVID on the political climate in the PRC, fine, I'll listen. But not on intel matters nor on medical intelligence matters.

I've used their work and even congressional reports to advocate for the Iran deal a few years back. Figure this is SOP when the Dems are in office.

Your opposition at the time and even on this board pretended like they meant nothing.

In your system its ok to question these reports. They aren't binding, aren't necessarily policy and do not seem to hold much authority given the way they get slammed by influential people.

Does policy always follow from these reports ? some times.

The reports are conservative. That's a constant i've noted.

[Officer of Engineers]

What surprised me about the DNI's statement is its counter to what goes on in other countries.

The foreign office is not always on the same page as the security people. The security people are always pushing for caution and hesitation. The foreign office wants to improve relations and looks negatively at anything that makes their job difficult. And will even at times act in ways detrimental to security.

Here your top diplomat is going on the offensive and its your security people that are down playing his efforts.

The end result of Pompeo's effort is an unwarranted nuclear strike against the Wuhan labs. Maybe it would not have reached that stage but it is our responsibility to be upfront with any intel that would suggest a bio WMD strike. Such intel is extremely lacking to say the least. Any step towards declaring a bio WMD strike, I want all the i's dotted and the t's crossed. Here, never mind the i's and t's, the entire page is blank.

[Albany Rifles]

DE,

The US Government should never be run as a business. The last 4 years are vivid proof of that.

And I have never advocated that State was responsible for generating intel...you have already seen my response to that.

As for how I acted to the previous administration....I disagreed totally on just about everything it stood for and how it executed. Tillerson gutted the State Department trying to lean it out...just at the time the Pentagon desperately needed an expansion of the soft power State brings to fights. He drove the efficiency of State into the ditch and then that craven asshat Pompeo utterly shattered it.

I know a shit ton of folks who were West Point classmates with Pompeo and knew he was an embarrassment then and were dismayed when he became SOS...he proved them correct in their assessments.

As for State's products and Iran...those products from State are the correct type of products which State is supposed to produce...not intelligence but assessments based on input from diplomatic sources. But intelligence reports are not given from State...their products are part of the overall intel assessment but are never the single intel assessment.

[Double Edge]

Yep, they're all on board this lab leak theory now

[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.

Obama wasn't the only president to speak about pandemic

Dated Nov 1 2005

George W. Bush in 2005: 'If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare' | ABC | Apr 05 2020

When Bush first told his aides he wanted to focus on the potential of a global pandemic, many of them harbored doubts.

"My reaction was -- I'm buried. I'm dealing with counterterrorism. Hurricane season. Wildfires. I'm like, 'What?'" Townsend said. "He said to me, 'It may not happen on our watch, but the nation needs the plan.'"

Over the ensuing months, cabinet officials got behind the idea. Most of them had governed through the Sept. 11 terror attacks, so events considered unlikely but highly-impactful had a certain resonance.

"There was a realization that it's no longer fantastical to raise scenarios about planes falling from the sky, or anthrax arriving in the mail," said Tom Bossert, who worked in the Bush White House and went on to serve as a homeland security adviser in the Trump administration. "It was not a novel. It was the world we were living."

According to Bossert, who is now an ABC News contributor, Bush did not just insist on preparation for a pandemic. He was obsessed with it.

"He was completely taken by the reality that that was going to happen," Bossert said.

Thus was born the nation's most comprehensive pandemic plan -- a playbook that included diagrams for a global early warning system, funding to develop new, rapid vaccine technology, and a robust national stockpile of critical supplies, such as face masks and ventilators, Townsend said.

The effort was intense over the ensuing three years, including exercises where cabinet officials gamed out their responses, but it was not sustained. Large swaths of the ambitious plan were either not fully realized or entirely shelved as other priorities and crises took hold.

In a November 2005 speech at the National Institutes of Health, Bush laid out proposals in granular detail -- describing with stunning prescience how a pandemic in the United States would unfold. Among those in the audience was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leader of the current crisis response, who was then and still is now the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire," Bush said at the time. "If caught early it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder, undetected, it can grow to an inferno that can spread quickly beyond our ability to control it."

"To respond to a pandemic, we need medical personnel and adequate supplies of equipment," Bush said. "In a pandemic, everything from syringes to hospital beds, respirators masks and protective equipment would be in short supply."

Bush told the gathered scientists that they would need to develop a vaccine in record time.

"If a pandemic strikes, our country must have a surge capacity in place that will allow us to bring a new vaccine on line quickly and manufacture enough to immunize every American against the pandemic strain," he said.


"If we wait for a pandemic to appear," he warned, "it will be too late to prepare. And one day many lives could be needlessly lost because we failed to act today."

[Double Edge]

Nicholas Wade has been busy since his article in the Bulletin. Given interviews to a few Indian print & tv orgs, One asked what got him going on lab leak. He mentioned an article by Yuri Deigin written for medium back in Apr 2020

Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research | Medium | Apr 22 2020

If you hear anyone claim “we know the virus didn’t come from a lab”, don’t buy it — it may well have. Labs around the globe have been creating synthetic viruses like CoV2 for years. And no, its genome would not necessarily contain hallmarks of human manipulation: modern genetic engineering tools permit cutting and pasting genomic fragments without leaving a trace. It can be done quickly, too: it took a Swiss team less than a month to create a synthetic clone of CoV2.

A year later it hasn't aged at all.

[Double Edge]

Another from the bulletin, given its date is prescient

Human error in high-biocontainment labs: a likely pandemic threat | Bulletin | Feb 25 2019

Odds of human error are two thirds and higher.

Human error is the main cause of potential exposures of lab workers to pathogens. Statistical data from two sources show that human error was the cause of, according to my research, 67 percent and 79.3 percent of incidents leading to potential exposures in BSL3 labs. These percentages come from analysis of years of incident data from the Federal Select Agent Program (FSAP) and from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). (Details may be found in the Supplementary Material document.)

During the 2009-2015 time period, FSAP received a total of 749 incident reports from select-agent research facilities. Conservatively, 594 or 79.3 percent of those incidents involve human error. (Details may be found in the Supplementary Material.)

National Institutes of Health incident data. Incident reports to the NIH Office of Science Policy cover the period from 2004 through 2017 and BSL3 and BSL4 facilities. They were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The 128 incident reports provide extremely detailed descriptions. The reports are often several-dozen pages long so almost no questions remain about details.

Of the 128 incidents, 86 or 67.2 percent were due to human error. This percentage is in the same ballpark as the FSAP reports.

Reporting is mandatory in the US when accidents occur so it gives an idea of likelihood in other places.

This is really hard work to do safely I'm afraid

[tantalus]

Another from the bulletin, given its date is prescient

Human error in high-biocontainment labs: a likely pandemic threat | Bulletin | Feb 25 2019

Odds of human error are two thirds and higher.







Reporting is mandatory in the US when accidents occur so it gives an idea of likelihood in other places.

This is really hard work to do safely I'm afraid

And all this in leading science journals for years and the media forgot to do their jobs. All published before the pandemic so not tainted by US politics.

Heck they could have just quoted faucis paper from 2012 if they needed to weigh lab leak pandemics as plausible versus conspiracy

Scientists working in this field might say—as indeed I have said—that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky. However, we must respect that there are genuine and legitimate concerns about this type of research, both domestically and globally. We cannot expect those who have these concerns to simply take us, the scientific community, at our word that the benefits of this work outweigh the risks, nor can we ignore their calls for greater transparency, their concerns about conflicts of interest, and their efforts to engage in a dialog about whether these experiments should have been performed in the first place. Those of us in the scientific community who believe in the merits of this work have the responsibility to address these concerns thoughtfully and respectfully.

I wonder who he might have been referring to in 2012 because its been crickets for a year save a few rogues accussed of entertaining dangerous racist theories...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3484390/

One concern, and this goes for Wuhan (as seems to have been an issue here) as well as elsewhere, is work, or parts of processes migrating down lab security levels. Nobody wants to do work all day in full hazard suits, its laborious and uncomfortable. Especially when the risks are miniscule at the daily, individual level. It becomes an issue when you multiply these risk all over the worlds labs, year after year and the damage is assymetrical, low risk, but high loss scenario. Humans are just terrible at this kind of risk evaluation.

We will need tough regulations (on the grey areas) and enforcement globally to keep level 4 work at level 4. Hard to see us (imo) mustering that kind of resolve without a consensus forming on a lab leak as the default hypothesis.

[tantalus]

Another bizarre part of the narrative is how wet markets and "strange" foods as causing the pandemic does not risk racist overrtones and scientists attempting to prevent the next pandemic accidentially leaking does. A nice example of the mainstream media losing its ability to reason clearly.

That said, wet markets with all these wild animals are actually a terrible idea.

[Double Edge]

Couple of researchers from South China Uni calling lab leak back in Feb 2020. The paper was removed from researchgate where it was published.



The spotlight is on WIV at the moment which is 12km away. Not much is said about Wuhan CDC.

[Double Edge]

One concern, and this goes for Wuhan (as seems to have been an issue here) as well as elsewhere, is work, or parts of processes migrating down lab security levels. Nobody wants to do work all day in full hazard suits, its laborious and uncomfortable. Especially when the risks are miniscule at the daily, individual level. It becomes an issue when you multiply these risk all over the worlds labs, year after year and the damage is assymetrical, low risk, but high loss scenario. Humans are just terrible at this kind of risk evaluation.

We will need tough regulations (on the grey areas) and enforcement globally to keep level 4 work at level 4. Hard to see us (imo) mustering that kind of resolve without a consensus forming on a lab leak as the default hypothesis.

It gets better than that. This one's from the Global Times.

Biosafety guideline issued to fix chronic management loopholes at virus labs | ECNS | Feb 17 2020

Hmm, Feb 2020. Wonder why they thought it would be a good idea

The Ministry of Science and Technology issued new rules over the weekend, requiring laboratories nationwide to boost their biosafety in a move that experts said could fix chronic inadequate management issues during the campaign against the coronavirus.

The release of the guideline deals with chronic loopholes at laboratories, Yang Zhanqiu, a deputy director of the pathogen biology department at Wuhan University in Hubei Province, told the Global Times on Sunday.

"The mention of biosafety at labs by the ministry has nothing to do with some saying that the coronavirus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences," Yang said.

Yes, people can get the wrong idea

But then it goes on to say ....

Laboratories in China have paid insufficient attention to biological disposal, Yang said.

Lab trash can contain man-made viruses, bacteria or microbes with a potentially deadly impact on human beings, animals or plants.

Some researchers discharge laboratory materials into the sewer after experiments without a specific biological disposal mechanism, Yang explained.

A minor SARS virus infection in Beijing and Anhui in 2004 was resulted from insufficient management and improper inactivation process at a lab, according to the People's Daily.

Laboratories in China have paid insufficient attention to biological disposal, Yang said.

Best to be on the safe side.

A top academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering earned 10.17 million yuan ($1.46 million) by illegally selling off lab animals and experimental milk, according to a report in the Shanghai-based The Paper.

Li Ning, a leading expert at transgenic technologies at China Agricultural University, was sentenced to 12 years in prison on January 2 for grafting 37.56 million yuan.

Management on biology labs is an issue not just for China. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also launched actions in August 2014 to improve its laboratory safety following incidents where research fellows failed to process virus samples properbly (sic)

It is a difficult business, agreed

Source for that top academician selling off lab animals and getting busted is the Beijing Times

http://chinascope.org/archives/21311

A high-profile Chinese researcher was sentenced for corruption and pocketing the gains from selling animals and animal products after lab experiments. This could indirectly strengthen the theory that the novel coronavirus could be leaked from China’s bio lab.

No kidding

[667medic]

Escape of pathogens from BSL3 facility, has happened before even in Singapore of all the places. I remember this quite well as I was a student and knew several researchers working on SARS.

Recent Singapore SARS case a laboratory accident (nih.gov)
Lancet Infect Dis. 2003 Nov; 3(11): 679.
Published online 2003 Oct 23. doi: 10.1016/S1473-3099(03)00815-6
PMCID: PMC7128757
PMID: 14603886
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7128757/

The recent case of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Singapore was the result of a laboratory accident, so concludes an 11-member review panel led by Antony Della-Porta, Biosafety Expert for the WHO, in a report produced for the Ministry of Health in Singapore. Authorities in Singapore have continued surveillance for SARS since the last reported case in May 2003 and became alarmed when, at the end of August, a 27-year-old doctoral student at the Singapore General Hospital (SGH) developed symptoms consistent with SARS.