HintonJamesHeel
Distinguished Member
- Messages
- 293
You say all that yet CIA was asked to investigate it by Biden and said it’s more likely than not that it came from a lab.
Covid Thread | Pandemic started Five Years Ago
- Thread starter tonman
- Start date
- Replies: 191
- Views: 4K
- Politics
HintonJamesHeel
Distinguished Member
- Messages
- 293
Every virologist has said it’s important to understand where this came from. That’s not in dispute.
gtyellowjacket
Iconic Member
- Messages
- 1,633
I can definitely see good reasons to determine the source such as improving lab containment techniques or stopping the selling of certain animals in an environment like a live market. That's just the cursory stuff. I imagine virologists might also have different techniques to study the microbe and model the spread based on the source of the initial infections. And maybe there would be a different vaccine/cure based on the source but that seems thin.
HintonJamesHeel
Distinguished Member
- Messages
- 293
You understand my post isn’t in dispute.
I understand that you are a Trump supplicant trying to deflect the shitty job your God-King did with covid. But spin on, dude. It makes you look more and more like the conspiracy-mongering dolt that you may very well be.
Do better (if that's even possible). If not, Super Ignore is appropriately in your future.
It amazes me how so many let china off the hook. Regardless of the origin, intent, lack of, etc. , The government did not cooperate and its behavior made a bad situation worse. You can believe that without being MAGA.
The one we've "let off the hook" is Trump. He killed far more Americans than China.
- Messages
- 968
.
It amazes me how many think we can actually do a danged thing to hold China accountable for the origin when we havent even taken ownership of our own shortcomings with regard to the response.
superrific
Legend of ZZL
- Messages
- 5,694
The "lab leak" nonsense is important because it's a conspiracy theory that has been sane-washed into a "hypothesis." It is not even that. Let's review for background:
1. Do highly infectious diseases regularly emerge from cross-species transmissions of viral DNA? Yes.
2. Have those diseases caused pandemics? Yes.
3. Have such diseases accounted for 100% of pandemics in the past? Yes.
4. Have there been naturally occurring coronaviruses with pandemic potential? Yes. SARS.
5. Is COVID similar to SARS? Yes.
6. Does cross-species transmission commonly occur between the types of animals in that market? Yes.
7. So why then do we think this isn't just a cross-species transmission. Because there's a lab 40 minutes away.
That's literally it. That's what the "lab leak" hypothesis is: a conclusion that a conspiracy is at work because of something easily explicable as a coincidence. A predictable coincidence. It's indisputably a conspiracy theory. Maybe it's one of the small category of conspiracy theories that turns out to be true: nobody has said there's a ZERO probability, but it's safe to assume the probability is low given that there is no evidence whatsoever and lots of questions that have to be answered for it even to make sense.
So when we give this bullshit the time of day, when we say "there's evidence in both directions," we are encouraging and mainstreaming conspiracy thinking. That ship has sailed, but we can still insist on tamping down the conspiracies, keep them fringe.
1. Do highly infectious diseases regularly emerge from cross-species transmissions of viral DNA? Yes.
2. Have those diseases caused pandemics? Yes.
3. Have such diseases accounted for 100% of pandemics in the past? Yes.
4. Have there been naturally occurring coronaviruses with pandemic potential? Yes. SARS.
5. Is COVID similar to SARS? Yes.
6. Does cross-species transmission commonly occur between the types of animals in that market? Yes.
7. So why then do we think this isn't just a cross-species transmission. Because there's a lab 40 minutes away.
That's literally it. That's what the "lab leak" hypothesis is: a conclusion that a conspiracy is at work because of something easily explicable as a coincidence. A predictable coincidence. It's indisputably a conspiracy theory. Maybe it's one of the small category of conspiracy theories that turns out to be true: nobody has said there's a ZERO probability, but it's safe to assume the probability is low given that there is no evidence whatsoever and lots of questions that have to be answered for it even to make sense.
So when we give this bullshit the time of day, when we say "there's evidence in both directions," we are encouraging and mainstreaming conspiracy thinking. That ship has sailed, but we can still insist on tamping down the conspiracies, keep them fringe.
superrific
Legend of ZZL
- Messages
- 5,694
Typically speaking, when I form judgments, they're always revisable in the face of new evidence. I'm not going to jump at every revelation uncritically and let my views spin wildly, but I will and do consider new evidence even if it contradicts my previous position. It is, after all, better to be right late than never.
So if someone wants to show me actual evidence of a lab leak, I'll consider it. Maybe I'll be convinced that my earlier assessment was wrong. It's hard to know, because first I'd need to see some evidence. It's not even clear what the evidence would look like. And no, the fact that the Chinese authorities were not fully cooperative is not evidence that they were hiding a lab leak. You can't assume the existence of something and then claim that thing is being hidden.
The only thing I'm aware of are anecdotal reports about people at the lab getting sick. I don't think we have much in the way of detail about that. But that's of little import, because the virus jumped from animals to humans in the market, and it had been circulating in the market for a couple of weeks at least. And they know this by analyzing SNPs (I think) between different specimens of the virus. So if those illnesses were connected, it would have to be something like:
1. Viruses from the lab, with little contagiousness, went to the market
2. At the market, the virus became highly contagious
3. After that, it jumped into people, in the new mutated form.
And that's not a lab leak story. That's a mutation story. The viruses in the lab were collected from nature. They were being studied. They weren't ultra-contagious. They were not COVID. They were maybe a precursor to COVID. Lots of viruses could be precursors to COVID or COVID-dangerous relatives.
Don't get me wrong -- I don't have too much time for that "hypothesis" 1-3 because, again, there's no evidence. But even if it's true, it's not telling us the virus came from the lab.
As for the CIA's "assessment": we can't evaluate it without knowing what it's based on, and since we will never find out, it's virtually meaningless. First, the idea of trusting the CIA? Maybe the one thing right and left have agreed on over half a century is that the CIA is not to be trusted, because it's not. But even if we knew that the CIA assessment is done in good faith with objectivity, so what? The CIA cannot overrule science. They might get some HUMINT that so-and-so wasn't keeping proper protocols at the lab and that administrators were worried about something yada yada yada. So? The virus has been shown, with a high degree of confidence, to have emerged from the market. Nothing the CIA can do or say changes that fact.
So if someone wants to show me actual evidence of a lab leak, I'll consider it. Maybe I'll be convinced that my earlier assessment was wrong. It's hard to know, because first I'd need to see some evidence. It's not even clear what the evidence would look like. And no, the fact that the Chinese authorities were not fully cooperative is not evidence that they were hiding a lab leak. You can't assume the existence of something and then claim that thing is being hidden.
The only thing I'm aware of are anecdotal reports about people at the lab getting sick. I don't think we have much in the way of detail about that. But that's of little import, because the virus jumped from animals to humans in the market, and it had been circulating in the market for a couple of weeks at least. And they know this by analyzing SNPs (I think) between different specimens of the virus. So if those illnesses were connected, it would have to be something like:
1. Viruses from the lab, with little contagiousness, went to the market
2. At the market, the virus became highly contagious
3. After that, it jumped into people, in the new mutated form.
And that's not a lab leak story. That's a mutation story. The viruses in the lab were collected from nature. They were being studied. They weren't ultra-contagious. They were not COVID. They were maybe a precursor to COVID. Lots of viruses could be precursors to COVID or COVID-dangerous relatives.
Don't get me wrong -- I don't have too much time for that "hypothesis" 1-3 because, again, there's no evidence. But even if it's true, it's not telling us the virus came from the lab.
As for the CIA's "assessment": we can't evaluate it without knowing what it's based on, and since we will never find out, it's virtually meaningless. First, the idea of trusting the CIA? Maybe the one thing right and left have agreed on over half a century is that the CIA is not to be trusted, because it's not. But even if we knew that the CIA assessment is done in good faith with objectivity, so what? The CIA cannot overrule science. They might get some HUMINT that so-and-so wasn't keeping proper protocols at the lab and that administrators were worried about something yada yada yada. So? The virus has been shown, with a high degree of confidence, to have emerged from the market. Nothing the CIA can do or say changes that fact.
gtyellowjacket
Iconic Member
- Messages
- 1,633
Interesting article primarily on how FBI scientists came up with their moderate confidence estimate that it was a lab leak. Here is a summation by the FBI's chief investigator.
"Bannan acknowledges that a natural spillover remains possible and should continue to be investigated. But he believes that the stark differences between how other coronaviruses emerged, the absence of any proven host animal, and what we know about the WIV’s research practices make a lab origin more likely. “The science speaks volumes,” he says."
www.vanityfair.com
"Bannan acknowledges that a natural spillover remains possible and should continue to be investigated. But he believes that the stark differences between how other coronaviruses emerged, the absence of any proven host animal, and what we know about the WIV’s research practices make a lab origin more likely. “The science speaks volumes,” he says."
Exclusive: Inside the FBI’s Lab Leak Investigation
As bird flu spreads, and Team Trump begins dismantling America’s public health apparatus, a former FBI scientist and investigator speaks out about the evidence that led the bureau to suspect that COVID-19 was sparked by an incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
- Messages
- 15,351
Five years on: The countries that never locked down for Covid-19
Five years on: The countries that never locked down for Covid-19
Most of the world went into lockdowns in March 2020 response to the Covid-19 pandemic, but what has been the impact in those that didn't impose strict restrictions?
www.bbc.com
donbosco
Iconic Member
- Messages
- 2,296
My recollection...
Looking back to March, Five Years ago. For my students and I the Eighth Week of the Spring Semester of 2020 (ending March 6, a Friday), was scheduled to lead us into a week-long break. Over the 7 days that followed Covid-19 drastically changed the way the world was arranged. Presaging it all, on that same Friday - way out west - the University of Washington announced that it was going online with classes “for at least the next few weeks.” We watched and waited but little suspected that we were on the cusp of something for which we had no schooling whatsoever. Information was garbled and overload slowly but steadily set in.
The trump Whitehouse offered mostly obfuscation and “ass-covering-doublespeak.” The nation was leaderless and many of our other institutions seemed caught off-guard. At my school, an email on March 11 directed us to extend our Spring Break an extra week and return to class online by way of Zoom or Google Meet technology on March 23. The projection was that we should prepare to teach that way until April 6. As we all know, we did not return to campus in early April but rather finished out the semester online and stayed in distance-learning mode through the Summer and Fall of 2020, and the Spring and following Summer of 2021. I did not return to a brick and mortar classroom until the Fall of 2021 — and at that time with all of us masked and most vaccinated. Myriad good reasons meant that others would take longer to go “face-to-face.”
Amidst all that hurly-burly and having not planned for a planetary event I was attending the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies gathering in Austin, Texas — Wednesday, March 4th through Sunday the 8th. I arrived in Austin early on Tuesday to keep a commitment with a local high school college prep program called ‘Austin Achieve.’ I noticed a few masked passengers in the airport upon landing in Texas. Nothing was different at all at the high school.
On Friday, March 6, the second day of that conference the city of Austin canceled the music festival known as South By Southwest. That was the same day that the U. of Washington moved online. The next day, Saturday, I gave my paper at an afternoon panel. Heading out by plane the next morning there were considerably more masks along with a palpable, and growing, sense of trepidation.
In the background a cruise ship had been stranded — off the coast of California and refused docking due to virus suspicions - ultimately crew members tested positive. In the meantime I had caught an interview online with Dr. Michael Osterholm. He convincingly cautioned that what we were seeing — now called the Corona Virus or Covid-19 — was deadly, on the rise, and would change the world. Sickness and death in New York City and Italy were making the news. My family and I were scheduled to fly into Newark on Wednesday, March 11 for a few days in The City. We canceled our plans. That very day The World Health Organization noted 118,000 cases in 114 countries and declared a Pandemic. On Thursday college basketball was cancelled just as March Madness was set to start.
The world seemed to be crawling with deadly invisible killing germs. No one knew if it was in the air or on the things we touched. Masks were urged but they were nowhere to be found. Recipes for hand sanitizing liquids, to supplement the now bought-up supply circulated. Panic buying and hoarding brought shortages. There was no toilet paper. We would learn so very much over the months to come. A new kind of education was aborning. Thoughtful folk were scrambling for information. We did not ‘come together.’ Things changed. Normal evaporated. A new normal began to shape. And still is.
I realize now that with the crashing inward of the world in the Third Month of Two Thousand Twenty of the Common Era that I started writing - and perhaps even thinking - in a way that I never had. Reaching back, for good or ill, and grabbing semblances of past ‘normals.’ And realizing that such a state is, in fact, ever-shifting, never still, and both deeply personal and widely shared all at once. I wasn’t just reaching back either but also reaching out for the lost human contact of the past - of playgrounds and ball courts and barrooms and buses. I learned too - as have so many of us - that “You can’t go home again” because home did not sit waiting while you were away. Indeed…
“…the dark ancestral
cave, the womb from
which mankind emerged
into the light, forever
pulls one back-but…
You can’t go home again…
You can’t go..back home
to the Escapes of Time
and Memory. You can’t
go home again.” ~ Thomas
Wolfe
Oh yes, and while we are piling on the adages - Home is ever with my family, ever Where The Heart Is. Ever Before Me. Ever Before Us.
Looking back to March, Five Years ago. For my students and I the Eighth Week of the Spring Semester of 2020 (ending March 6, a Friday), was scheduled to lead us into a week-long break. Over the 7 days that followed Covid-19 drastically changed the way the world was arranged. Presaging it all, on that same Friday - way out west - the University of Washington announced that it was going online with classes “for at least the next few weeks.” We watched and waited but little suspected that we were on the cusp of something for which we had no schooling whatsoever. Information was garbled and overload slowly but steadily set in.
The trump Whitehouse offered mostly obfuscation and “ass-covering-doublespeak.” The nation was leaderless and many of our other institutions seemed caught off-guard. At my school, an email on March 11 directed us to extend our Spring Break an extra week and return to class online by way of Zoom or Google Meet technology on March 23. The projection was that we should prepare to teach that way until April 6. As we all know, we did not return to campus in early April but rather finished out the semester online and stayed in distance-learning mode through the Summer and Fall of 2020, and the Spring and following Summer of 2021. I did not return to a brick and mortar classroom until the Fall of 2021 — and at that time with all of us masked and most vaccinated. Myriad good reasons meant that others would take longer to go “face-to-face.”
Amidst all that hurly-burly and having not planned for a planetary event I was attending the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies gathering in Austin, Texas — Wednesday, March 4th through Sunday the 8th. I arrived in Austin early on Tuesday to keep a commitment with a local high school college prep program called ‘Austin Achieve.’ I noticed a few masked passengers in the airport upon landing in Texas. Nothing was different at all at the high school.
On Friday, March 6, the second day of that conference the city of Austin canceled the music festival known as South By Southwest. That was the same day that the U. of Washington moved online. The next day, Saturday, I gave my paper at an afternoon panel. Heading out by plane the next morning there were considerably more masks along with a palpable, and growing, sense of trepidation.
In the background a cruise ship had been stranded — off the coast of California and refused docking due to virus suspicions - ultimately crew members tested positive. In the meantime I had caught an interview online with Dr. Michael Osterholm. He convincingly cautioned that what we were seeing — now called the Corona Virus or Covid-19 — was deadly, on the rise, and would change the world. Sickness and death in New York City and Italy were making the news. My family and I were scheduled to fly into Newark on Wednesday, March 11 for a few days in The City. We canceled our plans. That very day The World Health Organization noted 118,000 cases in 114 countries and declared a Pandemic. On Thursday college basketball was cancelled just as March Madness was set to start.
The world seemed to be crawling with deadly invisible killing germs. No one knew if it was in the air or on the things we touched. Masks were urged but they were nowhere to be found. Recipes for hand sanitizing liquids, to supplement the now bought-up supply circulated. Panic buying and hoarding brought shortages. There was no toilet paper. We would learn so very much over the months to come. A new kind of education was aborning. Thoughtful folk were scrambling for information. We did not ‘come together.’ Things changed. Normal evaporated. A new normal began to shape. And still is.
I realize now that with the crashing inward of the world in the Third Month of Two Thousand Twenty of the Common Era that I started writing - and perhaps even thinking - in a way that I never had. Reaching back, for good or ill, and grabbing semblances of past ‘normals.’ And realizing that such a state is, in fact, ever-shifting, never still, and both deeply personal and widely shared all at once. I wasn’t just reaching back either but also reaching out for the lost human contact of the past - of playgrounds and ball courts and barrooms and buses. I learned too - as have so many of us - that “You can’t go home again” because home did not sit waiting while you were away. Indeed…
“…the dark ancestral
cave, the womb from
which mankind emerged
into the light, forever
pulls one back-but…
You can’t go home again…
You can’t go..back home
to the Escapes of Time
and Memory. You can’t
go home again.” ~ Thomas
Wolfe
Oh yes, and while we are piling on the adages - Home is ever with my family, ever Where The Heart Is. Ever Before Me. Ever Before Us.
superrific
Legend of ZZL
- Messages
- 5,694
What a strange piece. "The science speaks volumes," says the biologist. There's barely a shred of science in the article. Maybe the scientist told the journalist some actual science and the journalist just didn't include it for a number of possibly valid reasons. But what's in that article is a rehash of the same non-evidence we've seen before.Interesting article primarily on how FBI scientists came up with their moderate confidence estimate that it was a lab leak. Here is a summation by the FBI's chief investigator.
"Bannan acknowledges that a natural spillover remains possible and should continue to be investigated. But he believes that the stark differences between how other coronaviruses emerged, the absence of any proven host animal, and what we know about the WIV’s research practices make a lab origin more likely. “The science speaks volumes,” he says."
Exclusive: Inside the FBI’s Lab Leak Investigation
As bird flu spreads, and Team Trump begins dismantling America’s public health apparatus, a former FBI scientist and investigator speaks out about the evidence that led the bureau to suspect that COVID-19 was sparked by an incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
1. It's claimed that research was being done at low BSL levels. Fine. That should definitely change. But it's not evidence of a lab leak. One wonders if some of these folks want the lab leak theory to be true, on the assumption that it would spur China to take biosafety more seriously. To me, that's the best explanation for some of this nonsense.
2. It's claimed that three researchers got sick with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019. Who cares? I mean, what is Covid-like symptoms? IOne of the problems with Covid was that it causes so many different symptoms, some of which are very common. Plus, fall of 2019 was before the virus spread. That's clear from the virology. Anyway, this is speculation and not science.
3. It's claimed that WIV was not entirely forthcoming. Fine. That's weak evidence that the virus came from the lab. It's not irrelevant, as secrecy is often evidence of consciousness of guilt, but it's not scientific and it's not strong enough to overcome direct evidence, like the virology studies from the market.
4. We haven't found the host animal. This, to me, is the most puzzling claim. You wouldn't expect to be able to find the animal for a virus that a) transmits asymptomatically, and b) is infectious for so many species. The virus spreads like wildfire among mink. There are a lot of mink farms in China. If there were some mink on a train with some other animals from Yunnan, and then the mink died -- how would you ever find that? And if the virus recombined on the trip or in the market, you'd never know it. For all we know, the host animal was sold at the market and somebody took it home and ate it.
The fact is that the virus clearly spread at the market. That's undisputed. So if it leaked from the lab, it would have had to get to the market 40 minutes away without contamination along the way. I mean, it's possible, but again, we are not in the realm of science.
SARS-CoV-1 did not spread asymptomatically. That would make it much easier to trace the source. So that analogy is basically useless garbage.
5. This is exactly the process I thought the FBI was using -- no science; reliance on humint sources and perceived motivations. That might be interesting except for the compelling virology evidence that points the other way. There was also no attempt to create a positive case for lab leak, other than noting coincidences. Again, any lab leak theory has to be able to explain how the virus got from WIV to the market. If it can't even offer a reasonable hypothesis, then it's not a respectable theory.
- Messages
- 945
Reading some of the retrospective stories, it seems like Sweden, Taiwan, and South Korea had some good experiences without enacted a formal COVID lockdown strategy. If I had to pick three countries in the world where if the government made a public health "suggestion," then Sweden, Taiwan, and South Korea would be at the top of my list where such a suggestion would actually carry some weight with the population. In the good old US of A, a government public health "suggestion" would be greeted by a majority of the population with a resounding, "GREAT! I was almost out of toilet paper and this suggestion came in the nick of time."
superrific
Legend of ZZL
- Messages
- 5,694
South Korea just has a completely different mentality when it comes to infectious diseases. They have been wearing masks for decades; they do so whenever the get sick; they do it to protect others; and nobody bitches about it.
I sometimes watch professional gaming (so-called e-sports), and for many years, basically all the best players in the world (in the game I watch) were in Korea. These guys would wear their masks while competing in a booth alone, so as to not spread it to the next person.
There's just no way to translate that mentality to the US or probably to other Western countries. I don't know about Taiwan.
DiehardHeelFan
Distinguished Member
- Messages
- 276
Yep. Still have leftover masks and hand sanitizer.
gtyellowjacket
Iconic Member
- Messages
- 1,633
We have a lot of pictures of our kids doing kid things like playing soccer with masks on.