*** OFFICIAL *** COVID-19 CoronaVirus Thread. Fresh epidemic fears as child pneumonia cases surge in Europe after China outbreak. NOW in USA (18 Viewers)

[LawFitz]

LOL, Woody spreading truth during his SNL opening monologue this past weekend, talking about a crazy movie script he was offered pre-Covid...

The drumbeat GROWS.

"So, the movie [script] goes like this: The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes. And people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drugs and keep taking them over and over."​

"I threw the script away," he added. "I mean, who was going to believe that crazy idea? Being forced to do drugs? I do that voluntarily all day long."​

 

[IvanKaramazov]

Your link is dated April 23, 2020.

Yes, it is. In 2020, people were very quick to rush to judgement on this and quite a few other issues. And they were quick to deplatform folks who didn't go along with the official narrative. Many of those folks ended up being completely vindicated, while for some reason the outlets that were spreading misinformation in the first place -- like NPR -- strangely don't suffer any reputational consequences from the people who were misinformed.

That was the point of citing their writing from 2020. If you were relying on NPR, you were being disinformed. If I were their target audience, I would be mad about that.

 

[Mitchie]

So Lab Leak conspiracy theory is the latest in a very long line to turn into conspiracy FACT.

But you are still expected to believe the mainstream narratives brought to you by Pfizer. Good luck.

don't think it was considered not plausible by most, not it's being given "low confidence" support.

 

[Leeroy Jenkins]

So Lab Leak conspiracy theory is the latest in a very long line to turn into conspiracy FACT.

But you are still expected to believe the mainstream narratives brought to you by Pfizer. Good luck.

There is a difference between accidental lab leak related to coronavirus research and nefarious virus manipulation and intentional leak into the environment.

 

[ignatiusjreilly]

So Lab Leak conspiracy theory is the latest in a very long line to turn into conspiracy FACT.

But you are still expected to believe the mainstream narratives brought to you by Pfizer. Good luck.

Well, you certainly have a different definition of "FACT" than most people.

But then, we already knew that.

 

[jobarules]

So Lab Leak conspiracy theory is the latest in a very long line to turn into conspiracy FACT.

But you are still expected to believe the mainstream narratives brought to you by Pfizer. Good luck.

There is a difference between accidental lab leak related to coronavirus research and nefarious virus manipulation and intentional leak into the environment.

No ****. Who's saying otherwise?

 

[IvanKaramazov]

Another way to look at it is that in April 2020, we (collectively) held two beliefs about covid that we now know to be false:

1) Covid is spread mainly by surface transmission, and it isn't airborne.
2) Covid almost certainly emerged from a wet market, not an accidental lab leak.

Nobody gets mad at the people who told us (1), and lots of us are mad at the people who told us (2). Why the difference?

Because the people who said that covid isn't airborne were arguing in good faith. They were mistaken, but they were acting on what they genuinely believed to be true at the time. They didn't go around censoring people who argued otherwise, and they didn't try to get people fired from their jobs for saying that covid was airborne. They approached it as an open empirical question and followed the evidence where it led. It didn't take long before we got to the bottom of things and updated our view of how covid is spread. So everybody could just say "Whoops, we got that one wrong" and everyone just moved on. We moved on because we all understand that all of us were trying to get it right.

Contrast that with how the "racist conspiracy theory" crowd reacted to the lab leak theory. The people who told us that there's no way covid escaped from a lab knew perfectly well that that was entirely possible. When they said it was almost definitely zoonotic, they were lying. For many of the virology researchers involved in this, they were lying for professional reasons. People who do virology research aren't going to want people thinking that their work might cause a global pandemic -- this isn't anything political, just boring, ordinary self-interest. But there was a also a very strong political reason that we all understand for nearly every media outlet and most tech companies to push the "conspiracy theory" line as well. So we got a bunch of gaslighting backed up by censorship, when it should have been obvious from the get-go that it might be more than a weird coincidence that the bat coronavirus lab just happened to be located a couple of miles from an outbreak of a bat coronavirus.

Those of us who treated both (1) and (2) as non-political empirical issues got both of them right at or around the same time. The rest of you were right there with us on (1), but if you got your news from places like NPR and Slate (lol) you were a couple of years behind everyone else on (2). And we remember how we were treated for being right a little ahead of schedule.

 

[Schmeabs]

Another way to look at it is that in April 2020, we (collectively) held two beliefs about covid that we now know to be false:

1) Covid is spread mainly by surface transmission, and it isn't airborne.
2) Covid almost certainly emerged from a wet market, not an accidental lab leak.

Nobody gets mad at the people who told us (1), and lots of us are mad at the people who told us (2). Why the difference?

Because the people who said that covid isn't airborne were arguing in good faith. They were mistaken, but they were acting on what they genuinely believed to be true at the time. They didn't go around censoring people who argued otherwise, and they didn't try to get people fired from their jobs for saying that covid was airborne. They approached it as an open empirical question and followed the evidence where it led. It didn't take long before we got to the bottom of things and updated our view of how covid is spread. So everybody could just say "Whoops, we got that one wrong" and everyone just moved on. We moved on because we all understand that all of us were trying to get it right.

Contrast that with how the "racist conspiracy theory" crowd reacted to the lab leak theory. The people who told us that there's no way covid escaped from a lab knew perfectly well that that was entirely possible. When they said it was almost definitely zoonotic, they were lying. For many of the virology researchers involved in this, they were lying for professional reasons. People who do virology research aren't going to want people thinking that their work might cause a global pandemic -- this isn't anything political, just boring, ordinary self-interest. But there was a also a very strong political reason that we all understand for nearly every media outlet and most tech companies to push the "conspiracy theory" line as well. So we got a bunch of gaslighting backed up by censorship, when it should have been obvious from the get-go that it might be more than a weird coincidence that the bat coronavirus lab just happened to be located a couple of miles from an outbreak of a bat coronavirus.

Those of us who treated both (1) and (2) as non-political empirical issues got both of them right at or around the same time. The rest of you were right there with us on (1), but if you got your news from places like NPR and Slate (lol) you were a couple of years behind everyone else on (2). And we remember how we were treated for being right a little ahead of schedule.

For #2, I think the media just didn't want to admit Trump was right

 

[jobarules]

Another way to look at it is that in April 2020, we (collectively) held two beliefs about covid that we now know to be false:

1) Covid is spread mainly by surface transmission, and it isn't airborne.
2) Covid almost certainly emerged from a wet market, not an accidental lab leak.

Nobody gets mad at the people who told us (1), and lots of us are mad at the people who told us (2). Why the difference?

Because the people who said that covid isn't airborne were arguing in good faith. They were mistaken, but they were acting on what they genuinely believed to be true at the time. They didn't go around censoring people who argued otherwise, and they didn't try to get people fired from their jobs for saying that covid was airborne. They approached it as an open empirical question and followed the evidence where it led. It didn't take long before we got to the bottom of things and updated our view of how covid is spread. So everybody could just say "Whoops, we got that one wrong" and everyone just moved on. We moved on because we all understand that all of us were trying to get it right.

Contrast that with how the "racist conspiracy theory" crowd reacted to the lab leak theory. The people who told us that there's no way covid escaped from a lab knew perfectly well that that was entirely possible. When they said it was almost definitely zoonotic, they were lying. For many of the virology researchers involved in this, they were lying for professional reasons. People who do virology research aren't going to want people thinking that their work might cause a global pandemic -- this isn't anything political, just boring, ordinary self-interest. But there was a also a very strong political reason that we all understand for nearly every media outlet and most tech companies to push the "conspiracy theory" line as well. So we got a bunch of gaslighting backed up by censorship, when it should have been obvious from the get-go that it might be more than a weird coincidence that the bat coronavirus lab just happened to be located a couple of miles from an outbreak of a bat coronavirus.

Those of us who treated both (1) and (2) as non-political empirical issues got both of them right at or around the same time. The rest of you were right there with us on (1), but if you got your news from places like NPR and Slate (lol) you were a couple of years behind everyone else on (2). And we remember how we were treated for being right a little ahead of schedule.

The difference is there was a certain someone who right about #2 and some people don't want to admit it.

 

[LawFitz]

For many of the virology researchers involved in this, they were lying for professional reasons. People who do virology research aren't going to want people thinking that their work might cause a global pandemic -- this isn't anything political, just boring, ordinary self-interest. But there was a also a very strong political reason that we all understand for nearly every media outlet and most tech companies to push the "conspiracy theory" line as well. So we got a bunch of gaslighting backed up by censorship, when it should have been obvious from the get-go that it might be more than a weird coincidence that the bat coronavirus lab just happened to be located a couple of miles from an outbreak of a bat coronavirus.

Hmm. Sounds like a mosaic. Like a perfect storm of loosely-related and inter-dependent, but not necessarily directly-conspiratorial parties coming together to shift mainstream narratives away from truth. Oddly familiar.

 

[Leeroy Jenkins]

Another way to look at it is that in April 2020, we (collectively) held two beliefs about covid that we now know to be false:

1) Covid is spread mainly by surface transmission, and it isn't airborne.
2) Covid almost certainly emerged from a wet market, not an accidental lab leak.

Nobody gets mad at the people who told us (1), and lots of us are mad at the people who told us (2). Why the difference?

Because the people who said that covid isn't airborne were arguing in good faith. They were mistaken, but they were acting on what they genuinely believed to be true at the time. They didn't go around censoring people who argued otherwise, and they didn't try to get people fired from their jobs for saying that covid was airborne. They approached it as an open empirical question and followed the evidence where it led. It didn't take long before we got to the bottom of things and updated our view of how covid is spread. So everybody could just say "Whoops, we got that one wrong" and everyone just moved on. We moved on because we all understand that all of us were trying to get it right.

Contrast that with how the "racist conspiracy theory" crowd reacted to the lab leak theory. The people who told us that there's no way covid escaped from a lab knew perfectly well that that was entirely possible. When they said it was almost definitely zoonotic, they were lying. For many of the virology researchers involved in this, they were lying for professional reasons. People who do virology research aren't going to want people thinking that their work might cause a global pandemic -- this isn't anything political, just boring, ordinary self-interest. But there was a also a very strong political reason that we all understand for nearly every media outlet and most tech companies to push the "conspiracy theory" line as well. So we got a bunch of gaslighting backed up by censorship, when it should have been obvious from the get-go that it might be more than a weird coincidence that the bat coronavirus lab just happened to be located a couple of miles from an outbreak of a bat coronavirus.

Those of us who treated both (1) and (2) as non-political empirical issues got both of them right at or around the same time. The rest of you were right there with us on (1), but if you got your news from places like NPR and Slate (lol) you were a couple of years behind everyone else on (2). And we remember how we were treated for being right a little ahead of schedule.

The lab leak still ties to the wet market, doesn't it?

 

[Leeroy Jenkins]

So Lab Leak conspiracy theory is the latest in a very long line to turn into conspiracy FACT.

But you are still expected to believe the mainstream narratives brought to you by Pfizer. Good luck.

There is a difference between accidental lab leak related to coronavirus research and nefarious virus manipulation and intentional leak into the environment.

No ****. Who's saying otherwise?

The talk at the time was much more conspiracy laden than just some accidental lab leak related to basic research on viruses.

I am curious if the "leak" is someone working in the lab got infected or leaked a sample it improperly handled somehow, or the selling of lab animals to the market etc.

 

[ignatiusjreilly]

Another way to look at it is that in April 2020, we (collectively) held two beliefs about covid that we now know to be false:

Again, this is a very odd level of certainty based on a "low confidence" report from a single government agency that is contradicted by other agencies.

I think the question of how Covid originated is a very important question, so I don't want to say that I don't care what the answer is, but I don't have any particular stake in which answer turns out to be right. I'm willing to wait until the question can be settled definitively (which may take years, and which may never happen) before drawing any conclusions. But it is my general observation that the proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis seem to be unusually invested in it being true, to the point where they massively overstate the case for it. Maybe, as you hypothesize, that's because they feel defensive given how dismissive many people were of the theory back in 2020. And I suppose that reaction is understandable. But it still doesn't excuse anyone being equally dismissive in the opposite direction

 

[jobarules]

So Lab Leak conspiracy theory is the latest in a very long line to turn into conspiracy FACT.

But you are still expected to believe the mainstream narratives brought to you by Pfizer. Good luck.

There is a difference between accidental lab leak related to coronavirus research and nefarious virus manipulation and intentional leak into the environment.

No ****. Who's saying otherwise?

The talk at the time was much more conspiracy laden than just some accidental lab leak related to basic research on viruses.

I am curious if the "leak" is someone working in the lab got infected or leaked a sample it improperly handled somehow, or the selling of lab animals to the market etc.

That was only one conspiracy theory. There was however a more predominant accidental lab leak theory which many considered to be just a conspiracy. Now you're the one being disingenuous by changing the narrative. Not surprised.

 

[culdeus]

Let's say a lab leak was intentional. What was the intention? Cull 65+? Seems like they more or less got the demo right, just didn't quite get it virulent enough to do enough damage.

What other intention was there?

 

[3C's]

Let's say a lab leak was intentional. What was the intention? Cull 65+? Seems like they more or less got the demo right, just didn't quite get it virulent enough to do enough damage.

What other intention was there?

Obviously it was just a test run.

 

[ignatiusjreilly]

Take a step back for a minute and consider this: If SARS-CoV2's origin was zoonotic, there is literally no one on earth who knows that with 100% certainty. If it was man-made, then that fact might be known to a small number of scientists in Wuhan and, depending on how conspiratorial you want to get, a number of researchers and/or government officials in China and possibly other countries as well.

But one thing we can say with almost 100% certainty is that nobody posting in this thread (myself very much included), and nobody any of us encounters on a regular basis, has any concrete knowledge of the virus' origin. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say none of us has nearly enough knowledge of how viruses operate to even understand how one would go about answering that question.

What that means is that, whatever you believe about SARS-CoV2's origins, your certainty about that belief is entirely reflective of your own biases rather than any discernible facts on the ground. If you're sure it was zoonotic, or if you're declaring the lab-leak hypothesis to be "fact", all you're really doing is confessing that's what you wish to be true

 

[The Commish]

I am wondering if ANY of you saying this comment from the DOE is "complete vindication" took the time to read what they wrote and how confident they were in their assertion. Based on the comments in this thread, it doesn't sound like it. You're either not reading it or intentionally mis/overstating what was said by the DOE. The correct answer to IK's #2 above is "we still don't know" and we likely never will.

Also, there was a #3 back in 2020. There was also the group who either ignorantly treated or didn't understand the very important distinctions between"created in a lab" and "made a jump to humans in a lab". I spent a WHOLE lot of time ridiculing the former while maintaining the latter was possible, though not probable based on what we knew at the time. I still hold this position today and a DOE assertion they aren't all that confident in isn't going to change my mind. We're likely never going to know what really happened unless we hack China or they cooperate. Even if we hack China at this point, they've had three years to muddy the waters so I'm not sure what we'd learn from a hack either.

 

[The Commish]

Take a step back for a minute and consider this: If SARS-CoV2's origin was zoonotic, there is literally no one on earth who knows that with 100% certainty. If it was man-made, then that fact might be known to a small number of scientists in Wuhan and, depending on how conspiratorial you want to get, a number of researchers and/or government officials in China and possibly other countries as well.

But one thing we can say with almost 100% certainty is that nobody posting in this thread (myself very much included), and nobody any of us encounters on a regular basis, has any concrete knowledge of the virus' origin. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say none of us has nearly enough knowledge of how viruses operate to even understand how one would go about answering that question.

What that means is that, whatever you believe about SARS-CoV2's origins, your certainty about that belief is entirely reflective of your own biases rather than any discernible facts on the ground. If you're sure it was zoonotic, or if you're declaring the lab-leak hypothesis to be "fact", all you're really doing is confessing that's what you wish to be true

There would be tells all over the "virus"...it would be obvious. Every single strand that has been studied is void of ANY of those tells. It's not man-made.

 

[RCon]

Even if we hack China at this point, they've had three years to muddy the waters so I'm not sure what we'd learn from a hack either.

Once we're in, we should probably poke around for balloon stuff, though.

 

[ZADO]

Dear lord, we are actually arguing with each other over where Covid originated , thats where we are now .
Who cares who`s right or wrong, all that matters is we find the truth so we can take measures to prevent it from ever happening again.

When all is said and done thats ALL that matters ....the truth

 

[Whyatt]

Another way to look at it is that in April 2020, we (collectively) held two beliefs about covid that we now know to be false:

1) Covid is spread mainly by surface transmission, and it isn't airborne.
2) Covid almost certainly emerged from a wet market, not an accidental lab leak.

Again, the first line of the NPR Article.

"Virus researchers say there is virtually no chance that the new coronavirus was released as result of a laboratory accident in China or anywhere else."

This conclusion is clearly false, and has been for quite some time.

I interpret Ivan's post to mean that, and nothing else - seems straightforward to me.

And I agree, if the virus leaked from a lab, a limited number of people know this and are hiding the fact, a conspiracy if you will.

 

[ignatiusjreilly]

Take a step back for a minute and consider this: If SARS-CoV2's origin was zoonotic, there is literally no one on earth who knows that with 100% certainty. If it was man-made, then that fact might be known to a small number of scientists in Wuhan and, depending on how conspiratorial you want to get, a number of researchers and/or government officials in China and possibly other countries as well.

But one thing we can say with almost 100% certainty is that nobody posting in this thread (myself very much included), and nobody any of us encounters on a regular basis, has any concrete knowledge of the virus' origin. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say none of us has nearly enough knowledge of how viruses operate to even understand how one would go about answering that question.

What that means is that, whatever you believe about SARS-CoV2's origins, your certainty about that belief is entirely reflective of your own biases rather than any discernible facts on the ground. If you're sure it was zoonotic, or if you're declaring the lab-leak hypothesis to be "fact", all you're really doing is confessing that's what you wish to be true

There would be tells all over the "virus"...it would be obvious. Every single strand that has been studied is void of ANY of those tells. It's not man-made.

If that's the case, why wouldn't researchers be able to conclusively declare that it was zoonotic?

My limited understanding of these things is that it often takes a number of years to conclusively isolate the origin of these types of outbreaks. You may be right that the fact that it originated in a closed, totalitarian society may make it impossible to ever get that answer, but it's also possible we're only three years into a multi-year discovery process

 

[ignatiusjreilly]

Another way to look at it is that in April 2020, we (collectively) held two beliefs about covid that we now know to be false:

1) Covid is spread mainly by surface transmission, and it isn't airborne.
2) Covid almost certainly emerged from a wet market, not an accidental lab leak.

Again, the first line of the NPR Article.

"Virus researchers say there is virtually no chance that the new coronavirus was released as result of a laboratory accident in China or anywhere else."

This conclusion is clearly false, and has been for quite some time.

I interpret Ivan's post to mean that, and nothing else - seems straightforward to me.

And I agree, if the virus leaked from a lab, a limited number of people know this and are hiding the fact, a conspiracy if you will.

Could be. I would assume it's also possible that, if it accidentally leaked from a lab, the people who did it don't even realize it. I suppose it could also be possible that it's a conspiracy without an underlying crime: the origin was zoonotic, but the Chinese didn't know that for sure, so they covered up everything the lab was doing just in case it was involved

 

[Whyatt]

Take a step back for a minute and consider this: If SARS-CoV2's origin was zoonotic, there is literally no one on earth who knows that with 100% certainty. If it was man-made, then that fact might be known to a small number of scientists in Wuhan and, depending on how conspiratorial you want to get, a number of researchers and/or government officials in China and possibly other countries as well.

But one thing we can say with almost 100% certainty is that nobody posting in this thread (myself very much included), and nobody any of us encounters on a regular basis, has any concrete knowledge of the virus' origin. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say none of us has nearly enough knowledge of how viruses operate to even understand how one would go about answering that question.

What that means is that, whatever you believe about SARS-CoV2's origins, your certainty about that belief is entirely reflective of your own biases rather than any discernible facts on the ground. If you're sure it was zoonotic, or if you're declaring the lab-leak hypothesis to be "fact", all you're really doing is confessing that's what you wish to be true

There would be tells all over the "virus"...it would be obvious. Every single strand that has been studied is void of ANY of those tells. It's not man-made.

I think you should google "virus gain of function research"

 

[Doug B]

If you're sure it was zoonotic, or if you're declaring the lab-leak hypothesis to be "fact" ...

Something else: These options aren't mutually exclusive. The Wuhan researchers collected specimen from bats out in the wild and brought the specimens back to the center for study (also see this 2017 link about same). No reason that initial exposure to a "human-ready" mutation couldn't have been made during this sample collection & research, either out in the bat caves or in the lab itself.

 

[Doug B]

Even if we hack China at this point, they've had three years to muddy the waters so I'm not sure what we'd learn from a hack either.

My understanding is that plenty of evidence and data from early on has been destroyed, regrettably.

 

[The Z Machine]

Those of us who treated both (1) and (2) as non-political empirical issues got both of them right at or around the same time.

Don't pat yourself on the back too much. I don't think that the lab leak hypothesis has been proven and is settled. It is plausible, yes. Just like a zoonotic origin is also plausible.

 

[Terminalxylem]

Another way to look at it is that in April 2020, we (collectively) held two beliefs about covid that we now know to be false:

1) Covid is spread mainly by surface transmission, and it isn't airborne.
2) Covid almost certainly emerged from a wet market, not an accidental lab leak.

Nobody gets mad at the people who told us (1), and lots of us are mad at the people who told us (2). Why the difference?

Because the people who said that covid isn't airborne were arguing in good faith. They were mistaken, but they were acting on what they genuinely believed to be true at the time. They didn't go around censoring people who argued otherwise, and they didn't try to get people fired from their jobs for saying that covid was airborne. They approached it as an open empirical question and followed the evidence where it led. It didn't take long before we got to the bottom of things and updated our view of how covid is spread. So everybody could just say "Whoops, we got that one wrong" and everyone just moved on. We moved on because we all understand that all of us were trying to get it right.

Contrast that with how the "racist conspiracy theory" crowd reacted to the lab leak theory. The people who told us that there's no way covid escaped from a lab knew perfectly well that that was entirely possible. When they said it was almost definitely zoonotic, they were lying. For many of the virology researchers involved in this, they were lying for professional reasons. People who do virology research aren't going to want people thinking that their work might cause a global pandemic -- this isn't anything political, just boring, ordinary self-interest. But there was a also a very strong political reason that we all understand for nearly every media outlet and most tech companies to push the "conspiracy theory" line as well. So we got a bunch of gaslighting backed up by censorship, when it should have been obvious from the get-go that it might be more than a weird coincidence that the bat coronavirus lab just happened to be located a couple of miles from an outbreak of a bat coronavirus.

Those of us who treated both (1) and (2) as non-political empirical issues got both of them right at or around the same time. The rest of you were right there with us on (1), but if you got your news from places like NPR and Slate (lol) you were a couple of years behind everyone else on (2). And we remember how we were treated for being right a little ahead of schedule.

I don’t think your recollection is correct regarding #1, nor the extent otherwise reputable people were deplatformed/criticized for 2. And I also think you are overestimating the value of these low confidence conclusions - we are far from a definitive understanding of the virus’ origin, so you can probably refrain from patting yourself on the back.

Fair or not, the lab leak group includes some inflammatory opinions about intentional release of the virus as a bioweapon. While that remains a remote possibility, the bar for media running with theories in that vein should be pretty high, no? Still, you certainly can blame virologists for being immediately dismissive of the possibility, but it’s a bit much to expect media outlets like NPR to call them on it, IMO.

ETA Glad to see others are calling you out on self congratulations. Based on what we know now, nobody should be taking a victory lap.

 

[Terminalxylem]

Take a step back for a minute and consider this: If SARS-CoV2's origin was zoonotic, there is literally no one on earth who knows that with 100% certainty. If it was man-made, then that fact might be known to a small number of scientists in Wuhan and, depending on how conspiratorial you want to get, a number of researchers and/or government officials in China and possibly other countries as well.

But one thing we can say with almost 100% certainty is that nobody posting in this thread (myself very much included), and nobody any of us encounters on a regular basis, has any concrete knowledge of the virus' origin. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say none of us has nearly enough knowledge of how viruses operate to even understand how one would go about answering that question.

What that means is that, whatever you believe about SARS-CoV2's origins, your certainty about that belief is entirely reflective of your own biases rather than any discernible facts on the ground. If you're sure it was zoonotic, or if you're declaring the lab-leak hypothesis to be "fact", all you're really doing is confessing that's what you wish to be true

There would be tells all over the "virus"...it would be obvious. Every single strand that has been studied is void of ANY of those tells. It's not man-made.

There has been discussion about the sequence of a furin cleavage site in the spike protein, which some have used as support for a bioengineered virus. Others have dismissed the validity of those assertions, but unless you’re a molecular virologist with specific background in coronaviruses, it’s hard to know what to believe.

 

[Terminalxylem]

Another way to look at it is that in April 2020, we (collectively) held two beliefs about covid that we now know to be false:

1) Covid is spread mainly by surface transmission, and it isn't airborne.
2) Covid almost certainly emerged from a wet market, not an accidental lab leak.

Again, the first line of the NPR Article.

"Virus researchers say there is virtually no chance that the new coronavirus was released as result of a laboratory accident in China or anywhere else."

This conclusion is clearly false, and has been for quite some time.

I interpret Ivan's post to mean that, and nothing else - seems straightforward to me.

And I agree, if the virus leaked from a lab, a limited number of people know this and are hiding the fact, a conspiracy if you will.

OK, it’s possible the virus leaked from a lab. NPR admitted as much, quite a while ago.

I think we can all agree on that, and save some keystrokes demonizing “liberal” media, while declaring the virus’ origins settled?

 

[Leeroy Jenkins]

So Lab Leak conspiracy theory is the latest in a very long line to turn into conspiracy FACT.

But you are still expected to believe the mainstream narratives brought to you by Pfizer. Good luck.

There is a difference between accidental lab leak related to coronavirus research and nefarious virus manipulation and intentional leak into the environment.

No ****. Who's saying otherwise?

The talk at the time was much more conspiracy laden than just some accidental lab leak related to basic research on viruses.

I am curious if the "leak" is someone working in the lab got infected or leaked a sample it improperly handled somehow, or the selling of lab animals to the market etc.

That was only one conspiracy theory. There was however a more predominant accidental lab leak theory which many considered to be just a conspiracy. Now you're the one being disingenuous by changing the narrative. Not surprised.

What was the predominant accidental leak theory?

 

[jobarules]

So Lab Leak conspiracy theory is the latest in a very long line to turn into conspiracy FACT.

But you are still expected to believe the mainstream narratives brought to you by Pfizer. Good luck.

There is a difference between accidental lab leak related to coronavirus research and nefarious virus manipulation and intentional leak into the environment.

No ****. Who's saying otherwise?

The talk at the time was much more conspiracy laden than just some accidental lab leak related to basic research on viruses.

I am curious if the "leak" is someone working in the lab got infected or leaked a sample it improperly handled somehow, or the selling of lab animals to the market etc.

That was only one conspiracy theory. There was however a more predominant accidental lab leak theory which many considered to be just a conspiracy. Now you're the one being disingenuous by changing the narrative. Not surprised.

What was the predominant accidental leak theory?

That it leaked from the lab doing gain of function research BY ACCIDENT

 

[ignatiusjreilly]

Contrast that with how the "racist conspiracy theory" crowd reacted to the lab leak theory. The people who told us that there's no way covid escaped from a lab knew perfectly well that that was entirely possible. When they said it was almost definitely zoonotic, they were lying. For many of the virology researchers involved in this, they were lying for professional reasons. People who do virology research aren't going to want people thinking that their work might cause a global pandemic -- this isn't anything political, just boring, ordinary self-interest. But there was a also a very strong political reason that we all understand for nearly every media outlet and most tech companies to push the "conspiracy theory" line as well. So we got a bunch of gaslighting backed up by censorship, when it should have been obvious from the get-go that it might be more than a weird coincidence that the bat coronavirus lab just happened to be located a couple of miles from an outbreak of a bat coronavirus.

In my earlier response, I focused on the part where you seemed to say you believed that the lab-leak hypothesis had been proven to be correct. But it occurs to me that these are some pretty damning accusations as well. Are you basing your allegations of deliberate lying on any actual evidence, or is that just your supposition? Because on the one hand you sound very sure of yourself, but on the other it would be pretty ironic if you were jumping to conclusions about the motives of people you accuse of jumping to conclusions.

If there is evidence that the scientists who rejected the lab-leak hypothesis were deliberately lying, I'd be curious to see it

 

[ignatiusjreilly]

The difference is there was a certain someone who right about #2 and some people don't want to admit it.

Reminds me of the famous fable, "The Townspeople Who Ignored the Wolf"

 

[Leeroy Jenkins]

So Lab Leak conspiracy theory is the latest in a very long line to turn into conspiracy FACT.

But you are still expected to believe the mainstream narratives brought to you by Pfizer. Good luck.

There is a difference between accidental lab leak related to coronavirus research and nefarious virus manipulation and intentional leak into the environment.

No ****. Who's saying otherwise?

The talk at the time was much more conspiracy laden than just some accidental lab leak related to basic research on viruses.

I am curious if the "leak" is someone working in the lab got infected or leaked a sample it improperly handled somehow, or the selling of lab animals to the market etc.

That was only one conspiracy theory. There was however a more predominant accidental lab leak theory which many considered to be just a conspiracy. Now you're the one being disingenuous by changing the narrative. Not surprised.

What was the predominant accidental leak theory?

That it leaked from the lab doing gain of function research BY ACCIDENT

So where are we on the gain of function piece?

 

[The Commish]

Take a step back for a minute and consider this: If SARS-CoV2's origin was zoonotic, there is literally no one on earth who knows that with 100% certainty. If it was man-made, then that fact might be known to a small number of scientists in Wuhan and, depending on how conspiratorial you want to get, a number of researchers and/or government officials in China and possibly other countries as well.

But one thing we can say with almost 100% certainty is that nobody posting in this thread (myself very much included), and nobody any of us encounters on a regular basis, has any concrete knowledge of the virus' origin. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say none of us has nearly enough knowledge of how viruses operate to even understand how one would go about answering that question.

What that means is that, whatever you believe about SARS-CoV2's origins, your certainty about that belief is entirely reflective of your own biases rather than any discernible facts on the ground. If you're sure it was zoonotic, or if you're declaring the lab-leak hypothesis to be "fact", all you're really doing is confessing that's what you wish to be true

There would be tells all over the "virus"...it would be obvious. Every single strand that has been studied is void of ANY of those tells. It's not man-made.

If that's the case, why wouldn't researchers be able to conclusively declare that it was zoonotic?

My limited understanding of these things is that it often takes a number of years to conclusively isolate the origin of these types of outbreaks. You may be right that the fact that it originated in a closed, totalitarian society may make it impossible to ever get that answer, but it's also possible we're only three years into a multi-year discovery process

Because there's still talk of "gain of function" which we will never know the answer to one way or the other (IMO) and a lot of people consider that "creating" too though it's more proper to use "evolve" or "mutate".

 

[quick-hands]

Another way to look at it is that in April 2020, we (collectively) held two beliefs about covid that we now know to be false:

1) Covid is spread mainly by surface transmission, and it isn't airborne.
2) Covid almost certainly emerged from a wet market, not an accidental lab leak.

Nobody gets mad at the people who told us (1), and lots of us are mad at the people who told us (2). Why the difference?

Because the people who said that covid isn't airborne were arguing in good faith. They were mistaken, but they were acting on what they genuinely believed to be true at the time. They didn't go around censoring people who argued otherwise, and they didn't try to get people fired from their jobs for saying that covid was airborne. They approached it as an open empirical question and followed the evidence where it led. It didn't take long before we got to the bottom of things and updated our view of how covid is spread. So everybody could just say "Whoops, we got that one wrong" and everyone just moved on. We moved on because we all understand that all of us were trying to get it right.

Contrast that with how the "racist conspiracy theory" crowd reacted to the lab leak theory. The people who told us that there's no way covid escaped from a lab knew perfectly well that that was entirely possible. When they said it was almost definitely zoonotic, they were lying. For many of the virology researchers involved in this, they were lying for professional reasons. People who do virology research aren't going to want people thinking that their work might cause a global pandemic -- this isn't anything political, just boring, ordinary self-interest. But there was a also a very strong political reason that we all understand for nearly every media outlet and most tech companies to push the "conspiracy theory" line as well. So we got a bunch of gaslighting backed up by censorship, when it should have been obvious from the get-go that it might be more than a weird coincidence that the bat coronavirus lab just happened to be located a couple of miles from an outbreak of a bat coronavirus.

Those of us who treated both (1) and (2) as non-political empirical issues got both of them right at or around the same time. The rest of you were right there with us on (1), but if you got your news from places like NPR and Slate (lol) you were a couple of years behind everyone else on (2). And we remember how we were treated for being right a little ahead of schedule.

The lab leak still ties to the wet market, doesn't it?

no

 

[ignatiusjreilly]

Take a step back for a minute and consider this: If SARS-CoV2's origin was zoonotic, there is literally no one on earth who knows that with 100% certainty. If it was man-made, then that fact might be known to a small number of scientists in Wuhan and, depending on how conspiratorial you want to get, a number of researchers and/or government officials in China and possibly other countries as well.

But one thing we can say with almost 100% certainty is that nobody posting in this thread (myself very much included), and nobody any of us encounters on a regular basis, has any concrete knowledge of the virus' origin. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say none of us has nearly enough knowledge of how viruses operate to even understand how one would go about answering that question.

What that means is that, whatever you believe about SARS-CoV2's origins, your certainty about that belief is entirely reflective of your own biases rather than any discernible facts on the ground. If you're sure it was zoonotic, or if you're declaring the lab-leak hypothesis to be "fact", all you're really doing is confessing that's what you wish to be true

There would be tells all over the "virus"...it would be obvious. Every single strand that has been studied is void of ANY of those tells. It's not man-made.

If that's the case, why wouldn't researchers be able to conclusively declare that it was zoonotic?

My limited understanding of these things is that it often takes a number of years to conclusively isolate the origin of these types of outbreaks. You may be right that the fact that it originated in a closed, totalitarian society may make it impossible to ever get that answer, but it's also possible we're only three years into a multi-year discovery process

Because there's still talk of "gain of function" which we will never know the answer to one way or the other (IMO) and a lot of people consider that "creating" too though it's more proper to use "evolve" or "mutate".

Correct me if I'm wrong, but GoF research seeks to force those mutations to occur in a controlled lab setting so that scientists can study how it happened, right?

If it was conclusively shown that something in that process went awry and led to the pandemic, I suspect the vast majority of people would conclude that the virus was "man-made". If the lab had never existed, the pandemic wouldn't have happened, at least not when it did.

Although I do agree with the broader point that a lot of these definitions are kind of blurry and can't be so neatly divided into one or two simple categories.

Still, if researchers could conclusively demonstrate that the virus developed zoonotically in the wild, they would have every incentive to publish that evidence. The fact that they haven't very strongly suggests that evidence does not (yet?) exist.

 

[Whyatt]

Take a step back for a minute and consider this: If SARS-CoV2's origin was zoonotic, there is literally no one on earth who knows that with 100% certainty. If it was man-made, then that fact might be known to a small number of scientists in Wuhan and, depending on how conspiratorial you want to get, a number of researchers and/or government officials in China and possibly other countries as well.

But one thing we can say with almost 100% certainty is that nobody posting in this thread (myself very much included), and nobody any of us encounters on a regular basis, has any concrete knowledge of the virus' origin. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say none of us has nearly enough knowledge of how viruses operate to even understand how one would go about answering that question.

What that means is that, whatever you believe about SARS-CoV2's origins, your certainty about that belief is entirely reflective of your own biases rather than any discernible facts on the ground. If you're sure it was zoonotic, or if you're declaring the lab-leak hypothesis to be "fact", all you're really doing is confessing that's what you wish to be true

There would be tells all over the "virus"...it would be obvious. Every single strand that has been studied is void of ANY of those tells. It's not man-made.

There has been discussion about the sequence of a furin cleavage site in the spike protein, which some have used as support for a bioengineered virus. Others have dismissed the validity of those assertions, but unless you’re a molecular virologist with specific background in coronaviruses, it’s hard to know what to believe.

These links are great.

This article is easier to follow, and is written by a reputable source - who co-wrote a book exploring the lab leak theory. It helps answer questions raised on this page.

To Terminalxylem’s point, it best to balance this by exploring best arguments supporting the wet market origin.

 

[quick-hands]

Take a step back for a minute and consider this: If SARS-CoV2's origin was zoonotic, there is literally no one on earth who knows that with 100% certainty. If it was man-made, then that fact might be known to a small number of scientists in Wuhan and, depending on how conspiratorial you want to get, a number of researchers and/or government officials in China and possibly other countries as well.

But one thing we can say with almost 100% certainty is that nobody posting in this thread (myself very much included), and nobody any of us encounters on a regular basis, has any concrete knowledge of the virus' origin. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say none of us has nearly enough knowledge of how viruses operate to even understand how one would go about answering that question.

What that means is that, whatever you believe about SARS-CoV2's origins, your certainty about that belief is entirely reflective of your own biases rather than any discernible facts on the ground. If you're sure it was zoonotic, or if you're declaring the lab-leak hypothesis to be "fact", all you're really doing is confessing that's what you wish to be true

There would be tells all over the "virus"...it would be obvious. Every single strand that has been studied is void of ANY of those tells. It's not man-made.

There has been discussion about the sequence of a furin cleavage site in the spike protein, which some have used as support for a bioengineered virus. Others have dismissed the validity of those assertions, but unless you’re a molecular virologist with specific background in coronaviruses, it’s hard to know what to believe.

These links are great.

This article is easier to follow, and is written by a reputable source - who co-wrote a book exploring the lab leak theory. It helps answer questions raised on this page.

To Terminalxylem’s point, it best to balance this by exploring best arguments supporting the wet market origin.

it didn't come from the markets. it wasn't spread thru the markets. except person to person.

 

[ignatiusjreilly]

Take a step back for a minute and consider this: If SARS-CoV2's origin was zoonotic, there is literally no one on earth who knows that with 100% certainty. If it was man-made, then that fact might be known to a small number of scientists in Wuhan and, depending on how conspiratorial you want to get, a number of researchers and/or government officials in China and possibly other countries as well.

But one thing we can say with almost 100% certainty is that nobody posting in this thread (myself very much included), and nobody any of us encounters on a regular basis, has any concrete knowledge of the virus' origin. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say none of us has nearly enough knowledge of how viruses operate to even understand how one would go about answering that question.

What that means is that, whatever you believe about SARS-CoV2's origins, your certainty about that belief is entirely reflective of your own biases rather than any discernible facts on the ground. If you're sure it was zoonotic, or if you're declaring the lab-leak hypothesis to be "fact", all you're really doing is confessing that's what you wish to be true

There would be tells all over the "virus"...it would be obvious. Every single strand that has been studied is void of ANY of those tells. It's not man-made.

There has been discussion about the sequence of a furin cleavage site in the spike protein, which some have used as support for a bioengineered virus. Others have dismissed the validity of those assertions, but unless you’re a molecular virologist with specific background in coronaviruses, it’s hard to know what to believe.

These links are great.

This article is easier to follow, and is written by a reputable source - who co-wrote a book exploring the lab leak theory. It helps answer questions raised on this page.

To Terminalxylem’s point, it best to balance this by exploring best arguments supporting the wet market origin.

it didn't come from the markets. it wasn't spread thru the markets. except person to person.

And you know this for certain how?

 

[fatness]

Long COVID date.
Man, I hope it's not nearly this widespread.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/pulse/long-covid.htm

Pandemic of the vaxxed. Sad.

That's how I can tell you didn't read the article, which doesn't include the words 'vaccine' or 'vaccinated'.
It's about long Covid, who had it, and who has it.
It doesn't fit your narrative.

 

[Terminalxylem]

Another way to look at it is that in April 2020, we (collectively) held two beliefs about covid that we now know to be false:

1) Covid is spread mainly by surface transmission, and it isn't airborne.
2) Covid almost certainly emerged from a wet market, not an accidental lab leak.

Nobody gets mad at the people who told us (1), and lots of us are mad at the people who told us (2). Why the difference?

Because the people who said that covid isn't airborne were arguing in good faith. They were mistaken, but they were acting on what they genuinely believed to be true at the time. They didn't go around censoring people who argued otherwise, and they didn't try to get people fired from their jobs for saying that covid was airborne. They approached it as an open empirical question and followed the evidence where it led. It didn't take long before we got to the bottom of things and updated our view of how covid is spread. So everybody could just say "Whoops, we got that one wrong" and everyone just moved on. We moved on because we all understand that all of us were trying to get it right.

Contrast that with how the "racist conspiracy theory" crowd reacted to the lab leak theory. The people who told us that there's no way covid escaped from a lab knew perfectly well that that was entirely possible. When they said it was almost definitely zoonotic, they were lying. For many of the virology researchers involved in this, they were lying for professional reasons. People who do virology research aren't going to want people thinking that their work might cause a global pandemic -- this isn't anything political, just boring, ordinary self-interest. But there was a also a very strong political reason that we all understand for nearly every media outlet and most tech companies to push the "conspiracy theory" line as well. So we got a bunch of gaslighting backed up by censorship, when it should have been obvious from the get-go that it might be more than a weird coincidence that the bat coronavirus lab just happened to be located a couple of miles from an outbreak of a bat coronavirus.

Those of us who treated both (1) and (2) as non-political empirical issues got both of them right at or around the same time. The rest of you were right there with us on (1), but if you got your news from places like NPR and Slate (lol) you were a couple of years behind everyone else on (2). And we remember how we were treated for being right a little ahead of schedule.

The lab leak still ties to the wet market, doesn't it?

no

Depending on what version of lab leak you believe, it certainly can be tied to the markets. For example, a lab worker may have sold animals to wet markets, with or without knowledge of the infectious risk they posed.

 

[fatness]

Probably the best reasonably current article on the origin of COVID that I've read.

How the Lab-Leak Theory Went From Fringe to Mainstream—and Why It’s a Warning

Three years ago, Tom Cotton ushered it into the public conversation.

slate.com

@Rich Conway , thanks.

So, why has a debate about issues that are largely of academic interest become so vitriolic? So politicized? What is the debate really about? Several observations suggest that it is not a scientific debate at all and is not really driven by concern over the origins of the pandemic. Most mass media have reported the lab-leak debate as a bitter debate between two groups of scientists. In fact, the debate is asymmetrical. On the one side, the overwhelming weight of opinion among virologists, epidemiologists, evolutionary biologists, and other scientists with experience and expertise in studying epidemic viral diseases is that COVID reached humans directly from an animal host or hosts. Although a few such experts have supported the lab-leak side, the most prominent proponents of a lab-leak origin are journalists, economists and public policy experts, politicians, postdoctoral fellows, and more-senior scientists who lack relevant expertise or experience.

While direct evidence for either a lab leak or an animal origin remains lacking, the lab-leak side has relied much more heavily on purely circumstantial evidence (e.g., pointing out that the Wuhan lab and the initial outbreak of COVID-19 occurred in the same city) and speculation (e.g., arguing that certain aspects of the molecular structure of the virus “could only” have arisen through experimental manipulation, not through evolution). Their claim that the failure to identify the animal that was the source of the virus discredits the animal-origin hypothesis is spurious—again, it can take decades to identify the exact source of a disease.

Even the concept of a lab leak has been a shifting target: Initially, the concern was often that the source of SARS-CoV-2 was bioweapon research. Later, accusations flew that SARS-CoV-2 had been created by laboratory manipulation of less dangerous viruses.

 

[fatness]

So, yes, my fear is that those who continue to mask will convince those in authority to mask our kids all day

Don't sit on your toilet at night. The monster will get you.

 

[fatness]

Also, there was a #3 back in 2020. There was also the group who either ignorantly treated or didn't understand the very important distinctions between"created in a lab" and "made a jump to humans in a lab". I spent a WHOLE lot of time ridiculing the former while maintaining the latter was possible, though not probable based on what we knew at the time.

Same here. By and large the same people promoting the "made to jump to humans" guess were promoting the "created in a lab" guess, mostly for political reasons.

 

[fatness]

This article is easier to follow, and is written by a reputable source - who co-wrote a book exploring the lab leak theory. It helps answer questions raised on this page.

That's a junk website. https://www.spiked-online.com/

 

[Terminalxylem]

Take a step back for a minute and consider this: If SARS-CoV2's origin was zoonotic, there is literally no one on earth who knows that with 100% certainty. If it was man-made, then that fact might be known to a small number of scientists in Wuhan and, depending on how conspiratorial you want to get, a number of researchers and/or government officials in China and possibly other countries as well.

But one thing we can say with almost 100% certainty is that nobody posting in this thread (myself very much included), and nobody any of us encounters on a regular basis, has any concrete knowledge of the virus' origin. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say none of us has nearly enough knowledge of how viruses operate to even understand how one would go about answering that question.

What that means is that, whatever you believe about SARS-CoV2's origins, your certainty about that belief is entirely reflective of your own biases rather than any discernible facts on the ground. If you're sure it was zoonotic, or if you're declaring the lab-leak hypothesis to be "fact", all you're really doing is confessing that's what you wish to be true

There would be tells all over the "virus"...it would be obvious. Every single strand that has been studied is void of ANY of those tells. It's not man-made.

There has been discussion about the sequence of a furin cleavage site in the spike protein, which some have used as support for a bioengineered virus. Others have dismissed the validity of those assertions, but unless you’re a molecular virologist with specific background in coronaviruses, it’s hard to know what to believe.

These links are great.

This article is easier to follow, and is written by a reputable source - who co-wrote a book exploring the lab leak theory. It helps answer questions raised on this page.

To Terminalxylem’s point, it best to balance this by exploring best arguments supporting the wet market origin.

Thanks for that link, which definitely is a nice summary for laypeople. Don’t know anything about that site.

 

[The Commish]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but GoF research seeks to force those mutations to occur in a controlled lab setting so that scientists can study how it happened, right?

If it was conclusively shown that something in that process went awry and led to the pandemic, I suspect the vast majority of people would conclude that the virus was "man-made". If the lab had never existed, the pandemic wouldn't have happened, at least not when it did.

Although I do agree with the broader point that a lot of these definitions are kind of blurry and can't be so neatly divided into one or two simple categories.

Still, if researchers could conclusively demonstrate that the virus developed zoonotically in the wild, they would have every incentive to publish that evidence. The fact that they haven't very strongly suggests that evidence does not (yet?) exist.

There are many different things that science looks at in GoF research. What they were actually DOING in the lab with the virus (whether straight-up testing the effects of a non-manipulated virus or testing what happens when one manipulates the virus) really only explains why the virus was in the lab in the first place. It's really not relevant to how/why the virus was able to get out of containment.