Top Researchers Are Calling For a Broader Investigation Into the Origin of Covid-19 (sciencemag.org) 208
In a letter in the journal Science, 18 prominent biologists -- including the world's foremost coronavirus researcher -- are lending their weight to calls for a new investigation of all possible origins of the virus, and calling on China's laboratories and agencies to "open their records" to independent analysis.
UPDATE:The New York Times points out that at least one of the signers, an epidemiologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, told them explicitly that "I think it is more likely than not that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from an animal reservoir rather than a lab." And the Times notes that "Unlike other recent statements, the new letter did not come down in favor of one scenario or another."
But Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute, still points out to the Times that "the letter suggests a false equivalence between the lab escape and natural origin scenarios. To this day, no credible evidence has been presented to support the lab leak hypothesis, which remains grounded in speculation."
UPDATE:The New York Times points out that at least one of the signers, an epidemiologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, told them explicitly that "I think it is more likely than not that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from an animal reservoir rather than a lab." And the Times notes that "Unlike other recent statements, the new letter did not come down in favor of one scenario or another."
But Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute, still points out to the Times that "the letter suggests a false equivalence between the lab escape and natural origin scenarios. To this day, no credible evidence has been presented to support the lab leak hypothesis, which remains grounded in speculation."
Thank god for Biden (Score:2, Funny)
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Re: Thank god for Biden (Score:2)
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That's not funny! [youtube.com]
This is NOT Funny (Score:2)
It is TRUE but NOT Funny.
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But apparently Andersen is under every single headline which criticizes the wild-reservoir theory (you'd think they'd at least diversify their go-to wild-reservoir defenders, but nope...)
People should be clear about the fact that it's him that's largely being called out when people attack the wild-reservoir theory. He's the one who posted the "it couldn't have been lab-made" paper that wild-reservoir defenders rallied around but that critics tore down.
I'll take "Things That Won't Happen" for 100, Alex (Score:5, Insightful)
Calling on China's laboratories and agencies to "open their records" to independent analysis
Would be great, but...
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From China's perspective, they already allowed WHO to perform an investigation. Some people are unhappy with the results and wants another. How many investigations should they help with? Should it keep going until one of those investigations finds them at fault? And more importantly, no matter what data they provide, those who want to blame it on China will simply claim China doctored the data.
If there's no way for China to make everyone happy no matter what they do, why would they comply?
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If you had a potential biological outbreak on your hands wouldn't you scrub down the facility?
The real issue here is that you want people from outside China to do the investigation, because you don't trust the Chinese to do it. Of course the Chinese are not going to accept your suspicion as a reason to do that. I have a feeling that most countries wouldn't accept foreign inspections of their facilities during the height of the pandemic or ever, given that they will all claim to be more than capable of regul
Re:I'll take "Things That Won't Happen" for 100, A (Score:4, Informative)
This is absolutely no-win for the Chinese government, and I'll happily agree with you on that. The problem is that the initial WHO investigation was flawed and much of the data provided was summaries, rather than the raw data. The Chinese government had vetoes on who the WHO could send as investigators and effectively had right-of-first-refusal for the produced report. Not exactly things that inspire confidence in the report itself. I expect that if the shoe had been on a different foot, and the outbreaks had first started in the US or EU near some virology laboratory, investigators would also not have had unrestricted access to the data there either.
My complaint is more that we'll never be entirely certain where this came from, even though the story in the report seems entirely plausible.
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The WHO are not the World Health Police. Their role is to assist, not to go and investigate countries looking for cover-ups. Their report was only created to collect the data that the Chinese supplied and make observations.
If you want an investigation... Well given that China is a sovereign nation your only real option is probably the CIA or some other clandestine agency, and anything they produce will likely be classified up the wazoo and locked away for 50 years.
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They only need to help with one. Your question should be "How many more investigations will they hinder?"
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Do you need the Chinese government to provide you with hospital data? Do you need the Chinese government to force the people involved to talk to you? Do you need to access government facilities like that virus research lab? Yes? Then they're not hindering you. You need their help.
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Re: I'll take "Things That Won't Happen" for 100, (Score:2)
Re: I'll take "Things That Won't Happen" for 100, (Score:2)
It's more likely than the USA doing the same, or even as much as the Chinese already have.
Now that's funny. (Score:3)
Hilarious. Not because of what they want to do, but the idea that the CCP would ever release any significant documents on the matter, let alone unaltered ones.
Re:Now that's funny. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes and the way CCP ran out and arrested doctors who were trying to stop COVID at the very early stages makes your comparison totally equivalent.
So seeing as how the US doesn't volunteer information on how the F35 engine works, or how the AEGIS system works, or the specs of the space shuttle or whatever the CCP wanted to know and had to steal, I suppose it's totally unreasonable for the CCP to volunteer information on what Gain-of-Function activity was going on at Wuhan, whether or not it involved Bat coronoviruses, whether there were lax safety conditions, and whether any of their researchers got sick with SARS-like symptoms just before the rest of Wuhan got sick. Did I understand that correctly? Asking for a friend.
Re:Now that's funny. (Score:4, Insightful)
The UK ordered unsuitable PPE and expelled thousands of doctors and nurses from the country at the start of the epidemic. Just points to gross stupidity, not attempted genocide.
Re: Now that's funny. (Score:2)
That didn't happen.
Re: Now that's funny. (Score:2)
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The UK government routinely illegally destroys thousands of files a year at the National Archives because it considers humiliation a national secret. This isn't unusual for anyone and doesn't point to crime.
Yeah...China cooperation. Good Luck with that... (Score:2, Insightful)
I"m sure they'll be even more open this time.
[/rolls eyes]
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Re: Yeah...China cooperation. Good Luck with that. (Score:2)
Re: Yeah...China cooperation. Good Luck with that (Score:2)
Kanji??
Re: Yeah...China cooperation. Good Luck with tha (Score:2)
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There's always the classic leftist comeback: "Other countries are bad too."
That's also the classic rightist comeback for criticism of the United States.
It's not really a lef/right thing, it's used by anyone who wants to divert attention from a question they can't answer.
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Think of the CHILDREN!
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The question is ... (Score:2)
What do they hope to find out? What are they trying to prove? From TFA:
Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable. Knowing how COVID-19 emerged is critical for informing global strategies to mitigate the risk of future outbreaks.
Or do they have an ulterior motive? Do they possibly think this was man-made? I've said it before. I don't think we're gonna find out for sure until another 50 years later when documents get unclassified.
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The Chinese who make decisions have no sense of right or wrong, all they care about is making themselves look good so they get promotions
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I wouldn't put it past China to be researching bioweapons.
I'd mod that funny if I had mod points. Well done!
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It's entirely plausible it was an accidental release of some sort of research alpha-test culture, for instance, derived by trying to hybridize rhinoviruses and coronaviruses;.
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Do they possibly think this was man-made?
I don't believe anyone thinks that it was man-made. There's incredibly good proof [nature.com] that this was not man-made. Regular lab splicing is not exact, that's kind of the point why CRISPR-Cas9 is such a big deal, it makes splicing a bit more exact (but we're not at a point to use it as well as we think it can be used). So if this virus was man made, there would be copy errors in long runs of the sequence for things like the spike protein and what not. But a comparison of SARS-Cov-2's sequence compared to other
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Ignoring techniques like serial passage while holding out that paper as some kind of proof of no modification is highly suspect
First off, I'm surprised that a Senator has a Slashdot account. Might I ask Senator Paul what you do with your time when you aren't regurgitating online theories? Additionally, I hold out the paper that 47 other papers published by a multitude of nations have cited as concurring with their research. That paper is considered the bedrock argument [nature.com] against the crap theory you're putting out there.
That's not some highly advanced technique in the future, it's well understood and in common use.
Aye it is. It's also inaccurate on short scales of time. So the point would be that this would need to be a vir
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“Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor
and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good
genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton
School of Finance, very good, very smart —you know, if
you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if,
like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m
one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s
true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they
try—oh, do they d
Re: The question is ... (Score:2)
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Open discussion (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering that any of the combinations of ideas regarding a lab leak (intentional or not) of COVID-19 (manufactured or natural) go against the currently accepted understanding of the virus, you won't be able to discuss this development on YouTube. They recently implemented policies disallowing any open discussion of COVID-19, and you're only allowed to discuss what the WHO, CDC, and other governments have defined as true.
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Most of which is already established by independent labs as true. If you want to look for WMDs or children in the basement of a pizza parlour with only one floor, don't blame me if people accuse you of sexing up the dossier of conspiracy theories.
too late for that (Score:3, Interesting)
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i think it was a virus found in nature, then enhanced by the chinese because trump was mucking wiht the economy
That really doesn't sound that absurd. That actually kind of jives with a pet theory that is rattling around in my brain. I think it was a weapons test.
Not a full blown one but more of a proof of concept and one to send a message. Take a low fatality rate virus, tamper with it to make it a lot more contagious, then release it into the wild and watch what happens. From what I've observed the test was a blazing success and the message being "look what we could have done if we really wanted to kill yo
Re: too late for that (Score:2)
Re: too late for that (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of which not exactly known for caring about their population.
So true, does make for a interesting thought experiment. But at bookwormT3 pointed out here.
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
The virus as a bio-weapon has fully been debunked. I'm actually willing to believe that because I think if it was proven to be a bio-weapon, even a proof of concept one, the response by the world would be a lot more explodie.
It wasn't the Chinese (Score:3)
It was the extra-terrestrials. This was their dry run before they do the full invasion of earth will the real virus. It is probably already in our DNA, eating away at us, polluting our precious bodily fluids.
And Biden is one of them. Made to look human. But the real Biden was teleported away decades ago. That is how he can still operate while being so old. He is not human. Stands to reason.
They are circling the earth as we speak, in their undetectable invasion fleet, just ready for the right moment t
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Mass censorship of any dissenting options about the cause, source, and reaction to the virus
What fucking planet are you living on where you haven't seen every single opinion from every single asshole on every single corner of the Internet with their pet theory about where this virus came from?
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Really? Become a doctor. Then create a video on how you disagree with current policy on the virus. Focus on the mask policies, lock downs, or vaccines. Get a few other doctors that agree with you to state there option on it.
Then take said video post it to youtube, facebook, and twitter. Wait and see how long your video stays up. Make sure you pay attention how the media reacts to your video.
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Contrary to popular opinion, doctors are /not/ experts in any of these fields. At best they have a passing awareness of the latest knowledge if they keep up to date with the research. (Any doctor that reckons vaccines are not worth getting in general, outside of the edge cases, should, of course, not be a doctor).
Medical misinformation has been a major problem for the pandemic, and before it, and a lot of it has been spread by doctors who are operating WELL OUTSIDE their field of expertise. e.g. a general p
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Become a doctor, make a video that doesn't agree with the status quo on covid, post it to twitter, youtube, or facebook. Once you have done that get back to us on the results.
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The goal posts have not moved. Link to video please.
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"i think it was a virus found in nature, then enhanced by the chinese because trump was mucking wiht the economy"
Almost certainly found in nature, but an intentional pandemic has already been debunked. Mid-2020, virology experts reported that COVID19 has some characteristics which, prior to nature proving science wrong, had been thought not to be effective in the human body. Or in other words, this virus would not have been chosen or been the goal of bioweapon research because it would have been thought ine
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a virus found in nature, then enhanced by the chinese because trump was mucking wiht the economy and causing china some serious economic grief with tariffs and finding alternatives
As someone else has pointed out, the virus was very bad at infecting humans before. Additionally, the spike protein compared to other similar knowns, like RaTG13 and SARS-Cov-1, shows a very clear linage in the Receptor Binding Domain (RBD) of the S protein. The ACE2 binding in function is similar to other Coronavirus. The biggest part of SARS-Cov-2 is the ability to trick the immune system and that is not the S-Protein that does that but more along the NSP2/3 within the ORF1ab gene. Editing these seque
Incompetence vs malice (Score:3, Insightful)
So it is very much possible, they were not trying develop any bio weapons. The incompetence and denial allowed the contagion to escape and infect the whole world.
You can ask, "Why blame malice when mere incompetence can explain the events?"
But, to adapt a phrase made famous by Arthur C Clarke [1], "Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice".
It does not matter, whether it was incompetence or malice. Chinese definitely bungled it. And they are too big to be held responsible. USA too has been too big and too powerful to be held responsible for rest of the world. But, at least, some in USA held their own government responsible, and reign in the excesses. Somewhat ineffective, but still, at least there were some. Alas, it's all gone now.
[1] Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
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The quote is actually attributed to Napoleon, it seems incorrectly [militaryhistorynow.com]. The attached link implies that it largely emerged in the writings of Jane West in 1812 ("Let us not attribute to malice and cruelty what may be referred to less criminal motives").
If nothing else, the optics are bad (Score:2)
The WHO behaves as though its an extension of the Chinese government.
The Chinese military had an office in the lab in Wuhan where gain of function experiments were conducted.
Is it any wonder people are suspicious?
In any case, we need to leave this one alone. I don't want WW3 to start. If it becomes proven the Chinese governme
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People were suspicious of Iraq. And were wrong.
People were suspicious of a pizza parlour. And were wrong.
People being suspicious doesn't mean a damn thing. Reality isn't democratic, things don't become true because you believe them.
WHO was defanged by the US Government, with the approval of US voters. But WHO are largely irrelevant, since it's the independent labs that did 99% of the validation.
Dr Kelly was up to his eyeballs in espionage, but that didn't make him a liar. It made him a target of blind hatre
Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the mental disciplines he prescribed is to generate multiple hypotheses. Implicit is that you don't reject one until the evidence is against it.
SARS COV2 is quite good at binding to human ACE2 receptors.
Hypothesis: it evolved to adapt to humans during an undetected period of circulation when it was misdiagnosed or doing its asymptomatic thing.
Hypothesis: a lab did routine gain of function testing and became just the latest of many labs all over the world to have an accident.
Hypothesis: it evolved naturally in animals that have ACE2 receptors similar to those in humans.
I have yet to see evidence that could rule out any of those. I will listen with respect to anyone who presents relevant facts.
Never happen. (Score:2)
Too many people accrue too much power and influence by not discovering this shit.
Sure but the USA won't comply. (Score:2)
China would if the USA would, but of course, the USA won't. China already let the WHO investigate, but that supposedly isn't good enough.
They mean the USA, not China. (Score:2)
Of course, people here will think they want more from China, but it's really from the USA that information is lacking...and they're refusing pretty much any kind of investigation.
It is not from a lab (Score:3)
We _know_ that. Engineering a virus like this leaves clear, easy to identify markers. COVID-19 does not have any of these markers. Unless Chinese labs are decades ahead of everybody else and can do things nobody else can, they did not make this.
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china. what would be their motivation to entertain an investigation of the origins of covid 19
To prove to the world they didn't have anything to do with it. Like it or not there is plenty of rumors and circumstantial evidence to say they did. They are probably hoping that a investigation will clear China's name.
Personally, I think its a little to late. It's been well over a year and China has had plenty of time to cover up and doctor any evidence that might have existed. At this point God himself, or what ever passes for God in what ever religious system that you subscribe to that is reading
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To prove to the world they didn't have anything to do with it. Like it or not there is plenty of rumors and circumstantial evidence to say they did. They are probably hoping that a investigation will clear China's name.
Personally, I think its a little to late. It's been well over a year and China has had plenty of time to cover up and doctor any evidence that might have existed. At this point God himself, or what ever passes for God in what ever religious system that you subscribe to that is reading this, could drop a stone tablet on Tucker Carlson's head. The tablet sayin g "China had nothing to do with this" and people would still scream foul.
An you can can plainly see by the response to Parent post that someone out there wants to take the heat off China. There is nothing trollish about this post. Just a comment but yet someone wants to make sure its take down.
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Science cannot prove a conjecture, only falsify. I have seen no falsifiable conjecture on offer and that is required before you can apply scientific methods.
Science HAS established that natural strains exist in the animal world that are very close to var2 and that var2 tranfers between humans and animals.
Science CANNOT show what happened at any given hour in any given lab. We don't have a working TARDIS.
Science CANNOT show direction - whether a virus in nature was brought into a lab or vice versa.
So what ar
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It has been proven. Many times by many researchers from many organizations.
You don't like that result, so you cherry-pick data that says it might be otherwise, in full knowledge of what you've done.
Sorry, not sympathetic.
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You should really bone up on your reading comprehension here.
At no point did I assert that China had actually done anything wrong. But like it or not there is plenty rumor and circumstantial evidence out there that they did and they are trying to cover it up. An there are some very powerful people, word leaders, that are tilt their head that way. You literately can't watch a foxnew show at night and not hear some one spouting this line.
The question was and still is, "china. what would be their moti
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also.
to say that americans have very big penises.
apologies to south park
There were millions of Hong Kong (Score:2)
protesters in the streets that were conveniently displaced when the virus was released.
Among other problems... like Trump likely to be re-elected.
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This is idiotic, the USA and Russians both had biologial weapon programs for decades, and the soviets had a number of accidental releases from those programs, you're not fooling anyone here chang!
Re: If there's nothing to hide, no worries! (Score:2)
If you've already reached your conclusion, why bother investigating any further?
Re:If there's nothing to hide, no worries! (Score:5, Insightful)
We have *no* intermediate species identified after much searching, unless you count the suspect humanized mice in the Wuhan lab. And given the spliced in cleavage site that uses the human version of the codons (not the coronavirus version of the same protein), it's pretty suspect.
Do you have any links to any credible publications on these matters?
Without those I'll be forced to file your theories as misinformation accordingly.
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The lack of evidence for an intermediate species is no evidence of lack, but the timetable casts increasing doubt
The timetable for a lack of evidence is the same. Till the heat death of the universe I suppose.
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"Since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction in the laboratory,” writes Steven Quay, a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of SARS2.
I googled this Steven Quay and broke my BS meter.
He's published a paper, and by "published" I mean he uploaded it to a website that's supposed to be open access for stuff that gets peer-reviewed elsewhere but he's obviously not getting this peer reviewed since it would get laughed out of a comparative literature journal.
The paper [zenodo.org] should serve as the punchline to a joke to anyone who has taken an introductory stats course.
He applied Bayes theorem to the problem... meaning he multiplied a bunch of numbers he
Re: Intermediate species, furin cleavage, arginine (Score:2, Troll)
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First of all, you have googled where I did not, and I trust your summary. Second, I gave a talk this week on Edward Jenner, variola, and vaccina, so I know full well that we face nothing of the threat that our ancestors faced daily - SARS-CoV-2 is little more than a bad flu season, when variolation meant 3% fatality, and natural variola was well over 20%. Third, while some sources in the Wade article might be compromised, we are all fumbling in the dark for what has happened this year, and the guilty parties (my own country included) will not tell the truth. I am not ready to discount these assertions.
In the UK a bad flu season would cause, in a year, not much more than 1/10th of the deaths observed from COVID-19, and that is with economy-damaging restrictions and a gargantuan vaccination programme to control COVID-19. In no way is COVID-19 'little more than a bad flu season'. Granted, this is not a black death level of threat, but to dismiss it as 'little more than a bad flu season' is incorrect as we can look at the statistics and no that it has been much worse.
Re: Intermediate species, furin cleavage, arginine (Score:2)
Re: Intermediate species, furin cleavage, arginine (Score:2)
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Are you trying to allege because you don't like one non-published paper he wrote that he's not a serious scientist [google.com]? He has over ten thousand citations.
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Are you trying to allege because you don't like one non-published paper he wrote that he's not a serious scientist [google.com]? He has over ten thousand citations.
He wasn't a serious scientist when he was writing that paper.
Now, according to that site he was a serious scientist though publication and citation counts can mean very different things for different fields. And his citations have fallen off a cliff since the early 2000's. I suspect it has something to do with his startup company and his attempt to monetize his reputation but that's just speculation.
Either way it doesn't matter because no matter how many papers and citations he has because the Bayes paper i
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The problem with this kind of circumstantial speculation is that you can draw equally likely and entirely opposite conclusions.
For example, the Chinese said that COVID-19 might have originated outside of China. You have just presented evidence to back that up, e.g. the fact that the original bat population and intermediate species have not been found in Wuhan.
If it was an artificial creation then we might as well speculate about the CIA developing it and deploying it at the behest of Donald J. Trump. After
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Nobody is alleging it was a weapon (well, nobody serious). What is being alleged is that the publicly-acknowledged gain-of-function research that they were conducting on bat coronaviruses, at a place housing COVID-19's closest-known wild relative, escaped (from a facility that had been heavily criticized by the state departrment as having lax precautions and which at one point stated they were intending to conduct such research at level 2/3, which would be insane)
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It's still all just speculation and innuendo though. I get that people would love to have another stick to beat China with, but it's really time to show your hard evidence or move on. Aside from anything else the next time this happens whichever country is the probable origin is unlikely to be very cooperative now.
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... humanized mice in the Wuhan lab. ...
are those like tiny people, or more like Mickey and Minnie Mouse?
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Pinky and The Brain
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Look into who's been funding the rather suspect gain of function research at the Wuhan lab.
We have *no* intermediate species identified after much searching, unless you count the suspect humanized mice in the Wuhan lab.
Have you ever heard of a zebrafish [wikipedia.org]? Probably, because a ton of biologists use it to perform research. Viruses aren't any different [wikipedia.org]. If you're going to do some really new type of research like gain of function you're going to use organisms you're familiar with, not some novel coronavirus that has been circulating unnoticed in bats for decades [nature.com].
With all the well understood coronaviruses they had on hand the Chinese decided to use a newly discovered virus as a model for gain of function research??? It just does
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There's zero chance of that. That's not reasonable.
Re: If there's nothing to hide, no worries! (Score:2, Informative)
Re: If there's nothing to hide, no worries! (Score:2)
You realise that is considered a compliment in China?
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We don't know it mostly kills old people. We know they're the ones who die from the initial symptoms, but most who die from HPV don't die from the warts. You simply can't extrapolate the entire curve from one data point.
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Now that's interesting.
But, Bloomberg %^)
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Last country to allow inspectors in, Iraq, found many inspectors were CIA and MI6 agents organizing a coup. It also got flattened by a sustained military campaign by the spying nations, after which terrorists that the spying nations had invited into Iraq started wiping everyone out.
Do you think maybe that might have set something of a precedent up? Especially as afterwards, it was admitted that not only were no WMDs found in Iraq, but that nobody believed the double agent who had made the allegations. They
Re: Lab accidents happen all the time everywhere (Score:2)
"but we do not have proof either way and it matters for preventing the next pandemic."
For the next one it doesn't matter which already happened, we already know both are risks, assume both. Improve lab safety and study zoonotic transmission.