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Medicine China Government

US Intelligence Agencies Split On COVID-19 Origins, Offer No High-Confidence Conclusions In New Report (cnbc.com) 228

Posted by BeauHD from the finger-pointing dept.
The U.S. intelligence community said Thursday that it was divided over the exact origin of Covid-19 in China. CNBC reports: "After examining all available intelligence reporting and other information, though, the IC remains divided on the most likely origin of Covid-19. All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident," the unclassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said. In May, President Joe Biden ordered a closer intelligence review of what he described as two likely scenarios of the origins of the Covid-19. "Here is their current position: 'while two elements in the IC leans toward the [human contact] scenario and one leans more toward the [lab leak scenario] -- each with low or moderate confidence -- the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other," Biden said. Developing...
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US Intelligence Agencies Split On COVID-19 Origins, Offer No High-Confidence Conclusions In New Report More

US Intelligence Agencies Split On COVID-19 Origins, Offer No High-Confidence Conclusions In New Report

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  • Boy that's great (Score:3)

    by Krishnoid ( 984597 ) on Friday August 27, 2021 @03:09PM (#61736433) Journal
    How about a few ideas based on historical virology, evolutionary simulations, and effects of that implanted microchip on how the virus could mutate further? Those would at least be something you can base immediate public ground-level health policy on rather than navel-gazing on where it came from.

    Well, at least we can now choose from multiple conspiracy theories and can add on a few terrestrial animals as possible origins.

    • Well, at least we can now choose from multiple conspiracy theories

      Well yeah, if you resolve the issue, the game ends

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      There's lots of further experiments that can be done: See if people inside of pizza parlor basements get Covid easier. Or when standing near a 5g tower while ingesting bleach wearing bamboo underwear sprinkled with JFK's ashes spaced at various distances from Bill Gates and George Soros. Try 1:4:9 distance ratios.

      • Re:Boy that's great (Score:5, Funny)

        by burtosis ( 1124179 ) on Friday August 27, 2021 @03:56PM (#61736629)

        Try 1:4:9 distance ratios.

        Ahh yes, the golden shower ratios.

        • Try 1:4:9 distance ratios.

          Ahh yes, the golden shower ratios.

          Come on Mods - this one made me snort.

          • Covid originated in an East Texas swamp when Elvis and Black JFK killed Bubba Ho Tep. The mummy's rotting corpse polluted the swamp and led to the evolution of the virus.

            • Covid originated in an East Texas swamp when Elvis and Black JFK killed Bubba Ho Tep. The mummy's rotting corpse polluted the swamp and led to the evolution of the virus.

              Dammit! now the secret's out!

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Yes, we should definitely do that. especially the bleach thing. And we should make it a very large scale experiment.Would at least raise the average smarts considerably.

    • Microchip?

      • Microchip?

        Yea, Bill Gates had equipped all covid vaccines with mind control chips. Bill was a real asshole and into some kinky **** I can’t talk about cause of the chip. I could have been subject to Bill the rest of my life but luckily Melinda took custody of me during the divorce.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 )

      How about a few ideas based on historical virology, evolutionary simulations, and effects of that implanted microchip on how the virus could mutate further? Those would at least be something you can base immediate public ground-level health policy on rather than navel-gazing on where it came from.

      Well, at least we can now choose from multiple conspiracy theories and can add on a few terrestrial animals as possible origins.

      It was another political bitchfight. Where liberals thought it was racist to even suggest where it came from, and conservatives wanting to blame China.

      Me? I lean toward the concept that it escaped from a nearby lab. But other than that, It is whatever it is, and we gotta deal with it.

      All I know is I keep sticking to refrigerators from the magnetizing effect of the vaccine.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fazig ( 2909523 )
        I agree that it's been a political bitch fight. Lately pretty much everything seems to turn into a political bitch fight.
        But instead of realizing that this kind of politicizing everything is what poisons our society, a lot of people start to think that science is poison if it does not support their opinion. A concerning development.

        I'm one of those (not even American) who asked for evidence, because I don't like how easy people tend to jump to conclusions based on the flimsiest shreds of evidence, which

        • I agree that it's been a political bitch fight. Lately pretty much everything seems to turn into a political bitch fight.

          Mostly I see that it is still used for political bitch fighting where people would rather yell "I told you so" instead of taking reasonable measures to handle the situation. Because as a matter of fact the virus strains are circulating in our societies. And parts of our society refuses to take reasonable measures to slow down the spread of infectious disease. Which I find very strange from people who think that this escaped a lab or was released deliberately as a biological weapon.

          There will always be stupid people - it's not a measure of intelligence, but messed up thought processes. And when it is coupled with politics, it just get's weird.

          The thought process issues are kind of concerning. Where we have people in here even touting messed up ideas like Ivermectin as some sort of miracle prophylactic and cure for Covid, based on a bogus and retracted study that claimed something like 90 percent success, while Caleb Wallace, who self treated himself with the so called miracle drug

  • The most bureaucratic way ever to say (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Friday August 27, 2021 @03:11PM (#61736437) Journal

    ..."we don't fucking know"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by schwit1 ( 797399 )

      ... or the US and China made a backroom deal.

    • ..."we don't fucking know"

      Except, perhaps, the agency or agencies responsible for releasing the virus.

      But of course they would say, "we don't fucking know".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. Which, given the pressure for finding against China pretty much means natural.

  • With China controlling the crime scene. But the preponderance of evidence strongly suggests a lab leak is the Occam's Razor of explanations. A pandemic breaking out right next to an Institute of Virology where gain-of-function research was being conducted on bat coronaviruses. The same facility that was the subject of urgent state department memos expressing concern over lax protocols at the lab. The closest naturally occurring virus to SARS-CoV-2 is found in bats a thousand kilometers away. Bats, agai

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by burtosis ( 1124179 )
      You forgot to add that the lab is hundreds of miles from areas likely to be the actual source of the novel coronavirus. If it was transferred from a wild animal, why didn’t the outbreak start around those rural inhabitants that did the capture and were in prolonged contact? One thing is certain, the outbreak epicenter does not fit with the likely location of people who would have come into natural contact.

      • You are assuming they'd immediately detect a virus in a rural area. How often do you go to a doctor and get a viral sequence analysis done? Most of the time symptoms are ignored. Second most often the doctor will tell you to take a Sudafed and be done with it. How often do they do detailed enough testing to detect if a new virus strain is circulating?

        • Not at all, I’m assuming they would spread it, albeit more slowly, around their rural area first and leak positive people to all nearby towns. This is how it’s spreading in rural areas now. This would have seen a wider initial spread than what was observed, at least according to the data we have.

          • Not at all, I’m assuming they would spread it, albeit more slowly, around their rural area first and leak positive people to all nearby towns. This is how it’s spreading in rural areas now. This would have seen a wider initial spread than what was observed, at least according to the data we have.

            Would you detect it in a rural area if you weren't really looking for it? Look at Maine over the past year and a half, how it's been affected by all three or four waves, not really all that much and it's been in full swing all around it. Would Mainers, knowing nothing else, realize something was wrong?

            Now we would for damn sure know something was up a few weeks after someone brought it to Boston or NYC. What would the odds of even having samples from early on in Maine be, like people going to their doc f

            • Would you detect it in a rural area if you weren't really looking for it?

              Of course not, not something that even is important at all here. OBVIOUSLY it wouldn’t be detected right away, rural or urban. It would once it got going and morgues suddenly got stuffed like a frat boy after taco Tuesday. Then, just like what happened, suddenly it dawns on people there’s a problem and people start to be tracked by symptoms and then a test is developed. If the initial outbreak happens in a dense urban center, vs a remote town, the case rate per regional area map would look q

              • In 2013 6 bat guano minors became ill with a bat virus, probably a coronavirus, and 3 died. It was well described in a Chinese doctor's master thesis. Samples were sent to the WIV among other places, as they should have been. They were not that infectious as nobody else in the hospital caught it.

                It is strongly suspected that those samples are related to RaTG13, the source of SARS-COV-2.

                • I was throwing a bit of hyperbole with the morgues being stuffed, doctors in those regions have been dealing wirh SARS outbreaks for almost two decades now. All it takes is a few severe acute respiratory cases without a known cause and the alarm bell gets rung. With SARS cov2, we know now that a few hospitalizations means maybe a hundred cases already happening. It most likely only spread from a single infected human in any scenario, in a rural setting it’s more challenging for the virus to spread

                  • Nope. SARS-1 was never prevalent in "those regions" where the bats were. China is a big place. So very unlikely that the miners got SARS-1 that way.

                    And only 6 people in hospital, all were mining bat guano. They got it from the bats. And nobody in the hospital got it from them.

                    The virus then need to gain the function required for human to human transmission.

              • Since the outbreak, there has been a massive search for the source of SARS-COV-2. If people got it in rural areas, they would have been found by now. Even if their symptoms were relatively mild. And vast numbers of animals have also been tested (90,000?).

                So maybe not detected initially, but certainly later on.

      • And something else... in some articles they've shown a map of the earliest cases in Wuhan, and how far away the lab is. First, that doesn't neccessarily matter; the building itself isn't infecting people outside it; an infected worker would likely commute home, spread it to people nearby. But, there's one crucial incorrect tidbit. A lot of people have being either assuming, or falsely stating, that the research was being conducted in the WIV BSL4 facility, which they mapped as far away. However, WIV Lab Dir
      • Outbreaks tend to happen in populated areas. Virology labs also tend to exist in populated areas. I think people have trouble estimating the odds in situations like this. If I throw 2 darts at a map, what are the odds they land within 20 miles of each other? Now weight that toward population centers. Someone here is thinking one in a million and someone else is thinking one in 10.

    • Re:Of course it can't be proven (Score:4, Insightful)

      by fropenn ( 1116699 ) on Friday August 27, 2021 @04:07PM (#61736657)
      Get away with it? What, are you going to send them a bill?

      China is a tremendously powerful country, perhaps the most powerful in the world. They will never admit any liability for COVID-19 or contribute a penny in restitution.

      I'm not saying we don't need to know for sure how it happened so we can prevent the next one, but prevention should be the reason, not revenge or retribution, because that will never amount to anything. If we keep pushing retribution as the goal of figuring this out then China will never tell us anything.

      • Communist China is an enemy of the United States, just like Communist Russia is. If Russia claimed to be working on a new source of nuclear power, and an accident occurred that killed millions around the world, we would rightfully expect Russia to PROVE they were not working on a new type of nuclear weapon and it really was an accident.

        There are several things the US can do to prevent something like this from happening again. First of all, the US should stop funding ALL research in Communist China. There

    • [Citations Needed]

    • You were doing good until you used the phrase gain of function. A right wing talking point. People who have never strung those words together in their lives are using it like they know what it means. It only equates to "Fauci bad".

    • That's not evidence (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday August 27, 2021 @04:40PM (#61736799)
      that's conjecture. Go look up Youtuber potholer54's videos on this. Or dig up one of my old comments linking to various studies (easier to find potholer54 and he's a lot more entertaining than I am).

      There are bat habitats and caves right near where ground zero is, and the virus has been traced back to bats for some time. That's actual evidence.

      Meanwhile the virus does not transmit well by touch and any work done at that lab would have been done in a petri dish. I don't care how bad the lab was run, it's safe to say they washed their hands.

      It's politicized because:

      a) The previous administration and their lackies in the press want you to believe it's a lab leak because it's easier to shift blame for their poor handling of the pandemic to individuals at a lab than to a broad economic policy like deforestation.

      b) China would like very much for you to blame it on a lab leak because then you won't demand they stop unsafely ripping up bat habitats and selling live wild animals at wet markets, both of which are super profitable.

      As always, follow the money.

      • "the virus does not transmit well by touch"
        Really? So EITHER you're ridiculously hair splitting (it doesn't transmit by TOUCH... but admit it is ridiculously easy to transmit by breath air water etc) or the whole masks thing for the last 18 months has been for nothing...which is it?

        • please stop putting words in my mouth.

          The virus does not transmit well by touch. Handwashing is enough to protect you. Even the worst run biolab would sanitize people after they worked with a disease, and they wouldn't directly handle it. They'd have plastic gloves and suits. N95s too. Nurses and doctors still get it even with the N95s because they're getting right up in sick people's faces. That doesn't apply to a petri dish.

          What do you get out of spreading these lies? Fun? Money? Venting your ange

          • Nobody put words in your mouth, you were asserting - in response to a post that the most likely source was the Wuhan lab - that 'it doesn't transmit well by touch'?
            EITHER:
            - you were speaking generically, meaning 'transmit well generally'
            or
            - you were speaking specifically, meaning ONLY exactly the words you said 'doesn't transmit well by touch'

            The latter would be completely asinine as we're talking about accidental transmission from a lab. What sort of a fucking idiot would think that 'touch' is the only ve

    • There's a lot of information we can gather even without China's help.

      For example, this study was funded by the US [nih.gov], to build COVID strains and test them live in humanized mice. Can we ask the administrators of that project how far they got with it, and any data they have related to the project? Presumably they were getting regular reports from the Wuhan team.

      So it's time to stop putting all the blame on China, and start looking at the data we can collect from America. Because there's a lot.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Bullshit. You are mentally deficient. Occam's razor says something like this was overdue from entirely natural cause.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by exa ( 27197 )

        Maybe you're just not intelligent enough to understand this situation though, the likes of you shouldn't represent science.

      • that the people pushing the lab conspiracy show up on every thread, get modded up to +5 (while modding down people who point out in detail why they're wrong) then get modded down while the folks pointing out it originated in animals like the Epidemiologists warned us it would get modded up... after the thread's been on the site for a bit and probably is seeing less traffic.

        What I'm getting at is that I think we've got a troll farm + sock puppet accounts controlling these threads when they go live and h
    • Here's a thought experiment, of all the outbreaks that we know about which weren't lab escapes, how many of them happened within 20m of a virus lab? So your Occams Razor failed all of those. Now of all the lab escape oubreaks, how many were 100+ miles away from a lab? It failed those too. I don't know the actual number but it would be an interesting project.

    • Enjoy your war with China American. The rest of us will watch.

  • was taking dead bats from work and selling them on the wet market for extra income

    • They didn't sell bats at the wet market. We now have a definitive list of all the animals being sold at the markets in Wuhan, and bats were not among them.

  • Biden quote? (Score:3)

    by Mycroft-X ( 11435 ) on Friday August 27, 2021 @04:13PM (#61736685)

    "Here is their current position: 'while two elements in the IC leans toward the [human contact] scenario and one leans more toward the [lab leak scenario] -- each with low or moderate confidence -- the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other," Biden said

    Really? Biden said that? Thats a direct quote in his own words? I don't believe that...those are the words of a statistician, not Joe Biden.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dlleigh ( 313922 )

      Teleprompters. We have the technology.

    • "assess with low/moderate/high confidence" is how intelligence agencies always report findings. He'd be reading that phrase in intelligence reports his whole career. But please, more propaganda from the alternate reality where Biden is demented and senile, but Trump is perfectly fine.

      I have broken more Elton John records. He seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I donâ(TM)t have a musical instrument. I donâ(TM)t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No, weâ(TM)ve broken a lot of records. Weâ(TM)ve broken virtually every record. Because you know, look, I only need this space. They need much more room. For basketball, for hockey and all of the sports, they need a lot of room. We donâ(TM)t need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records. Really, we do it without, like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical â" the mouth. And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth, right? The brain. More important than the mouth is the brain. The brain is much more important.

      Yeah, sure, not senile at all.

  • Facebook virology experts (Score:5, Insightful)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Friday August 27, 2021 @04:26PM (#61736733)

    Ah, I see we're all back to being certified Facebook virology & epidemiology experts again.

    Fucking grow up.

  • I wish all statements came with some indication of confidence intervals or certainty levels. It would be nice if the general public wasn't coddled in its preference for absolute certainty about things we aren't certain about.

    • Contrary to military and public health training (remember, US public health infrastructure spun off from the army back in the day). These people are taught that it's better to decide and act now, even if you might be wrong, than to decide and act later to be sure you're right.

      There is a certain logic to this thinking in the context of a literal battlefield with a smallish number of people, but in the context of a long-running situation with buy-in necessary from millions, it's the sort of mentality that buy

    • Yeah that phrasing reminded me of someone I've known for a while. Me.

      My boss doesn't like it when I answer his question with " blah blah with about 80% confidence." But oftentimes the evidence/information you have can only get you so far.

      He wasn't happy the other day when. I said the analysis is consistent with a particular conclusion. But that's all I can honestly say. There may be other explanations that are also consistent.

      • We have a weird thing where people who express things with the most confidence are assumed to be the most competent. I suspect it's a human thing and not just a cultural thing, given that so many cultures (all of them?) have respected people whose job it is to confidently make up bullshit about the future. Sometimes it's priests reading oracle bones before a battle, sometimes it's ESPN analysts predicting the outcome of a football game, sometimes it's business consultants who have figured out the art of c

  • The most viable explanation is that someone got a little to enamored by bat soup. The second most viable explanation is that someone from the Wuhan lab got infected when collecting viral specimens or when trying to do a plaque assay or something in the lab.

    The least plausible explanation is deliberate release of an engineered virus. Why? Because the damn thing is too similar to all the existing coronaviruses. It doesn't have new features from other viruses. In an engineered virus, you would expect to see ce

    • The most viable explanation is that someone got a little to enamored by bat soup.

      They don't eat bat soup in China. There were no bats for sale in the Wuhan animal markets.

  • We can't even get people to vaccinate against the disease. Where it came from is the least of our problems.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dknj ( 441802 )

      plenty of news saying even those vaccinated still get the disease. so that's also the least of our problems

  • Simple: take all the people who have the opinion they're not supposed to have, and then block them on social media, or excoriate that rest.

    Voila! Now we have consensus.

    I mean, that's what we did last year wasn't it?

  • It is in China's national interest to have COVID-19 be found to have originated in nature, in bats. Further, it has been nearly two years since the disease was apparently first noted as contracted by people in China. Finally, China is tightly controlled by the Communist Party, and they have had total control of all the possible sites and all the evidence for the entire time.

    so... consider this:

    There is NO evidence of ANY trail of infected humans starting in a remote bat infested area and leading to the city

  • The classified part reads:
    "Dear Herr Presidente Biden,
    We delayed the press furor as you requested, and we have reached no conclusions, fulfilling your other requests. We stand ready to obfuscate anything else you need."

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