"interesting tidbit" followed by you going nuclear as a response. You're a total spazz. Is it debunked? You didn't debunk it itt. Where did you hrar about this conspiracy theory? Who debunked it and where? Why does it make you furious? I don't even care. It could be the fakest of all fake news. It's possible. If that's the case just say so and move on or perhaps link to a source. This benign "tidbit" has you really worked up

You immediately showed disdain towards myself, James Lindsay, and this "conspiracy theory" like one of those scrawny low-t politics regs who'll weep tears of joy when a feminist gets down on one knee to propose to you. With such a low post count, prompt response times on this subject, and the built in baggage it looks like this isn't your only account. Take a few deep breathes sweetheart

juan,
This is how you do conspiracy correctly in a way that actually presents as a probable proposition:



Yes it's noteworthy that the testing guidelines changed, and it's really weird that cases started dropping rapidly when the guideline was published. Whether it matters for false positives I don't know. I would guess not a lot.

The good thing is, death data will tell us definitively (I don't listen to idiots with opinions and listen even less when they claim to be experts, only data matters). Cases have more than halved in the US since January 13th, down 62% in a month from 753 pm to 292 pm. Deaths should also halve from peak in the next three weeks then. If they do, it's not a testing artifact.

The fact that it occurred near a presidential change is not noteworthy. Conspiracies (and there is plenty of actual real collusion and dirty deals and theft and cheating out there) don't work like that.

Yeah what I thought was an "interesting tidbit" was the fact that they changed the testing methods which could skew results. I wasn't really fascinated by the speculation of motives. Now it seems like the assertion that testing methods were even changed at all is in question. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. It was posted by James Lindsay and zerohedge so I thought it was likely based on some form of reality

Right now the NY Post is tweeting about how Cuomo's staff is guilty of covering up care home deaths. I didn't post anything because the media is so untrustworthy, and at this point it seems like a premature tangent to go down. When someone claims the testing methodology changed its an objective enough claim that I assume it's true. What is true is that we have officials from NY of all rank and areas of expertise on video making the dumbest mistakes possible. Health officials were literally telling everyone to come down to chinatown and celebrate their new year a year ago. Ignore the fear mongering, there's nothing to be scared of

I don't know where the virus was created and neither does anyone else, bar a handful Chinese people. We will likely never know.

However, the idea that a country that is using concentration camps for forced sterilisation of women and organ harvesting and lying about it, is not capable of creating this virus in a lab and lying about it, is absurd.

If it was created in a lab, then I hope we never find out as the political implications could literally lead to the end of civilisation

How is this not obvious to people?

I don't believe it was created in a lab (as a bioweapon). I believe it's quite probable it escaped from a lab, however. Chinese behavior makes no sense otherwise. It's not like there isn't a history of this level of incompetence - SARS 1 escaped Chinese labs twice.
Yeah I disagree. China is still containable if the entire world acts hard and drastically to contains them now. China is 1933 Nazi Germany, if the Nazis could build armies of robots. It was easily containable during the time of Clinton, Bush and Obama, but as the Chinese professor said, before Trump and after (Biden), they owned Wall Street who owned the politicians, and always got their way while they plundered the US. They even own much of the media who are a straight up fifth column - they framed Trump's trade war (a necessary first step to move manufacturing supply chains out of China in preparation for phase 2 which is more aggressive containment) as "protectionism" and him as the aggressor - as if China's plundering and theft and forced tech transfer wasn't the actual problem.

So this "head in the sand" view is something I don't understand. China should be combated aggressively while they lack Western tech. Failure to do this will indeed result in the end of civilization; once they pull ahead on high end manufacturing, robotics and AI (and they're training 10x the STEM graduates every year that the US is), they can and will take over the world. Then we'll all be Uighurs or worse. They can't be contained or changed by niceness or half measures, just as Nazi Germany couldn't be.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....act_id=3771318

How about that one? gg

Nobody doubts that they are capable of engineering A virus and lying about it after the fact if the lie benefits them. It's that this particular virus has all the hallmarks of naturally evolving in nature and none of the signatures of lab engineering.

You're giving a pretense to knowledge you don't have. We don't know enough to make that call (it "looks" natural therefore it must be) in a world where you can literally print DNA and RNA from software.

I raised this before but it never garnered any discussion but I will float it again.

If indeed we accept that this type of virus can spontaneously evolve from nature based on 'certain circumstances', would it not be irresponsible of gov'ts to not try to mock it up in a lab and learn how to defend against it prior to the type of spontaneous outbreak, we are told happened here?

I think countries are pretty much obligated to try, in controlled conditions, to create the most dangerous evolutions of these viruses that circulate in nature, in an attempt to find ways to mitigate. Of course that then leads into the danger of covert weapons programs who may want that same data for entirely different reasons.

Seems like the problem is mistakes get made and viruses get out

So every so often we risk global pandemic in the interest of protecting ourselves from biological attack by malicious actors and learning more about infectious disease

It's arguable we shouldn't be doing some of this research at all. I dunno if I agree or disagree with it

That’s not what I said of course. Probably too much math for you given you got that from my post, but its just Bayes’ theorem/definition of conditional probability. Even if you had a fairly high prior probability of it being lab engineered before looking at it, the properties of the virus itself drastically lower those odds to make it a dog.

It’s not at all controversial in the literature.

And ultimately that is the equation,

Chance of forming naturally and causing 3MM+ deaths world wide as we try to figure it out and counter it during its run through the population...


VERSUS

Chance of finding variants and their mitigations in the lab saving potentially millions of lives if you do, but with the risk that a mistake might happen and it might get out...

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4104828

apparently there were virology podcasts

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2102/2102.03910.pdf

I'm not qualified to analyze this stuff but lab theory seems silly to dismiss at this point. That doesn't mean this is some sort of bio weapon either. A lab leak seems realistic

Pro tip: If you're not qualified to analyze something, you should definitely ignore the arXiv. This probably seems like a completely reasonable article to an outsider, but to any HEP-th grad student and even many undergrads, it's obviously meant to be a joke.

This is false. Nothing so far precludes the escape from a lab. When combined with the false and misleading origin stories given by the Chinese in the early days of the pandemic, and the odd goings-on at the lab itself, there is a strong consilience argument that the virus indeed escaped from a lab.

-receptor binding motif in Sars-Cov-2 that creates the furin cleavage site for human transmission is highly similar to experiments that we know have been done in the Wuhan laboratory
-Cov-2 is 96% identical to a Yunnan bat strain, bats that are not native to Wuhan, that were not found at the seafood market, bats that are native to Yunnan province, 1800km away from Wuhan, bats that have been collected for coronavirus analysis by the Wuhan lab as far back as 2013

-the other major part of the identity of the cov-2 virus is pangolin in nature, and can be traced to sick pangolin confiscation and sampling done in 2017
-furin cleavage site has no close relatives, suggesting it might have been bioengineered
-ratg13 is 100% identical to rabtcov/4991, found in Yunnan bats in 2013

-several Wuhan lab workers became ill with pneumonia in autumn 2019
-CCP has refused any interviews with these lab workers
-CCP had delayed, to worldwide criticism, any WHO investigation
-CCP jumping all over theories the origin was in a different country

This is more bad conditional probability and seemingly willful misreading. Nothing can preclude lab escape to your standards But this virus lacks genetic similarity to previously lab manipulated/studied corona-viruses. So what you are saying is it's likely they did a ton of extra work to secretly create in a lab a totally new virus backbone and got lucky that this one escaped rather than one of the other existing ones that they surely must have started from giving them an extra but wholly unintentional level of deniability. And one of your main arguments is that a highly dishonest communist oligarchy that always lies and misleads.... lied and misled after the outbreak?

Sorry if this is supposed to be common knowledge, but what exactly are you a "pro" at?

"Pro tip" was just meant as a euphemism for good advice not as in a literal tip from a pro.

I like how you think this is a response to my post. The furin site is 4 amino acids long. There is 99%+ genetic similarity between cov-2 and the two previously known strains. The amount of 'work' needed to be done to splice the two and add a 4 amino acid furin site is pretty trivial. You're acting like they needed to create a bioweapon from scratch to have this 'escaped from a lab.'

Gain of function experiments happen on viruses all the time, even in US labs. All that needed to happen for this to escape from a lab was that one of these gain of function experiments exposed a few lab workers who had contact with the general population. We have circumstantial evidence of exactly that. We also know that this has happened in Chinese (and other) labs before. We currently have no good theory for how this might have evolved in nature (malayan pangolins sneeze on Yunnan bats that end up in Wuhan, 2000km away--how!?), and the seafood market hypothesis was debunked months ago.

OK

The origins of the phrase pro tip are a condescending way to offer advice to someone doing something comically wrong. Of course we don't see that phrase used that much anymore because people with social skills realize that when it's been used to death it loses its humor or any sort of originality and you're just left sounding like a... I'll let figure that part out. Of course if you were an actual pro on the subject, then you could in fact offer a "pro tip".

The bolded seems to be you just making claims contrary to lots of research and acting as if it's some sort of scientific truth. In the first link I posted is a virology podcast that occurred before the pandemic where they discuss what research is being conducted, why, and how. They discuss and theorize risks etc. You can then connect the dots directly to the paper I linked which actual experts see plenty of evidence contrary to the bolded in your post and that link directly to the discussions by actual virologists prior to the pandemic.

I saw the paper because Bret Weinstein linked it. He has a background in biology and is familiar with lab rats. He actually came up with a theory about telomere length in lab rats vs wild that would have all sorts of implications. He tells the story here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s at around the 50 minute mark. It's kind of long and not all that exciting unless you're in to that sort of stuff. His theory turned out to be true. Anyways, I believe he is literate enough to determine if a paper like that was "malarkey"

On top of all that, from my perspective, the lab theory involving the CCP actually has a parallel storyline to something like Chernobyl, which certainly isn't a conspiracy theory. At this point the thing I find most interesting about this is peoples motivation to dismiss it so quickly. Maybe the virus did escape from a lab, maybe it didn't. I don't know. The rush to shout down people or even experts by layman is obviously derived from some motivation. It's certainly not expertise, knowledge, or scientific consensus

The did do gain of function research on corona viruses at that lab as far as I understand. Saw a short clip where Bret Weinstein argues that the amount of novelties in this virus makes it a clear favorite to come from a lab.

ecriture, how do you think the virus originated?

But again, the Nature correspondence argues (convincingly imo) that the scructure of this virus does not look like a lab studied variant with gain of function. It looks like a virus found in nature with a gain of function mutation.

Who's the "We" in this sentence? I agree hardcore "must be made in a lab truthers" that don't really care what the literature says will never find an alternative natural explanation.

I got hurt feelings
I got hurt feelings

Everything I said is either high school math or in the Nature correspondence I linked, with cites to the actual papers. You get mad about people being condescending but you are uncritically going with a fringe intellectual dark web dude? Shouldn't you be used to that by now?

Like you're intentionally quoting heterodox sources and offended that people don't take you seriously. Your case is so weak you have to go to podcasts and fringe academics... by that standard I can create controversies that P=NP, disprove the big bang etc.

The same magazine that said this?



Humanity. We know:

1) 99%+ of the genes from Sars-Cov-2 come from two animals
2) Both animals were collected by the Wuhan lab
3) The Wuhan lab does gain of function research on coronaviruses
3) One animal was collected in 2013 2000km away and the other comes from 2017 from an entirely different country
4) RBTG13 which is 95% identical to cov-2 was known only to the wuhan lab until January 2020
5) Furin cleavage site is 4 amino acids long and comes from malayan pangolins
6) No theory exists as to how these two animals came into contact with one another, other than at the lab

Be careful or you might be found guilty of harboring the same bias you are accusing of others.