Not sure why anybody would care about my opinion but if there was a million dollar free roll and and an incontrovertible way to have it settled i would definitely choose non lab origin.

Sure. If politics is what matters the most to you you probably will not be convinced. It's funny you think your fringe view represents humanity, but nobody really cares. Like Juan was doing the typical far right rambling about how pEoPLE aRe ShuTTinG dOWn dEBATE but the truth is most people will just ignore you

Hypothetical scenario:
Lets say sometimes a virus accidentally leaks from a lab and sometimes it spreads from nature.
Lets say there's only 1 lab that studies these viruses.
One day a virus starts spreading in humans in Wuhan.
The only lab that studies the viruses exists in Wuhan.
If you happened to be a betting man, would you like to bet it was a leak or natural?

How many BSL-4 labs exist that could study something like SARS-CoV-2? I believe it's 45 or so across the globe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level
Actually seems less when you start looking at them.

That depends on the reason why the 1 lab is located in Wuhan. It could be located there because Wuhan is only city in the world with a population of wild bats nearby that carry coronaviruses.

I'm calling bullshit on your claims. Run the numbers for us. Show us this math that you claim proves your position. It's super simple to write out Bayes, a few lines, and you make a strong claim above that the properties of the virus make it a dog and that you have enough data to run through Bayes.

The reality is you're just full of crap. There's nothing quantifiable or insightful in any of your posts. That might work in SMP, but we're traders.
This is a complete lie.

By the way, here's the state of the investigation of the months-long-blocked WHO team, who are half Chinese and half other countries, most probably China picked given that China blocked and negotiated for many months:

What exactly would you expect to see a year after the event???? This is ecriture d'adulte level of silliness.

And the bolded is especially comical given that infected bats attacked and peed on scientists, and that there have multiple breaches from Chinese high security biological facilities that led to community transmission before, including SARS-1 twice.

I can't wait until these mad times are over.

'Universal vaccine' that can conquer all variants could be available within a year thanks to British scientists:

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/med...out&li=AAnZ9Ug

It's pretty basic, I would think even for traders. If you thought a random viral outbreak in Wuhan would be ~75% lab origin before all this and ~90% of lab origin and ~5% of natural outbreaks would have one of the signature lab "viral backbones" not found in Covid-19 you can go from lab origin being a ~3:1 favorite to ~1:3 dog. This has nothing to do with the investigation or any of your other rantings, but just based on the Nature correspondence and HS math. They obviously didn't spell it out in this level of childish detail but it's what they are saying.

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss that it did come from the lab accidentally. It's very plausible given the circumstances and it does in a way mirror ChernobyI.
I find it strange that Twitter went out of their way to ban that author a while back but at the same time allow other wild conspiracies run free.

I do agree that it's probably better for humanity that we stick with the natural storyline instead of the lab one.

It's not actually not basic, you're just a dickhead who doesn't understand complexity or epistemology, so are holding forth confidently on something you have no clue about.

So you think it's 90% that items of lab origin have a 20-year-old-technology lab signature? On what do you base this?

Sorry, you failed to spell out the math there, that's just dickhead level feels.

It's obvious what they are saying, we don't need your dickhead-level Bayes put on top of it. And what they are saying is really stupidly flawed and an argument from personal incredulity. They put forth three main points:

1. They imagine that a lab-produced protein spike should have the best binding efficiency known; since covid has a less-than-perfect binding efficiency, it makes it less likely it came from a lab. I kid you not; this is the stupidity of their argument.

2. They're saying that if it was engineered, they would expect it would often have a common viral backbone; since it doesn't, it's less likely to come from a lab. This is also very stupid for obvious reasons, not least of which someone manufacturing a bioweapon or experimenting on modifying various natural coronaviruses (Wuhan had collected many from wild bats) is simply not going to use an old-technology viral backbone. This is epicly stupid. It doesn't move the line 1%, yet you're such an idiot you think it's 90% in your sample probabilities.

3. The virus has a number of mutations which indicates it's evolved alongside an immune system. This is the only good actual point that they make, and moves the line somewhat. Ironically, you understood the paper so poorly you failed to raise the only noteworthy probability. I do not know the extent to which this moves the line, and neither do you, but given the epicly stupid (1) and (2), I have zero faith that authors are other than idiots on the topic, probably in search of a pre-decided conclusion.

I personally think it's likely not engineered and it's a natural virus that escaped. For the straightforward reason that the number of escape paths in a lab where scientists are getting bitten and peed on by coronavirus carrying bats >>> the number of scenarios where they engineered an effective human pathogen and that escaped. It's a much cleaner analysis to get it to a dog than your ridiculous priors.

You're making it sound like sequences of 4 amino acids are easily distinguished as either man-made or naturally occurring, and that's just wrong. It's not always easy to distinguish between the two. What gave you the idea that it was?

We know to a thousandth of a percent the level of naturally occurring gene sequences that exist in Sars-Cov-2, because of identical sequences that occur in ancestral viruses found in animals. What makes up the rest is totally up in the air. The odds currently favor Cov-2 coming from a lab because that's the only place we know to a certainty most of the prerequisite gene sequences that make up Cov-2 were co-located.

As to the immune system part of the argument, it doesn't fly. Pangolins and bats have immune systems, and mutations carried forward from precursor rna from these two animals into cov-2 are not an indication that the terminal virus (which appears to be a recombination of 2+ different viruses in at least 2 different animals) evolved naturally.

I'll give you a simple runout of what could have happened. The Wuhan lab was collecting viruses from various sick creatures for a couple decades. Part of their experiments was combining sequences of viruses together in gain of function experiments. One of the combinations they did was from a coronavirus obtained from bats in 2013 and another from sick pangolins obtained in 2017. Sometime in 2019, there was an exposure of this virus to several lab workers in the lab, and they spread it into the public. The lab and CCP covered it up, and 18 months later we are here.

The natural explanation is that a near-identical form of the 2013 virus from bats somehow combined with the pangolin virus from 2017, and after a couple of other mutations, it somehow ended up exploding out of Wuhan, of all places, nearly 2000km away from the cave bats where the 2013 precursor virus comes from.

In light of Occam's razor, just ask yourself which one makes more sense.

The lab collects coronaviruses from all over China, they go on expeditions to capture live infected animals with novel viruses.

Wittgenheiny,
Yep. Let's do some probabilities for ecriture d'adulte

P(Outbreak starts anywhere in China) = 1

P(Outbreak randomly with no connection starts within miles of China's only high security lab researching the exact kind of virus that escaped) = <0.001

More compelling than dodgy virus backbone arguments, don't you think? We could even Bayes this for our special needs friend:

P(Virus escape a high level biosecurity lab per year) = 0.1 . There have been multiple escapes of dangerous pathogens from Chinese labs including SARS-1 twice.

P(Virus naturally jumps from animal to humans in China per year) = 0.1

The second can happen anywhere in China; P(anywhere in China | China) = 1

The first has to happen in the 0.01% of China immediately near the lab. P(lab area | China) = 0.0001

It's a compelling number.

Not only the exact kind, but the exact precursor viral RNA, from two different sources, one of which was known only to the Wuhan lab until they released it to the public in January 2020, up to 4 months after the virus had exploded in Wuhan.

It seems this synthetic recombination is currently easily done and leaves none of the signatures the idiots in that nature paper think should be in the virus if was "engineered".

Here's a paper from 2008 - the dinosaur age in molecular biology - talking about how they created an infectious agent by combining parts of the infecting spike on various bat coronaviruses.

Synthetic recombinant bat SARS-like coronavirus is infectious in cultured cells and in mice

This is of course the exact research (and more advanced) they would have been doing at the Wuhan lab.

You can always tell the people you shouldn't listen to (like ecriture d'adulte), they're smug and have low levels of curiosity.

It’s hardly being dismissed. Lab creation and accidental or intentional release is a very very popular theory among the masses. If you went to a mediocre to bad high school like mine and wade into people’s Facebook feeds you’ll probably find a healthy majority support the idea.

Lol nice meltdown, but you literally asked me to show you the math and to write out how Bayes’ theorem applies. I simply did what you requested. You’re free to reject the correspondence; I doubt anybody will really care that you do. But you don’t need to ask for remedial help with Bayes’ theorem before rejecting it.

Ecriture,

I think the problem is this: basically, a novel virus that spontaneously mutates from animal origin is equally likely to originate anywhere in the world.

With that knowledge in hand, the question was, what is the base probability that the virus happened to spontaneously originate right next to the very lab that studies these things?

You handicapped that percentage as about 25% dumb luck/75% maybe the lab had something to do with it.

That's probably the worst handicapping in the history of handicapping, maybe ever.

And that's before you throw in all the other irregularities, such as bats from a thousand miles away, peguilins with no connection...etc.

And he is a smug pos to boot who likes writing out Bayes'

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using Tapatalk

I don't think he wins a smugness contest around here.

Sure, this was already addressed. If you’re a hardcore made in the lab guy (ie the chances of a non lab virus starting in Wuhan is ~0) of course no Bayesian adjustments will change that. The literature isn’t starting with that prior, but tons of people on Facebook etc are.

Where was it addressed? lol?

Yeah this is a classic midwit situation.

Lol I would think a Nature comms counts as addressed.

It's sort of like when laymen say "physicists thought for a long time that neutrinos had 0 mass and were wrong, how can they be so sure the photon doesn't have mass???!!!!".

Agreed and I'm huge fan of expert opinion as well. For example, when Wuhan was already in hard lockdown with people dying in the streets, I was comforted by these experts who know far more than I do:

Panic over coronavirus is ‘very human,’ but experts say the risk is low

Disagreeing with these expert's opinions is like claiming that photons have mass because physicists were wrong about neutrinos (and only a silly person would do that)!

Nah, it's completely fine to ignore mainstream media science reports and even quotes from scientists in general, though obviously people don't have that luxury during pandemics etc. It's less fine to treat quotes in newspapers the same as even just Nature correspondences. And of course you're doing the exacr same thing as the photon laymen; scientists were wrong here, so they are probably wrong somewhere else.

Simply reiterating that you posted a Nature article is no longer good enough, because the faulty arguments given in the article as to why coronavirus 'could not have been lab created' have been addressed here, multiple times. The claim is not that, and never has been, that coronavirus was created from scratch in a lab. The claim is that coronavirus in its current or close-to-current form, escaped from the Wuhan lab.

If you care to posit a theory, any theory, as to how 2013 bat coronavirus RNA combined with 2017 pangolin coronavirus RNA to create a novel coronavirus that exploded from the Wuhan epicenter that does not include the lab, I'm all ears.