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Cont: Origins of Covid (2)

1) For most zoonotic outbreaks there is no clear trail. Look at mpox. No clear trail from source to human pandemic. Look at HIV no clear trail from primate to human. Look at TB no clear trail into the human populations e.g. South America. What traces are you suggesting should exist? Antibodies?

2) The virus was no more ready to infect humans than many other mammalian species like mink, deer etc.

3) How do we know no precursor virus circulated? No one was looking., if the precursor virus didn't cause deaths in humans no one would have looked for it.

Again you just claim that absence of evidence is evidence in itself. That is only true if you would have expected evidence to exist.
Re #1: BS. You know so little about infectious disease. There were traces of HIV going back before the first recognized cases. Blood specimens stored years before.

Oldest 'nearly complete' HIV genome found in forgotten tissue sample from 1966
The virus was found in a tissue sample from 1966, almost two decades before HIV was discovered. ...

... Based on genetic sequencing of samples of the virus, scientists think that HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, first found a foothold in humans in Central Africa sometime in the early 1900s, spilling over from chimpanzees. There are multiple strains of the virus, but the ones responsible for 95% of cases worldwide are in a subgroup called HIV-1 group M. More than 32 million people have died of AIDS, the disease caused by HIV, since the pandemic began.

... There are older fragments of HIV out there, one from 1959 and one from 1960, also from DRC. But those pieces aren't as complete, and thus can't offer as much information about the virus' mutations. Those fragments were also from different subtypes of HIV, Gryseels said, which shows that the virus had been circulating for some time in humans before the 1950s. ...

It's possible that some change in HIV-1's genome made it more efficient, Gryseels said, but more likely that societal changes made the difference. Urbanization rose rapidly during the early 1900s in Central Africa.
So what's your assertion here? How is this anything like COVID 19? Let me guess, you are going by Worobey who had some success determining elements of the early HIV pandemic now insists on applying that to COVID 19.

Early SARS 1 is a much better model. It's been discussed in detail up thread.

And you bring up TB? Oh my word! TB is thousands of years old. It's been found in Egyptian mummies.


Re#2: Nonsense! So do you have a link where the source species was mink? Deer? Pigs? Rats? Raccoon dogs?

Re#3: No one was looking? Are you kidding? Did all traces of the virus vanish just when researchers started looking for it?


Re the absence of evidence, you are leaving an important clause out of that sentence. It's absence of evidence where one expects evidence to be.


This has all been discussed ad nauseum in this thread. Is there anything new? If not, what is the point in rehashing these debate points over and over and over?
 
SG: HIV can be detected historically because it integrates into the genome. You won’t be able to detect RNA because it doesn’t integrate and does effectively disappear unless the samples collected at the time were preserving RNA which is very fragile. As plantable says, antibodies can inform you of a past infection.
 
Here we go. Circus is coming to town...

We invited the Editors-in-Chief of
@TheLancet
,
@ScienceMagazine
, &
@Nature
to testify.

Did the U.S. government censor & direct the scientific review process at these top scientific journals to advance a preferred narrative about COVID origins?

Link
 
The 'Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic'?

https://oversight.house.gov/subcommittee/select-subcommittee-on-the-coronavirus-pandemic/

Appears to be an ad-hoc subcommittee of the House of Representatives, comprised of 9 Republicans, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, a certifiable lunatic, and 7 Democrats, none of whom I've heard of before.

I'm sure they'll get to the bottom of this.

ETA: I may have heard of one of the Democratic members, Debbie Dingell. She is the widow of John Dingell, who held the same seat from 1955 until 2015, which is a record.
Wikipedia tells me she is 70 years old although her official portrait makes her appear to be a lot younger than her actual chronological age. She is about 27 years younger than her late husband.
 
Last edited:
The 'Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic'?

https://oversight.house.gov/subcommittee/select-subcommittee-on-the-coronavirus-pandemic/

Appears to be an ad-hoc subcommittee of the House of Representatives, comprised of 9 Republicans, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, a certifiable lunatic, and 7 Democrats, none of whom I've heard of before.

I'm sure they'll get to the bottom of this.

From what I can see, Peter Daszak is going to give testimony. I wonder if MtG will start squawking about “Nuremberg 2.0”.
 
It looks to me like the "lab leak hypothesis is a scientifically unfounded conspiracy theory" narrative is unraveling.

The subcommittee is now requesting the declassification of certain documents that they've been able to examine and which they claim indicate a Chinese cover-up of a lab leak origin. Is there a dissenting minority report from the Democrat members? I haven't heard of any.

Meanwhile the research effort to establish the natural origin of Covid-19 looks about as earnest, vigorous, and fruitful as O.J.'s search for the real killer.
 
This thread should be the example of why this forum should never have some army of disinformation 'truth tellers'. Most were wrong wrong wrong despite all the obvious clues and subsequent evidence... and just plain common sense.

Total sheeple.
 
It looks to me like the "lab leak hypothesis is a scientifically unfounded conspiracy theory" narrative is unraveling.

The subcommittee is now requesting the declassification of certain documents that they've been able to examine and which they claim indicate a Chinese cover-up of a lab leak origin. Is there a dissenting minority report from the Democrat members? I haven't heard of any.

Meanwhile the research effort to establish the natural origin of Covid-19 looks about as earnest, vigorous, and fruitful as O.J.'s search for the real killer.

Hilarious. This is followed by this...

This thread should be the example of why this forum should never have some army of disinformation 'truth tellers'. Most were wrong wrong wrong despite all the obvious clues and subsequent evidence... and just plain common sense.

Total sheeple.
 
"Hilarious"? That's your argument @angrysoba?

As I mentioned, I don't think I need to argue against these kinds of posts when there are no arguments offered...

It looks to me like the "lab leak hypothesis is a scientifically unfounded conspiracy theory" narrative is unraveling.

The subcommittee is now requesting the declassification of certain documents that they've been able to examine and which they claim indicate a Chinese cover-up of a lab leak origin. Is there a dissenting minority report from the Democrat members? I haven't heard of any.

Meanwhile the research effort to establish the natural origin of Covid-19 looks about as earnest, vigorous, and fruitful as O.J.'s search for the real killer.

This thread should be the example of why this forum should never have some army of disinformation 'truth tellers'. Most were wrong wrong wrong despite all the obvious clues and subsequent evidence... and just plain common sense.

Total sheeple.

However, this description by Peter Jacobs pretty much sums up what I think of the origins of Covid debate...

Peter Jacobs said:
All of these things can be true:

- a hypothetical lab related origin for SC2 wasn't axiomatically conspiracist
- extant evidence overwhelmingly supports zoonotic spillover
- Lab Leaker rhetoric overwhelmingly was & is weird conspiracist dork nonsense at odds with extant evidence

Link

Peter Jacobs said:
The single biggest impediment to ending the mainstreaming of "Lab Leak" conspiracy theories is that people in media, politics, and occasionally science routinely fail to distinguish between the hypothetical possibility of a lab related origin & specific concrete Lab Leaker claims

Peter Jacobs said:
The total known genetic diversity of early lineages of a novel virus was found inside a market w/susceptible animal hosts, around which early cases cluster. That very market was identified years prior as a spillover risk bc a related virus emerged this way. A real headscratcher!

This always seems to be the way when I have tried to get an actual argument from the lab leakers.

The only one that has really been fleshed out, by Skeptic Ginger, was the one made by two writers for Counterpunch which was a barking mad conspiracy theory.

It basically was the idea that Eco Health and the WIV, who receive funding for looking for pandemic-potential viruses, found a virus in the Monjiang Mine and decided to cover it up and pretend that it didn't exist in order to make it more pathonogenic or transmissible for...reasons... through serial passaging, then it escaped from a BSL-2, 3 or 4 from the WIV or the Wuhan CDC lab, either during the Wuhan Military Games, during which the whole city unbeknownst to the rest of the world, was locked down, and the militaries of all the countries who attended the Games spread it to the rest of the world when they went back home, hence the clusters in Italy and the US that happened early on, and for some reason the militaries of all these countries never bothered to investigate this, and Fauci and the Wellcome Trust etc... are covering it all up.

Other arguments are somewhat lab leak of the gaps cobbling together of ideas that don't really make sense. Few people can agree on what lab it was supposed to have come from, how it got to the wet market etc...
 
Also, I find it slightly annoying that there is now a narrative that a lab leak was a conspiracy theory.

People probably do not remember what types of conspiracy theories were floating around before. I suppose in some way they have come back, which is why the GOP-led committee keep talking so much about the Chinese military. The conspiratorial claims were about bioweapons. The gain-of-function arguments are off-shoots of this, but some people are interested in it because it implicates vaccine research, and we know that many of the lab leakers (not all! I never said all... were and are anti-vaxxers). In fact, if you look at, say, the vast majority of listeners to the Joe Rogan podcast, you probably know four things about Covid-19:
1. Covid leaked from a lab because of bioweapons/vaccine research
2. Vaccines are bad.
3. Ivermectin is the treatment for Covid-19 that THEY don't want you to know about.
4. Covid is pretty much harmless anyway/a hoax to put us all in our homes.

It didn't quite start that way. Places like InfoWars and Zero Hedge were the ones pushing the coronavirus theories...

Look, this article is from January 2020, when Covid-19 was still a little baby....

There’s a ‘coronavirus patent’
This claim is inaccurate — we’ve rated a similar statement Pants on Fire!

Several Facebook posts, tweets, articles and YouTube videos allege that a vaccine developed for the coronavirus just as it started to spread earlier this month. Those claims were widely shared in anti-vaccine groups on Facebook, where some users said the disease could be a government plot to vaccinate more people.

FEMA ‘proposes martial law’
This claim is fabricated.

In an article published Jan. 23, a website called Twisted Truth wrote that the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency had called on President Donald Trump to impose martial law in the United States, which would transfer power to the military.

Gates Foundation predicted virus, ‘funded group who owns virus patent’
Several Facebook posts, blogs and YouTube videos claim that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation predicted, and are somehow profiting from, the coronavirus outbreak. The allegations were circulated widely in QAnon and other conspiracy Facebook groups and pages, as well as on 4chan, a fringe internet forum where several high-profile conspiracies were created.

Coronavirus was ‘created in a lab’ as a ‘bioweapon for population control’
These claims are baseless — and they conflate COVID-19 with other strains of the illness. Our friends at Factcheck.org and Health Feedback debunked similar conspiracy theories.

Facebook posts and tabloids have said that COVID-19 was created in a lab, with some going as far as to say that the illness is a "bioweapon for population control." One video created by David Zublick, who has a history of propagating conspiracies, has more than 12,000 views on YouTube.

China ‘stole Coronavirus from Canada and weaponized it into a Bioweapon’
This claim is False — it comes from a blog with a track record of publishing false information.

Zero Hedge said in a Jan. 26 story that the coronavirus is part of a Chinese plot to develop a bioweapon. The article was republished from a website called Great Game India.

"Last year a mysterious shipment was caught smuggling Coronavirus from Canada. It was traced to Chinese agents working at a Canadian lab," the story reads.

China will admit virus came from lab ‘linked to its covert biological weapon programs’
This claim is False — it comes from a website with ties to Steve Bannon and a Chinese billionaire.

In an article published Jan. 25, G News wrote that Chinese Communist Party officials would soon "admit that the real source of the coronavirus is from ‘a lab in Wuhan (China)’ linked to its covert biological weapon programs."

There are ‘reports of 10,000 DEAD in Wuhan’
We rated this claim Pants on Fire!

It comes from a Jan. 24 story from the Geller Report. The website is run by Pamela Geller, an activist who co-founded Stop Islamization of America, a far-right group.

"CORONAVIRUS: Reports of 10,000 DEAD in Wuhan, China," the story reads. It has been shared more than 2,000 times on Facebook.

Link


And before anyone says, "hey wait a minute, it wasn't even called Covid-19 then. That article is a faked!"

Update (March 11, 2020): We've updated this article to include the specific name of the 2019 coronavirus (COVID-19).


These were the types of claims that were being made in January of 2020. When you see these, do you think they are conspiracy theories? Yes or no?

For me, they blatantly look like them, and these are the types of theories that were common when, for example, Peter Daszak wrote his ill-advised letter to the Lancet, and when the Proximal Origins paper was written.

People are reading things backwards when they say that a lab leak was never considered, and that all permutations of lab leak were inherently conspiratorial. They are not, but when most lab leakers have attempted to explain their theories, they almost always rely on conspiratorial thinking which almost always involves the numbers of conspirators growing and growing.

Oh, and they dismiss people who don't agree with them as "sheeple". That's a hallmark of conspiracy theorism as well.
 
Hermeneutical examination of emails.
Anomaly hunting.
Far-fetched theories.
Claims that evidence doesn't exist because it is covered up.
An ever-expanding cover-up, no less.
Absurd attempts to move the burden of proof.
Lob-sided standards of evidence.
Lob-sided standards of credibility of figures involved (Andrew Huff, anyone?)
Accusations that people charged with doing one thing were in fact hell-bent on the opposite.

These things are the very bread-and-butter of conspiracy theories, and this thread and its precursor are absolutely saturated with it.

And now that the GOP and a few Democratic politicians are investigating, I'm certainly no more persuaded by the lab leak theory. Have you even seen the level of intelligence on display in the House of Representatives?
 
Whether or not there are CTs about bioweapons that has not been put forth in this thread other than it was mentioned. The only CT was the cover up by Daszak and Shi et al.
 
Whether or not there are CTs about bioweapons that has not been put forth in this thread other than it was mentioned. The only CT was the cover up by Daszak and Shi et al.

That is missing the point. It was Myriad who came in here talking about a lab leak conspiracy theory. You wanted to know what my argument was. My argument is that there were conspiracy theories and the responses to those conspiracy theories (the Daszak letter to the Lancet and the Proximal Origins paper) were largely written to combat those specific types of conspiracy theories. Yet retroactively you and others in this thread are behaving as though these papers were written to debunk the possibility of a lab accident.

So I pointed out that while it is not conspiratorial per se to argue a lab leak could have occurred, the specific lab leak claims, by you, about the Mojiang Mine serial passage theory, or the Wuhan Military Games lockdown theory, ARE wild conspiracy theories.
 
Don't drag this thread into CT territory. Take your CT rambling to the other forum.

I didn’t drag this thread into CT territory. That was done here….

It looks to me like the "lab leak hypothesis is a scientifically unfounded conspiracy theory" narrative is unraveling.

The subcommittee is now requesting the declassification of certain documents that they've been able to examine and which they claim indicate a Chinese cover-up of a lab leak origin. Is there a dissenting minority report from the Democrat members? I haven't heard of any.

Meanwhile the research effort to establish the natural origin of Covid-19 looks about as earnest, vigorous, and fruitful as O.J.'s search for the real killer.

This thread should be the example of why this forum should never have some army of disinformation 'truth tellers'. Most were wrong wrong wrong despite all the obvious clues and subsequent evidence... and just plain common sense.

Total sheeple.

Then when I chuckled at it, you demanded a more substantive argument. I gave you one so you predictably complain.

If you don’t want me talking about conspiracy theories then don’t demand I do!
 
I have been listening to some of the testimony from David Morens who was advisor to Fauci who is being accused of deleting (or trying to delete, or suggesting he had or wanted to delete emails) between himself and others including Daszak and Fauci.

He sounds like someone who was a bit sloppy and used the type of language that people might use if they were chatting with friends, unaware that these emails will one day be made public and read out in a committee hearing.

That said, there doesn't seem to be anything that I have heard here that suggests they are covering up a lab leak. Rather there is concealment of bad practice (using personal emails for work), bad mouthing certain people, making unprofessional jokes.

Probably a good cautionary tale for anyone who writes emails to colleagues in professional settings.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?53583...thony-fauci-testifies-covid-19-origins-emails
 
That is missing the point. It was Myriad who came in here talking about a lab leak conspiracy theory. You wanted to know what my argument was. My argument is that there were conspiracy theories and the responses to those conspiracy theories (the Daszak letter to the Lancet and the Proximal Origins paper) were largely written to combat those specific types of conspiracy theories. Yet retroactively you and others in this thread are behaving as though these papers were written to debunk the possibility of a lab accident.
(hilting added)

Multiple members have derided all discussion of any possibility of any kind of lab accident involved in the origin of the human spread of Covid-19 as conspiracy theory from the start.

From post 5 of page 1 of thread 1, February 2021:

Trebuchet said:
This thread is to discuss the origins of the disease, as there's quite a bit of discussion on it in the main thread and still quite a bit of discussion to go.

The main claim at this stage is that it came from the Wuhan laboratory.
Conspiracy theories is thataway!
(hilting in original post)
 
(hilting added)

Multiple members have derided all discussion of any possibility of any kind of lab accident involved in the origin of the human spread of Covid-19 as conspiracy theory from the start.

From post 5 of page 1 of thread 1, February 2021:


(hilting in original post)

Okay, so Trebuchet called it a conspiracy theory. But I don't think he's posted much if at all in these threads, so I don't think the "narrative" is that any reference to a lab leak is a conspiracy theory.

The possibility of a lab leak does not require a conspiracy theory, and yet almost all of the tactics of those who are persuaded of a lab leak involve conspiracy theorizing.

You were asking...

"Is there a dissenting minority report from the Democrat members? I haven't heard of any."

I heard members of the Democrats say explicitly, a number of times, in the Morens hearing, that they have not seen evidence that any of the NIH grants, or Fauci or Morens or Daszak were involved in creating any viruses or working with any viruses that could have been the precursor of Covid-19.

Instead, despite no evidence, the idea that there is some murky cover-up about a lab leak is what many of the politicians in the GOP, as well as a few others, are trying to push.

It remains the fact that there is no credible evidence of a lab leak. All of the lab leak claims involve making up stuff written in crayon to cover over the gaps in knowledge.

If you look again at page 1, you will see there was some claim about sick WIV workers apparently being known to Mike Pompeo's State Department. Years later we still have no more information except that Michael Shellenberger named three workers that he said he got from "insider sources". But why is THIS not declassifed? Where is the actual information? Why are these politicians not demanding that these sources be hauled before a hearing?

Well, my guess is for the same reason that we still have no information about a similarly sourced story by Michael Shellenber ("credible insiders") who told him all about the alien spacecraft and alien bodies that his credible sources found.

My guess, to be explicit, is that the information is complete BS!
 
I heard members of the Democrats say explicitly, a number of times, in the Morens hearing, that they have not seen evidence that any of the NIH grants, or Fauci or Morens or Daszak were involved in creating any viruses or working with any viruses that could have been the precursor of Covid-19.

Instead, despite no evidence, the idea that there is some murky cover-up about a lab leak is what many of the politicians in the GOP, as well as a few others, are trying to push.

It remains the fact that there is no credible evidence of a lab leak. All of the lab leak claims involve making up stuff written in crayon to cover over the gaps in knowledge.

A partisan viewpoint, by your own words. Viruses do not favor political parties. The origin being from the lab or scientists at the lab moving live viruses, needs nothing other than a 'chance'.
It is what it is.
Many still seem to avoid the simplest, most obvious answer- the top contender
being the premiere bat virus lab in the world being at ground zero, doing no-see-um experiments, or to anyone just looking at basic geography of the bats and the cuisine of the area NOT being bats..
Your statement here will age poorly (and already has -- in my opinion. )

All of this was known in the first few weeks.
 
A partisan viewpoint, by your own words. Viruses do not favor political parties. The origin being from the lab or scientists at the lab moving live viruses, needs nothing other than a 'chance'.
It is what it is.
Many still seem to avoid the simplest, most obvious answer- the top contender
being the premiere bat virus lab in the world being at ground zero, doing no-see-um experiments, or to anyone just looking at basic geography of the bats and the cuisine of the area NOT being bats..
Your statement here will age poorly (and already has -- in my opinion. )

All of this was known in the first few weeks.

Nobody credible is, or has ever been arguing that Covid was caused by eating bats.

One of the reasons why scientists wrote the Proximal Origins paper was because of the possibility that the virus somehow came about through manipulation. But they concluded that it was unlikely to have because the various parts of the virus were known in the wild and therefore it likely came about through recombination.
 
Nobody credible is, or has ever been arguing that Covid was caused by eating bats.

One of the reasons why scientists wrote the Proximal Origins paper was because of the possibility that the virus somehow came about through manipulation. But they concluded that it was unlikely to have because the various parts of the virus were known in the wild and therefore it likely came about through recombination.

"Somehow" was in early phase...just a week into the virus affecting the US. They (the writers of proximal) wrote it in a matter of a few days and spoke so confidently discounting the lab, which was so odd for a timeline of an outbreak where anything was possible at that point, especially the large level 2&3 and a new 4 viral biolab , top in the world for bat virus research, and just down the road n the city at ground zero.
And they were WRONG.
And so were you in your estimation of the statistical significance of it.

Time has already told the story. No natural origin was found. No animal. No vector in nature. It was the lab.
 
The 'Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic'?

https://oversight.house.gov/subcommittee/select-subcommittee-on-the-coronavirus-pandemic/

Appears to be an ad-hoc subcommittee of the House of Representatives, comprised of 9 Republicans, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, a certifiable lunatic, and 7 Democrats, none of whom I've heard of before.

I'm sure they'll get to the bottom of this.


That subcommittee is chaired by Representative Brad Wenstrup, DPM (Doctor of Podiatric Medicine).

It is fair to describe Dr Wenstrup as a conspiracy theorist, because he signed an amicus brief in support of Texas v Pennsylvania, a lawsuit drafted by lawyers associated with Donald Trump's campaign, brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, alleging that four states violated the US Constitution by actions that ran counter to the independent state legislature theory, which is a discredited legal theory that remains popular among Republicans. That lawsuit was the last gasp of Trump's legal efforts to overturn the 2016 election. It was opposed by the Texas Solicitor General, and the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

I apologize for having to mention the facts related in the paragraph above, but it is important to keep Dr Wenstrup's political biases in mind when reading the report I will cite in just a moment.

It looks to me like the "lab leak hypothesis is a scientifically unfounded conspiracy theory" narrative is unraveling.

The subcommittee is now requesting the declassification of certain documents that they've been able to examine and which they claim indicate a Chinese cover-up of a lab leak origin. Is there a dissenting minority report from the Democrat members? I haven't heard of any.


The subcommittee's most recent report is dated 1 May 2024. Its opening letter and executive summary give an impression that the report was written by Republicans without any moderating influence from Democrats. The opening letter also tells us Representative Wenstrup doesn't know the difference between "reign" and "rein".

That is why I took a moment to check up on Representative Wenstrup.

You were asking...

"Is there a dissenting minority report from the Democrat members? I haven't heard of any."

I heard members of the Democrats say explicitly, a number of times, in the Morens hearing, that they have not seen evidence that any of the NIH grants, or Fauci or Morens or Daszak were involved in creating any viruses or working with any viruses that could have been the precursor of Covid-19.

Instead, despite no evidence, the idea that there is some murky cover-up about a lab leak is what many of the politicians in the GOP, as well as a few others, are trying to push.


That does indeed appear to be the idea pushed by the subcommittee report of 1 May.

It remains the fact that there is no credible evidence of a lab leak. All of the lab leak claims involve making up stuff written in crayon to cover over the gaps in knowledge.

If you look again at page 1, you will see there was some claim about sick WIV workers apparently being known to Mike Pompeo's State Department. Years later we still have no more information except that Michael Shellenberger named three workers that he said he got from "insider sources". But why is THIS not declassifed? Where is the actual information? Why are these politicians not demanding that these sources be hauled before a hearing?

Well, my guess is for the same reason that we still have no information about a similarly sourced story by Michael Shellenber ("credible insiders") who told him all about the alien spacecraft and alien bodies that his credible sources found.

My guess, to be explicit, is that the information is complete BS!


With regard to the paragraph I highlighted, we do know that the US State Department issued a fact sheet on 15 January 2021 (less than a week before the end of Pompeo's tenure as Trump's Secretary of State) that averred the following:
The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.


The fact sheet also said this:
The U.S. government does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus—known as SARS-CoV-2—was transmitted initially to humans. We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

The virus could have emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals, spreading in a pattern consistent with a natural epidemic. Alternatively, a laboratory accident could resemble a natural outbreak if the initial exposure included only a few individuals and was compounded by asymptomatic infection.


It seems to me the US government doesn't know a whole lot more now than it did then.

Time has already told the story. No natural origin was found. No animal. No vector in nature. It was the lab.


We are in a situation where there are two overly broad hypotheses, which we might refer to as X and Y. There are a few facts that could be construed as evidence for X, and a few facts that could be construed as evidence for Y, but there is as yet no open and shut case to be made for either X or Y.

At this time, it would be quite silly to pretend the absence of an open and shut case for X is definitive proof of Y.
 
Correction: see highlighted strikeout.

That subcommittee is chaired by Representative Brad Wenstrup, DPM (Doctor of Podiatric Medicine).

It is fair to describe Dr Wenstrup as a conspiracy theorist, because he signed an amicus brief in support of Texas v Pennsylvania, a lawsuit drafted by lawyers associated with Donald Trump's campaign, brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, alleging that four states violated the US Constitution by actions that ran counter to the independent state legislature theory, which is a discredited legal theory that remains popular among Republicans. That lawsuit was the last gasp of Trump's legal efforts to overturn the 2016 2020 election. It was opposed by the Texas Solicitor General, and the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
 
That subcommittee is chaired by Representative Brad Wenstrup, DPM (Doctor of Podiatric Medicine).

It is fair to describe Dr Wenstrup as a conspiracy theorist, because he signed an amicus brief in support of Texas v Pennsylvania, a lawsuit drafted by lawyers associated with Donald Trump's campaign, brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, alleging that four states violated the US Constitution by actions that ran counter to the independent state legislature theory, which is a discredited legal theory that remains popular among Republicans. That lawsuit was the last gasp of Trump's legal efforts to overturn the 2016 election. It was opposed by the Texas Solicitor General, and the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

I apologize for having to mention the facts related in the paragraph above, but it is important to keep Dr Wenstrup's political biases in mind when reading the report I will cite in just a moment.




The subcommittee's most recent report is dated 1 May 2024. Its opening letter and executive summary give an impression that the report was written by Republicans without any moderating influence from Democrats. The opening letter also tells us Representative Wenstrup doesn't know the difference between "reign" and "rein".

That is why I took a moment to check up on Representative Wenstrup.




That does indeed appear to be the idea pushed by the subcommittee report of 1 May.




With regard to the paragraph I highlighted, we do know that the US State Department issued a fact sheet on 15 January 2021 (less than a week before the end of Pompeo's tenure as Trump's Secretary of State) that averred the following:



The fact sheet also said this:



It seems to me the US government doesn't know a whole lot more now than it did then.




We are in a situation where there are two overly broad hypotheses, which we might refer to as X and Y. There are a few facts that could be construed as evidence for X, and a few facts that could be construed as evidence for Y, but there is as yet no open and shut case to be made for either X or Y.

At this time, it would be quite silly to pretend the absence of an open and shut case for X is definitive proof of Y.

Well said!

However, a priori it is very unlikely given the knowledge and technology available at the time that SARS-CoV-2 could have been created at WIV. Whilst on the other hand we have many, many zoonotic pandemics. HIV, Flu, SARS (nearly), plague, small pox, mpox, etc.
 
Well said!

However, a priori it is very unlikely given the knowledge and technology available at the time that SARS-CoV-2 could have been created at WIV. Whilst on the other hand we have many, many zoonotic pandemics. HIV, Flu, SARS (nearly), plague, small pox, mpox, etc.

That isn't the claim. It might be the reason, but there are a myriad of other ways that work at the lab leads to the escape of a virus that caused the virus to circulate in Wuhan, specifically. The other explanations actually need more proof, proof that was never found.
 
That isn't the claim. It might be the reason, but there are a myriad of other ways that work at the lab leads to the escape of a virus that caused the virus to circulate in Wuhan, specifically. The other explanations actually need more proof, proof that was never found.

No!

There are no ways that work at the laboratory can lead to SARS-CoV-2. It is impossible. The only real way a laboratory leak could have caused SARS-CoV-2 to have occurred in Wuhan is if SARS-CoV-2 was imported into the laboratory as a pre-existing virus from the wild. Even that is problematic and has no positive evidence to support it.
 
No!

There are no ways that work at the laboratory can lead to SARS-CoV-2. It is impossible. The only real way a laboratory leak could have caused SARS-CoV-2 to have occurred in Wuhan is if SARS-CoV-2 was imported into the laboratory as a pre-existing virus from the wild. Even that is problematic and has no positive evidence to support it.
To be clear, do you rule out the lab leak as the cause of the pandemic?
I have just checked back in.
 
No!

There are no ways that work at the laboratory can lead to SARS-CoV-2. It is impossible. The only real way a laboratory leak could have caused SARS-CoV-2 to have occurred in Wuhan is if SARS-CoV-2 was imported into the laboratory as a pre-existing virus from the wild. Even that is problematic and has no positive evidence to support it.

To be clear, do you rule out the lab leak as the cause of the pandemic?
I have just checked back in.


As has been said by multiple people, it is possible that the pandemic began with a lab leak.

As Planigale said above, the most plausible scenarios for a lab-leak origin of the pandemic involve escape from a laboratory of SARS-CoV-2 viruses that evolved in the wild but were brought into the laboratory inadvertently. For example, a lab worker whose job involved collecting bats or bat viruses might have become infected with SARS-CoV-2 as part of his/her job and then shopped at the wet market, causing the wet market to look like the origin of the pandemic. Another possibility is that bats or bat viruses were collected in the wild and brought into the lab as part of its research, but somehow escaped the lab; here again one of the more likely avenues of escape is through a lab worker becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 while in the lab and then infecting others as he or she went about his/her daily life.

There is no solid evidence of any lab worker becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak at the wet market. Some workers have of course come down with symptoms that were assumed to be caused by a common cold or flu-like virus, and it is conceivable that their symptoms were actually due to Covid-19. But there is no solid evidence for that.
 
As has been said by multiple people, it is possible that the pandemic began with a lab leak.

As Planigale said above, the most plausible scenarios for a lab-leak origin of the pandemic involve escape from a laboratory of SARS-CoV-2 viruses that evolved in the wild but were brought into the laboratory inadvertently. For example, a lab worker whose job involved collecting bats or bat viruses might have become infected with SARS-CoV-2 as part of his/her job and then shopped at the wet market, causing the wet market to look like the origin of the pandemic. Another possibility is that bats or bat viruses were collected in the wild and brought into the lab as part of its research, but somehow escaped the lab; here again one of the more likely avenues of escape is through a lab worker becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 while in the lab and then infecting others as he or she went about his/her daily life.

There is no solid evidence of any lab worker becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak at the wet market. Some workers have of course come down with symptoms that were assumed to be caused by a common cold or flu-like virus, and it is conceivable that their symptoms were actually due to Covid-19. But there is no solid evidence for that.

I agree.
 
... It was the lab.

Can you specify which of the three "out of the lab" scenarios just enumerated by W.D.C. you are convinced "it was"?
  1. A Wuhan lab worker got infected with SARS-Cov-2 virus while out on a field trip in the wild and inadvertantly spread it, e.g.at the wet market. (In this scenario, the lab was not actually working with the virus)
  2. A Wuhan lab stored and studied SARS-Cov-2 virus, which was sampled from some animal reservoir in the wild, and a lab worker got infected with that (natural origin) lab population virus and spread it in the city, e.g. at the wet market
  3. A lab in Wuhan had CREATED the Sars-Cov-2 virus with enhanced functionality or whatever (i.e. "weaponized") from a wild precursor virus, and through a lab accident (an infected worker...),or deliberately, it started spreading in Wuhan.

If you can't decide, do you at least have an opinion on which is the most likely, and which the least likely one? And what evidence or argument would you base that opinion on?
Or have I overlooked a fourth possibility?
 
A few days ago, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released the transcript of Dr Fauci's closed-door testimony of 8 and 9 January, along with several press releases and memos that apply considerable political spin to that and other transcripts.

This excerpt, from page 117 of Fauci's second transcript, is relevant to this thread:

Q Just you sitting here today, do you think the possibility or the hypothesis that the coronavirus emerged from a laboratory accident is a conspiracy theory?

A Well, it's a possibility. I think people have made conspiracy aspects from it. And I think you have to separate the two when you keep an open mind, that it could be a lab leak or it could be a natural occurrence.

I've mentioned in this committee that I believe the evidence that I've seen weighs my opinion towards one, which is a natural occurrence, but I still leave an open mind.

So I think that in and of itself isn't inherently a conspiracy theory, but some people spin off things from that that are kind of crazy.

Q No, that's fair.

A Okay.


That short exchange was followed by a long and meandering discussion of Dr Daszak and others. That long and meandering discussion was followed by long and meandering discussions of various other issues.

Fauci gave public testimony before the subcommittee today, but the silliness of today's hearing belongs in a different subforum.
 
This is an episode of This Week in Virology which begins with a breakdown of the Alina Chan op-ed piece in the New York Times.

I would be interested to know what Capsid thinks of the episode, as they go into the science of viruses in some detail to explain why some of the diagrams in Alina Chan's piece are wrong.

They also explain how the op-ed does what I and others have been saying for a while, that a lab leak theory doesn't necessarily have to be a conspiracy theory, but dismissing evidence for the market origin essentially involves having to claim conspiracies and incompetence of scientists such as Worobey, the intelligence community in the US, and other government figures, and in other countries.

For example, the two lineages in the market, and the fact that even among those early cases of Covid who had no connection to the market lived closer to the market than those who did have a connection to it.

Again, the only way to explain it is some underhanded behaviour by virologists and the peer reviewers.



Here is one point that I think shows a deliberate distortion by Alina Chan:

Their research showed that the viruses most similar to SARS‑CoV‑2, the virus that caused the pandemic, circulate in bats that live roughly 1,000 miles away from Wuhan. Scientists from Dr. Shi’s team traveled repeatedly to Yunnan province to collect these viruses and had expanded their search to Southeast Asia. Bats in other parts of China have not been found to carry viruses that are as closely related to SARS-CoV-2.

This point came up because of RaTG13, which Chan and Ridley spent a lot of time hinting must have been the progenitor virus, and yet, RaTG13 is not as close to SARS-CoV2 than BANAL-52 which came from Laos. This part about "Bats in other parts of China have not been found to carry...." is misleading if viruses closer to SARS-CoV2 were found in Laos.
 


Here is one point that I think shows a deliberate distortion by Alina Chan:



This point came up because of RaTG13, which Chan and Ridley spent a lot of time hinting must have been the progenitor virus, and yet, RaTG13 is not as close to SARS-CoV2 than BANAL-52 which came from Laos. This part about "Bats in other parts of China have not been found to carry...." is misleading if viruses closer to SARS-CoV2 were found in Laos.


Wuhan Institute of Virology was the repository for bat viruses collected from _________?
Fill in the blank if you think it is just one area or one country.
🤔
 
Wuhan Institute of Virology was the repository for bat viruses collected from _________?
Fill in the blank if you think it is just one area or one country.
🤔

How many actual bat coronaviruses do you think they ever found?

China is the only country WIV searched for bat coronaviruses, and China being a large country, only a very small part of China.
 
It looks to me like the "lab leak hypothesis is a scientifically unfounded conspiracy theory" narrative is unraveling.

The subcommittee is now requesting the declassification of certain documents that they've been able to examine and which they claim indicate a Chinese cover-up of a lab leak origin. Is there a dissenting minority report from the Democrat members? I haven't heard of any.

Meanwhile the research effort to establish the natural origin of Covid-19 looks about as earnest, vigorous, and fruitful as O.J.'s search for the real killer.

A Republican led congressional subcommittee is not the best way to investigate a scientific issue in 2024.

Listen the recent episode of the TWIV podcast (This Week In Virology, linked to above by angrysoba) for a clear explanation about how they know it was not a lab leak, and what's wrong with the lab leak claims.
 
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A Republican led congressional subcommittee is not the best way to investigate a scientific issue in 2024.

Listen the recent episode of the TWIV podcast (This Week In Virology, linked to above by angrysoba) for a clear explanation about how they know it was not a lab leak, and what's wrong with the lab leak claims.

I will just repeat something I have said a few times already. It's not conspiratorial per se to think that the virus began in a lab, and it is possible that some kind of lab incident did cause the pandemic. Because of this, I think it is too strong to state categorically that the pandemic began in nature.

That said, and again, to repeat, much of the arguments for a lab leak are either conspiracy theories, or unparsimonious, or both, with many of the conspiracy theories quickly relying on an ever-expanding cover-up across multiple entities in different countries, often relying on evidence that support different proposed routes for the pandemic to start, or even contradictory evidence. The lab leak theorists often appear to be agnostic or not even concerned how the virus leaked from a lab, or which lab it was supposed to have leaked from, whether any tampering of the virus occurred, whether the Chinese military were involved, whether it was simply caught in the wild and escaped as it was, or whether it was made more virulent, or more transmissable through serial passaging etc... the emails seem to be read as either confessions, or claims that they knew, but with the presumption that what they really thought was discussed outside of these Slack channels, emails etc...
 
I will just repeat something I have said a few times already. It's not conspiratorial per se to think that the virus began in a lab, and it is possible that some kind of lab incident did cause the pandemic. Because of this, I think it is too strong to state categorically that the pandemic began in nature.

That said, and again, to repeat, much of the arguments for a lab leak are either conspiracy theories, or unparsimonious, or both, with many of the conspiracy theories quickly relying on an ever-expanding cover-up across multiple entities in different countries, often relying on evidence that support different proposed routes for the pandemic to start, or even contradictory evidence. The lab leak theorists often appear to be agnostic or not even concerned how the virus leaked from a lab, or which lab it was supposed to have leaked from, whether any tampering of the virus occurred, whether the Chinese military were involved, whether it was simply caught in the wild and escaped as it was, or whether it was made more virulent, or more transmissable through serial passaging etc... the emails seem to be read as either confessions, or claims that they knew, but with the presumption that what they really thought was discussed outside of these Slack channels, emails etc...

I agree. It doesn't help the lab leak proponents when they argue for a conspiracy involving named scientists across many countries, we know there are extremists who believe that those involved are guilty of mass murder.

The simple case that an unknown virus infected a laboratory worker either through field work or handling material in a laboratory is possible but I feel not the most likely explanation. Any arguments that the virus was manipulated / synthesised in the laboratory is simply science fiction.
 
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