You’re too intelligent for me to believe you don’t see it, so I’m not engaging in this endless round questioning.
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I honestly don’t get it. Like if you and CN both want a rigorous investigation into the lab leak hypothesis, then that’s exactly what I want. Most of why I think the lab leak is pretty likely (besides coming up with nothing after extensive animal testing) is China’s reticence to allowing such an independent investigation to happen. And surely you don’t dispute that if there was a lab accident, this is exactly what China would do: stonewall any attempt at that type of investigation. But who knows, maybe that investigation will happen. I have my doubts though.
And, interestingly enough, China allowing that sort of independent investigation would drastically lower the probability that it was a lab accident, even before the results of the investigation were in.
I did answer it, and it’s hard to believe that you don’t understand. A comprehensive and transparent investigation into covid looks into various lab hypotheses. No reasonable investigation starts off with eliminating hypotheses without looking into them.
That notably isn’t an admission that a lab leak is ‘likely’ in any way. There’s also a fair amount of evidence in this area, and it does not support the lab leak hypothesis.
Work will continue on the origin of covid, but it’s a far harder question to answer definitively than you’re willing to consider. For example, it took over a decade (not a few months), to definitively determine the source of SARS. It’s going to take time.
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I saw this a while back on Thailand…
It was 3 January 2020, and Supaporn Wacharapluesadee was standing by, awaiting a delivery. Word had spread that there was some kind of respiratory disease affecting people in Wuhan, China, and with the Lunar New Year approaching, many Chinese tourists were headed to neighbouring Thailand to celebrate. Cautiously, the Thai government began screening passengers arriving from Wuhan at the airport, and a few select labs – including Wacharapluesadee’s – were chosen to process the samples to try to detect the problem.
Wacharapluesadee is an expert virus hunter. She runs the Thai Red Cross Emerging Infectious Disease-Health Science Centre in Bangkok. Over the past 10 years, she’s been part of Predict, a worldwide effort to detect and stop diseases that can jump from non-human animals to humans.
She and her team have sampled many species. But their main focus has been on bats, which are known to harbour many coronaviruses.
You keep repeating this, but it’s obviously wrong. Or rather, it’s half true and irrelevant. They found SARS-infected animals and SARS-infected animal traders in a few months. That was extremely strong evidence that one of those animals was the intermediate animal and that the animal trade was the path into the population. The outbreak started in November 2002 and that paper was written, peer reviewed, and published by September 2003. The original reservoir was not identified, but that’s irrelevant. If that same sort of evidence was found in the Wuhan markets – infected animals and animal traders, but no idea where the natural reservoir was – no one would be talking about a lab leak. Because that would be extremely compelling evidence of a natural spillover event.
I mean I guess I don’t really understand what the issue is here. We both want a comprehensive investigation and agree that both the natural origin and lab leak needs to be exhaustively and independently looked at? If that happens then it will sort itself out, what difference does it make if I think it’s more likely than you do? In any case, most of why I think a lab leak is pretty likely is that China seems to adamantly not want this sort of investigation into the lab leak conducted.
Covid was a once a century black swan event. It had all the perfect attributes to become what it did. Really fucking contagious before symptoms start, and not so fucking deadly that it burns itself out too quickly. It’s right in the sweet spot for deadly global pandemic. Since Covid has drawn more attention to disease in general, there have been tons of stories like this about the next scary disease that’s about to come. The odds of any one of them becoming a global pandemic like Covid or worse are infinitesimally small. Like, yeah, we could get a once in a century plague two years in a row, and yeah, globalization has increased the chances of these types of events, but it’s still not particularly likely.
The issue is that you keep saying stupid shit like the lab leak is likely, pointing out that Guangdong is far away from Wuhan as if it’s relevant to anything, the post just above this one which I’m not going to waste any more time on, or many more things that are uninformed.
No one disagrees that there needs to be a good investigation into the origins of covid.
Please note that this isn’t an invitation to try to relitigate those issues. It won’t be addressed by me any further. You’ve been conclusively proven wrong.
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It’s not that I disagree with this, it’s just are their actions really particularly about not wanting the lab leak hypothesis tested because they suspect it’s true? The contact tracing beyond the market, for example, doesn’t seem obviously tied to the lab hypothesis (though clearly it could support it depending on what was found).
I’d think they wouldn’t like the origins being looked at by international observers regardless, and, in this instance, the lab leak hypothesis is the obvious worst case scenario to protect against. So I’m just not sure you can draw much inference about likelihood from their actions.
The natural reservoir of the close relative to Covid is in Yunnan, not Guangdong. But that Yunnan is quite far from Wuhan is relevant because that’s a step that needs to be explained. How did that virus travel 1000 miles (if that is indeed the source). It’s obviously relevant. And you’re not going to waste any more time on my post above because it’s all true.
All fair points, I don’t really disagree with anything here. They’re probably reflexively hyper-secretive and would resist an investigation regardless. Maybe you can’t read too much into anything.
A few fixes.
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Your article change is pretty nitty, because I obviously wasn’t saying that was necessarily the original reservoir. The parenthetical you deleted (if that is indeed the source) ought to make that even more clear.
Of course it isn’t shocking if it happened. But you reference that it happened before. Which is true, but when it happened before with SARS there was compelling evidence of how that leap was made pretty quickly. Hey, look, these animals in this market have SARS. The people trading the animals have SARS. The people selling the animals in the market have SARS. The people selling vegetables don’t.
Remember that time that you said Trump wasn’t trying to seize power and then he riled up a mob to go and seize the capitol and they did, and they took it over, and then you still said that trump wasn’t trying to seize power? This is like that.
How do you figure?
Nitty maybe, but you’ve almost totally hitched your wagon to THOSE bats being THE reservoir, and since they’re far, it’s unlikely to be them. Expanding the possibility to other bats that may have other even more closely related coronaviruses undermines your EHRMEHGHERD FEHR AWAY, MUST BE LERB case in a big way, precisely because you’re making your case by trying to limit non-lab possibilities due to a big lack of it-was-the-lab evidence.
Speaking of, while we’re considering people in Wuhan who didn’t get covid and the implications that has on its origin, it looks like the people who worked in the lab weren’t ones who got it. So, lab origin, obviously.
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I haven’t hitched my wagon to those bats being the reservoir? But that’s the closest (and only) plausible reservoir that anyone has found so far, and it’s pretty far away. And assuming I can translate the bolded gibberish accurately, I don’t think that it “must” be anything. There isn’t good evidence for any of the plausible scenarios as far as I know. So they need to do a lot more testing of animals around Wuhan and they need to open up an independent investigation of the lab possibility. And I guess the frozen food option as well.
What is the evidence that the people working in the lab didn’t get covid?
Welp, maybe tomorrow.
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Niaph was part of the inspiration for the movie Contagion, FWIW.