I’ll burn my daily reply to point out that I don’t think anyone said don’t investigate it, nor that it was 1:1000000000.
Consensus was that lab leak is least likely scenario and jump from an animal very much most likely.
But anyone that thinks they shouldn’t keep investigating the source of the worst pandemic of our lifetime go ahead and raise your hand.
Anyone? Nobody? Cool.
Don’t think anyone said it’s racist to investigate the origin, but saying icky wet market dog eaters and sneaky Chinese sort of is. Not terribly controversial there either, no?
Why are you trying to nail him down because he might have said “recommended not investigating” where he might meant “did not recommend investigating”. The entire rest of his argument clearly shows he meant the latter.
What many are misunderstanding is that the fact that there was a lab in the area can overcome the fact that almost all viruses don’t come from labs. The easiest way to demonstrate this is to imagine that the first case was the next door neighbor of the lab director. Would anyone doubt that the lab is now the big favorite to be the origin no matter how unlikely it would have been before that was known? Doctors who take pride in the specialized knowledge they have that can demonstrate the great likelihood of natural vs manmade viruses will naturally resist a pure probability argument that a ten year old would understand and that may be ocurring here.
Fauci badly needs to be fired at this point, he’s flip flopped a ridic amount of times.
If we eventually end up finding out it was from a lab that means republicans are smarter at medicine than actual doctors. I was already ready to fire them all and overhaul/start over with medical school as it is so.
sigh the last time this came up in March I said the same thing I’m saying now:
This is of course the case. Despite all the histironics ITT, neither Fauci nor the WHO nor anyone serious is saying this.
Assuming the disease was actually COVID and ignoring the extremely dubious sourcing, this “bombshell” tells us nothing. 3 WIV employees and 80+ people not associated with the WIV getting sick is completely consistent with any of the COVID origin theories.
I’m still of the opinion that there can be two sides of an argument, with one side being objectively, definitively incorrect, without either side being “the racist side” so with that said, I’m still kinda blown away that “bat soup chinamans” is the purportedly non-racist side in this whole affair.
It’s worth pointing out that the WHO report states that no employees of the lab got sick before December, based on the representations of the lab. It’s one of the stated reasons that they think the theory is unlikely.
Of course, like everything else involving the lab theory, the WHO team did not actually investigate any of it themselves and just took the lab’s word for it that nobody got sick.
This is because it literally has happened before. SARS 1.0 was due to a wet market. MERS, a close relative of this, was fairly similar but with camels instead of a wet market. More generally, poor sanitation, wild animals and markets have been associated with disease outbreaks since we began tracking these things.
And while I don’t think Chris, Keeed et al are supporting this theory because they are racists, their theory sure is number one with racists. Chris’ link in this post is from a guy who thinks that racial stereotypes and culture come from genes. Gatewaypundit like that medium article. Instapundit too. American Thinker. Pretty much every single garbage RWNJ website pushed this bullshit.
And to be clear, that “paper” is utter horseshit:
Moving on…
This, again, is utter horseshit. If your point is that we’ve moved from 0.01% to 1% then that’s not supported by anything. If your point is that we’ve moved from 0.1% to 10% that’s not true. You can pick which one it is, I don’t care.
Because those things are drastically different. The WHO clearly recommends continued investigation in general to the source of the virus. They do not rule out a lab source. They do, however, prioritize the things that are much more likely. That’s how it should be. The conspiracy theorists use this to suggest that the WHO is suppressing investigation into the lab theory. What gets infuriating is that they demand all sorts of investigation into something they’ll also say is very unlikely in the next breath while having, to this point, literally zero ideas for what should be investigated. It’s asinine.
TeamConspiracy continually posts bullshit leaving adults in the room to try to figure out what’s actually true. Then after posting that bullshit, they’ll say they never really meant it anyways (like Keeed going back and forth about how he wasn’t talking about a man created origin, then two posts later talking about man created origin, then saying he never did).
Team Lab Leak/Lab Created has:
Made a big deal about how far the source of COVID was from the outbreak of SARS-1, only to find out the actual origin of SARS-1 was a massive distance from the main initial outbreak.
Argued that the origin of SARS was immediately found, it took about 18 years.
Used a paper from a known racist piece of shit with numerous basic errors and conspiracy theories
Not given one piece of evidence that is remotely compelling
New data compiled by the WHO team regarding the presence of distinct lineages of SARS-CoV-2 in different Wuhan wildlife markets are inconsistent with a laboratory-based origin of SARS-CoV-2. No data or other evidence has emerged in support of the Lab Leak theory. In contrast, the WHO report significantly adds to the large volume of epidemiological and genomic data that support emergence of SARS-CoV-2 from a zoonotic reservoir, either wildlife or farmed animals.
They did not find Covid in any of the animals tested at any market in Wuhan and the markets are NOT thought to be where the virus jumped from animal to human. This entire blog post is based on events that are not believed to have happened.
I’m gonna use my one post to strenuously object to this policy.
Sometimes internet shitposting gets heated. These things happen. And this is an interesting topic, imo. I think throttling the discussion here is a net negative.
They didn’t test nearly enough to rule the market out, to say nothing of the farms around Wuhan. Also, the first comment responding to the post addresses this.
Just not true. And you guys on team Lab Leak still need to explain where the second lineage came from, which is the whole point of his argument that you’re casually ignoring.
Every chance I’m missing something, but reading that post and going back to the WHO report I don’t know why an answer about lineages, regardless of whether the first infection was lab or animal based, is that they could have evolved in humans.
The post never suggests that is not possible. It says at one point that “[i]t is possible that humans involved in the wildlife trade were also infected and involved in this pathway.”
The WHO report looked at 16 studies that modelled the most recent common ancestor of the December + January sequences and concludes:
The point estimates for the time to most recent ancestor ranged from late September to early December, but most estimates were between mid-November and early December.
In other words seems extremely possibly during the time at which it was infecting humans in Wuhan. At no point in the discussion do they say the divergence of the two must (or even is likely to) be associated with animal rather than human infections.
It may be important, but new information is very slow to come out, and no one here has any particular insight or firsthand information of their own. As such the only thing to do on a day-to-day basis is snipe at each other over the same old set of facts. This serves mainly to foment animosity rather than generating any kind of enlightenment.
This feels like making up new rules without community input. By this standard, every thread would be one a day. I think this restriction should be removed.
I puzzled over this some too. One problem I see is that the lab-leak hypothesis needs to explain both the Huanan market outbreak and the linkage between cases and other wildlife markets. One explanation is that someone gets infected from the lab (directly or indirectly), then goes to Huanan market and kicks off a big cluster, and then the virus spreads to other markets through vendors, etc. But that theory is not correct, because the genetic evidence said the lineage present at Huanan descended from the lineage seen elsewhere, not vice versa.
That said, I also don’t see why there couldn’t have been a cluster at another market sparked by a lab-linked chain that then kicked off the big Huanan cluster (though that may not be consistent with the other epidemiology). It starts to seem like a lot of coincidences though… why is the virus so good at spreading in markets and not elsewhere?
One hypothesis is that the apparent linkage between markets and early spread is sampling bias. If people expect to see a SARS-like outbreak, then you ask people who show up with mysterious flu-like symptoms if they’ve been to a wet market and call in the CDC if they have, but if they haven’t, you give them 2 aspirin, etc. Not sure how that hypothesis looks from other evidence. But if it’s true, maybe there are unidentified restaurant clusters and workplace clusters that make the market spread seem more typical.
On the other side of things, I haven’t heard of any COVID lineages that are unrelated to the original Wuhan ones. (Possibly wrong here?). It seems implausible that there’s some animal reservoir that people are in regular contact with and that transmitted the virus to people exactly twice, then just stopped.
Anyways, interesting stuff. Let’s snipe at each other some more tomorrow!
