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Post 20 Jun 2021, 1:50 pm

First it doesnt matter if some crackpots tried to link the lab to the outbreak. That doesnt cast doubt on a reasonable theory tying the lab to the outbreak.

And im not sure what youre looking at. There is no debunking going on that I saw. One guy listed the evidence he would need to see for inconvertible proof and says he didnt see any. First, proving it is a lot different than ruling it out. Secondly, China has not given access to lab records and medical records so thats why there is no clear proof.

There is no way to debunk or prove the lab is responsible until China allows access to lab records of the lab and medical records of the researchers and any blood samples. China told the WHO what their records said. Thats worthless! And they have refused to allow such access. There are only two real reasons for that denial I can think of: (1) they know the lab is responsible, or (2) they are uncertain the lab is responsible and afraid what an investigation would reveal. If they know the lab is not responsible, then it is in their best interests to allow access.

Instead we're supposed to believe some bat flew several hundred miles to Wuhan and infected someone or that some traveler got infected where these horseshoe bats are and came to Wuhan without infecting anyone else on the way or that we are somehow wrong about there being no bats in Wuhan or horseshoe bats even close to Wuhan. (and China has not said that; no one has said that horseshoe bats are found in or near Wuhan.)These theories about horseshoe bats getting to Wuhan are incredibly fanciful. All these opinions about the virus..and very little about there being no friggin' horseshoe bats in and around Wuhan. The market theory has been debunked so it wasnt bats being brought to market. Maybe someone had a pet bat?
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Post 22 Jun 2021, 5:41 am

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/20/ ... ked-story/

Patients with unexplained pneumonias started showing up at hospitals; within days, dozens were dead. The secret police seized doctors’ records and ordered them to keep silent. US spies picked up clues about a lab leak, but local authorities had a more mundane explanation: contaminated meat.

It took more than a decade for the truth to come out.

In April and May 1979, at least 66 people died after airborne anthrax bacteria emerged from a military lab in the Soviet Union. But leading American scientists voiced confidence in the Soviets’ claim that the pathogen had jumped from animals to humans. Only after a full-fledged investigation in the 1990s did one of those scientists confirm the earlier suspicions: The accident in what is now the Russian Urals city of Yekaterinburg was a lab leak, one of the deadliest ever documented.
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Post 22 Jun 2021, 6:43 am

https://www.wsj.com/video/wuhan-lab-hyp ... os1&page=1

Here's a video that does a very good job objectively comparing the two hypotheses. The reality may be that we never know since China clearly has prevented the world from having access to all the information. We cannot scientifically prove either hypothesis, but it is certainly not far fetched to surmise that the virus came from the lab. Frankly, I think it is likely based on the available evidence, including the fact that China engaged in a cover up.

BTW, let's understand that evidence is more than conjecture but less than proof.
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Post 22 Jun 2021, 8:29 am

But leading American scientists voiced confidence in the Soviets’ claim that the pathogen had jumped from animals to humans.


Sounds familiar...
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Post 23 Jun 2021, 10:38 am

Here's an article from Vanity Fair

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06 ... 9s-origins

which is very credible. The author was interviewed on Fresh Air about a week ago and comes across as very balanced and knowledgeable.

Following are some snippets. It is well worth the read!

Then, in February, a research paper coauthored by two Chinese scientists, based at separate Wuhan universities, appeared online as a preprint. It tackled a fundamental question: How did a novel bat coronavirus get to a major metropolis of 11 million people in central China, in the dead of winter when most bats were hibernating, and turn a market where bats weren’t sold into the epicenter of an outbreak?

The paper offered an answer: “We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus.” The first was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which sat just 280 meters from the Huanan market and had been known to collect hundreds of bat samples. The second, the researchers wrote, was the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The paper came to a staggeringly blunt conclusion about COVID-19: “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.... Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places.” Almost as soon as the paper appeared on the internet, it disappeared, but not before U.S. government officials took note.


On February 14, 2020, to the surprise of NSC officials, President Xi Jinping of China announced a plan to fast-track a new biosecurity law to tighten safety procedures throughout the country’s laboratories. Was this a response to confidential information?


Alina Chan, a young molecular biologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, found that early sequences of the virus showed very little evidence of mutation. Had the virus jumped from animals to humans, one would expect to see numerous adaptations, as was true in the 2002 SARS outbreak. To Chan, it appeared that SARS-CoV-2 was already “pre-adapted to human transmission,” she wrote in a preprint paper in May 2020.


On February 3, 2020, with the COVID-19 outbreak already spreading beyond China, Shi Zhengli and several colleagues published a paper noting that the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s genetic code was almost 80% identical to that of SARS-CoV, which caused the 2002 outbreak. But they also reported that it was 96.2% identical to a coronavirus sequence in their possession called RaTG13, which was previously detected in “Yunnan province.” They concluded that RaTG13 was the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2.


RaTG13 was from the bat cave that killed 3 miners instantly. Samples were taken to Wuhan for study. The database with the various Coronavirus sequences was taken down by China over a year ago and has not been put back up for security reasons.

After reading this, I am more convinced than ever that there was a lab leak. China has close to 4 million deaths on its hands, and counting.
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Post 23 Jun 2021, 3:25 pm

Great article, RJ. Really pulls everything together--thats what good journalism does. One date that I think is incredibly significant: September 12, 2019. Thats the date the Wuhan Virulogy lab took its virus sequence database off-line. Did they know back then of a lab leak?

The other thing that strikes is how the desire to keep grant money flowing can lead to dangerous research. Gain-of-function research became a way for labs to fund themselves. You get a scientific push for this research, even though it is really questionable as to whether the research should be done at all. And of course you have scientists in government, so this demand for grant money has a political effect as well. And the desire to keep gain-of-function money coming led to some scientists seeking to shut down the lab leak hypothesis. And then China's powerful influence over the WHO and the scientific community due to its own funding of research also had an impact.

I would be shocked if it wasnt the lab at this point given the shoddy lab practices, prior lab leaks in China, the hiding of the 2012 mine incident, taking the virus sequences off-line right before the pandemic, researchers getting sick at the lab right before the pandemic, the Chinese CDC moving its lab in early December to near the market, the military involvement in lab research, the lying from the lab director, and everything else in the article.
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Post 24 Jun 2021, 4:40 am

Freeman:
I would be shocked if it wasnt the lab at this point given the shoddy lab practices, prior lab leaks in China, the hiding of the 2012 mine incident, taking the virus sequences off-line right before the pandemic, researchers getting sick at the lab right before the pandemic, the Chinese CDC moving its lab in early December to near the market, the military involvement in lab research, the lying from the lab director, and everything else in the article.


Yeah, and this came out Tuesday:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-g ... low_a_pos1

The removal of the sequencing data is described in a new paper posted online Tuesday by Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. The paper, which hasn’t been peer reviewed, says the missing data include sequences from virus samples collected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in January and February of 2020 from patients hospitalized with or suspected of having Covid-19.


“It makes us wonder if there are other sequences like these that have been purged,” said Vaughn S. Cooper, a University of Pittsburgh evolutionary biologist who wasn’t involved in the new paper and said he hasn’t studied the deleted sequences himself.


“We really need to look hard and see if there is other early information about sequences that hasn’t been found,” he said. “I intend to go through every early preprint I can find about SARS-CoV-2 and see if it describes any data that isn’t in the databases.”


In 6 months it may be that the lab leak theory is the consensus, except in China and some parts of Canada.
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Post 24 Jun 2021, 5:03 am

In 6 months it may be that the lab leak theory is the consensus, except in China and some parts of Canada.


I wonder which part(s)... :grin:
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Post 24 Jun 2021, 6:16 am

Ray Jay wrote:Here's an article from Vanity Fair

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06 ... 9s-origins

which is very credible. The author was interviewed on Fresh Air about a week ago and comes across as very balanced and knowledgeable.


Thank you!
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Post 28 Jun 2021, 7:13 am

You are welcome.

A very credible source that says the lab leak theory is unlikely:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features ... speaks-out
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Post 28 Jun 2021, 8:45 am

Should someone check if Toronto is having a power outage? Not much from the Chinese Embassy there of late...
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Post 28 Jun 2021, 11:57 am

I read the article. She was there so she should be able to give some eyewitness testimony as to what was going on at the lab without being subject to Chinese pressure. I'll put aside for the moment how her connection to the lab could make her biased. I'll look at her statements and see how they hold up.

First of all she studied Ebola. That research took place in Bl-4 lab. We know that research on the SARS viruses took place in BL-2 and BL-3. She did not make that clear in the article. That's pretty damning. Because she talks about how great the BL-4 lab containment is. That's not even relevant. What matters is the containment practices in the BL-2 and BL-3 labs, which she doesnt know about.

And this also means that she wouldnt have come into contact with researchers working on the SARs viruses. So we're left with the bus. We dont even know big the bus was. Was that bus just for researchers who work in BL-4. How many ride the bus? How many researchers work in the entire lab?

She assumes she would have gotten sick if those 3 researchers had gotten sick. Why? She is not working in the same lab as the SARs researchers. If SARs researchers took the same bus as her then it would be possible. But there is no evidence that she was on the same bus as them. I dont know...but maybe all the researchers on the same bus go to the same BL-4 lab?

She also attended a conference where she said many of her Chinese collaborators attended.Again, presumably those who work at BL-4 lab The article says the conference was at the end of December; it wasnt. It was on December 9 and 10. Inadvertent error? Patient 0 was December 9 so no one knew it was going to spread at that time. So if researchers got sick in either BL-3 or BL-2 would scientists working in the BL-4 lab know about it? Even if Chinese scientists who went to the conference knew about it...you think they are just going to chat about it?

It just looks like more smokescreen to me. I would imagine she has a good faith belief there was no lab leak, but she is manipulating the facts to suit her version. If she wanted to be credible she needed to explain the distinctions between the labs and their different levels of containment and who she would have come into contact with. Instead she implied the BL-4 was the level of thats SARs work was done in--false-- and that it was very unlikely a lab leak could have occurred there (maybe so but that has no relevance to the SARs virus work done in BL-4 and BL-3)and acted like there was a very good chance that she would have been contact with the SARs researchers and would have gotten sick if they were sick, because she had a lot of collaborators, there were lunches, and of course she took the bus every day with a bunch of them. She was wrong about the time of the conference and her supposition that she would have just known if there had been a lab leak by the demeanor of her collaborators is speculative at best, because there is a good chance that such a lab leak would have been kept secret from other researchers at the lab, even if they knew the researchers would likely not have talked about it, and it's unlikely the Chinese would have sent anyone they thought knew about it out of the country at that time.

She has no particular expertise better than other virologists so I wont even address her gain-in-function comments. The only thing she really has to offer is her eyewitness testimony about the labs and she was blatantly misleading with regard to that.
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Post 29 Jun 2021, 7:09 am

Freeman - thanks, very inciteful
bbauska - very funny
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Post 08 Jul 2021, 12:01 pm

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/562026-hhs-secretary-it-is-absolutely-the-governments-business-to-know

"We want to give people the sense that they have the freedom to choose, but we hope that they choose to live,"

You know, I have a major problem with Becerra's statement. The government should not give us a SENSE that we have freedom. The government should ensure that our inalienable rights are not being infringed upon. Sure this could be a mis-speak, but it shows a trend line of this administrations desire to infringe upon the rights of Americans.
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Post 21 Jul 2021, 12:46 pm

freeman3
Patient 0 was December 9 so no one knew it was going to spread at that time.

Her comment was n reference to the claim that there were three researchers reported (by the WSJ apparently) as sick in early November.

freeman3
It just looks like more smokescreen to me.


Of course it does. Who were the 3 scientists that were supposedly sick in November?
You can twist yourself into more knots to convince yourself of a conspiracy. (Either to produce a virus or to cover up a leak).
And to do that you have to believe this Australian is part of the cover up...

You guys are just silly. Wait for actual evidence