Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Agency Now Says

Re:Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Ag... by actually_a_dog on Sunday February 26, 2023 @05:24PM (#34950243)

You don't need to "discredit" the hypothesis very much, because it shouldn't have any real "credit" to begin with. The only evidence for it at all seems to be the proximity of the Wuhan lab to the first known outbreak, plus the fact that 3 researchers got sick in November (i.e. flu season) with some unknown virus. If you ask me, that plus $5 might buy you a cup of coffee.

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Re:Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Ag... by ikrenji on Sunday February 26, 2023 @06:01PM (#34950623)

it's a hell of coincidence that out of all chinese cities the outbreak started in the one city housing the premiere institute dedicated to researching coronaviruses... so there is no smoking gun evidence, but it's a reasonable hypothesis... anyway, no one apart from the chinese ministry of state security will ever know for sure one way or another

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Re:Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Ag... by yibg on Sunday February 26, 2023 @07:09PM (#34951248)

Isn’t that mixing causation with correlation. The lab is there because there are lots of virus sources there.

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Re:Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Ag... by MichaelZuo on Sunday February 26, 2023 @08:41PM (#34951950)

This is definitely the most sensible explanation, since it's quite well known that Wuhan is the most important transportation hub in China since even before the lab was a distant dream in some postdoc's imagination.

And China does have the world's largest annual human migration, in the Spring Festival.

Placing the most prestigious and well funded lab studying dangerous human transmissible viruses at the world's most likely place to originate such a virus is an obvious choice.

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Re:Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Ag... by mwbajor on Monday February 27, 2023 @09:23AM (#34956710)

Wow, you did quite the somersault there.

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Re:Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Ag... by MichaelZuo on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @04:37PM (#34975201)

Account created 22 days ago with the profile description: "Long time lurker, only made an account to comment about FPGAs..."

So this seems like low-effort trolling.

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Re:Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Ag... by himinlomax on Monday February 27, 2023 @08:20AM (#34956063)

> The lab is there because there are lots of virus sources there.

That's patently false.

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Re:Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Ag... by actually_a_dog on Monday February 27, 2023 @04:19PM (#34961995)

I don't see any evidence in either your or the GP's post.

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Re:Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Ag... by j-krieger on Monday February 27, 2023 @07:09AM (#34955486)

So you discredit an incredibly likely theory that a rapidly spreading epidemic from an origin city in a totalitarian state with a highly specific lab focusing on coronaviruses, based on lack of credit?

I don‘t know what to say.

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Re:Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Ag... by actually_a_dog on Monday February 27, 2023 @11:46AM (#34958624)

It's called "lack of available evidence." You can't use the fact that there isn't evidence of a thing happening in order to give the theory weight. When the evidence comes out, if it exists, and if it ever does come out for general consumption, then my opinion is subject to change.

Why not just say it came from North Korea? There's just about as much publicly available evidence for that as there is that it came from a lab leak in China.

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Re:Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Ag... by j-krieger on Wednesday March 01, 2023 @08:05AM (#34981906)

> You can't use the fact that there isn't evidence of a thing happening in order to give the theory weight

I can and I will, because of the fact that there is some evidence that the Chinese Government made efforts to hide evidence around Covid 19’s origins and their history regarding uncomfortable truths.

You can not argue in good faith on grounds of evidence or no evidence if not all parties are playing open and fair. A totalitarian Government with an overarching system of controlling it‘s population and information is certainly not supporting good scientific research and discovery.

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