CIA Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid's Origins

Re:CIA Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid's Origins by lamontcg on Saturday January 25, 2025 @10:52PM (#42827561)

The initial outbreak cases were clustered around the wet market, not around WIV, and the cases weren't linked to WIV. There was a documented lab leak with SARS-CoV-1 and it killed the affected researcher's mother. That'd the kind of thing you expect to see in a lab leak. Instead you see a cluster of cases that look exactly like it spilled over from the wet market.

And there's zero evidence to support the lab leak. All the research they were doing on live virus was based on SARS-CoV-1. You can't get SARS-CoV-2 out of that. And while they sequenced RaTG-13, there is no evidence they ever had live virus, and RaTG-13 is still around a thousand mutations and a few decades of evolution away from SARS-CoV-2.

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Re:CIA Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid's Origins by danenania on Sunday January 26, 2025 @12:12AM (#42827874)

The research on “clustering” in the market is extremely flimsy. It relies on government data sources and very small sample sizes.

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Re:CIA Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid's Origins by tripletao on Sunday January 26, 2025 @04:44AM (#42829044)

> There was a documented lab leak with SARS-CoV-1 and it killed the affected researcher's mother. That'd the kind of thing you expect to see in a lab leak.

SARS-1 had a CFR of 11% over all ages, 55% for >65. That's about 10x as deadly as SARS-CoV-2. The situations are thus not comparable--with SARS-CoV-2, we'd expect much more cryptic spread before someone gets sick enough to seek medical attention, and illness much more easily misdiagnosed as flu.

There's also zero question that the WIV had unpublished viruses during the pandemic, since they just published 56 new sequences collected "between 2004 and 2021". So do you really think it's impossible that they actually had 57?

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Re:CIA Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid's Origins by lamontcg on Sunday January 26, 2025 @05:51PM (#42835059)

Sequences aren't live virus and don't require live virus.

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Re:CIA Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid's Origins by galangalalgol on Sunday January 26, 2025 @10:18AM (#42830595)

The article I read indicated a number of researchers did become ill and die in the right timeframe, with the wet market they routinely visited following that.

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Re:CIA Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid's Origins by lamontcg on Sunday January 26, 2025 @05:49PM (#42835036)

The article that was written in the NYT by the same author that wrote the "yellow cake uranium in Niger" article that was the basis for the Iraq War.

I don't give that a lot of credit.

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Re:CIA Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid's Origins by galangalalgol on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @08:41AM (#42852172)

Pretty sure I read it on Vox, but it might have been a republishing of the same AP or Reuters source. It was a kind of retrospective of how problematic it is when someone so wrong about so many things is right about something.

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