Covid 19 origin(s)

[Spuds]

Originally Posted by Lantanafrs2

Jmho so its worthless but I believe the endgame of this research was to weaponize a virus.

To what end? Releasing a new virus is like opening Pandora's box. Once it's out you can't put it back in. And it's definitely a weapon that can be turned back on the creator.

[Capt Spaulding]

Originally Posted by Spuds

To what end? Releasing a new virus is like opening Pandora's box. Once it's out you can't put it back in. And it's definitely a weapon that can be turned back on the creator.

This came to be known as "blowback." The use of poison gas in WWI was a dramatic example of the weapon's ability to kill those who deployed it. Another, more contemporaneous example was the CIA's funding, training, and arming of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the early 80s. The idea was to kill Russians, but our providing all that funding, weapons, and training came back to haunt (and kill) us in a big way.

[Spuds]

Originally Posted by Capt Spaulding

This came to be known as "blowback." The use of poison gas in WWI was a dramatic example of the weapon's ability to kill those who deployed it. Another, more contemporaneous example was the CIA's funding, training, and arming of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the early 80s. The idea was to kill Russians, but our providing all that funding, weapons, and training came back to haunt (and kill) us in a big way.

This is actually a different mechanic. There is a finite supply of advanced weapons you distribute. Likewise, giving away the idea for a weapon does not mean the opponent has the ability to produce it, at least not immediately.

Weaponizing a virus on the other hand, you are literally installing the factory for your adversary inside their own territory. They immediately have everything they need to produce an unlimited quantity. Doing so is infinitely more stupid than even giving your adversary an intact conventional weapon to use or copy.

[weederr33]

Originally Posted by Spuds

This is actually a different mechanic. There is a finite supply of advanced weapons you distribute. Likewise, giving away the idea for a weapon does not mean the opponent has the ability to produce it, at least not immediately.

Weaponizing a virus on the other hand, you are literally installing the factory for your adversary inside their own territory. They immediately have everything they need to produce an unlimited quantity. Doing so is infinitely more stupid than even giving your adversary an intact conventional weapon to use or copy.

Doesn't stop it from heavily impacting your enemy's economy and the health impacts of it's military combat readiness. Especially if they're as stupid and pretentious as the US. ah-hem I mean, as smart and FREE as the US.

[Atmo]

[Captain Snooze]

Dr. Fauci: ‘There’s No Longer A Need For Statues To Wear Masks Outside’
"WASHINGTON—Clarifying newly relaxed CDC guidelines, White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci told reporters Thursday that there was no longer a need for statues to wear masks outside. “The science has shown that the virus does not spread easily outdoors, so if you are a concrete statue standing at the center of a fountain or a bronze cast of a historical figure in the park, feel free to go ahead and discard that mask,” said Fauci, who confirmed that the guidelines applied to all statues regardless of age, whether they were a copper ring of young school children holding hands and dancing or an ancient Greek terracotta figure. “It’s perfectly safe to have your mask off outdoors. But if you’re gathered indoors with other statues—for example, if you’re at a museum as part of a collection of marble Renaissance sculptures or one of many elegant busts adorning the top of a fireplace mantel—we ask that you keep your mask on.” At press time, Dr. Fauci added that regardless of whether they were indoors or outdoors, all mannequins should continue to wear masks until they became eligible for vaccination."

[soundman98]

I only read the first page. Is there an over/under on when this will get deleted?

[humfrz]

Originally Posted by Lantanafrs2

I'm starting this thread so emerging info can be shared without clogging up other discussions or triggering others who wish to protect their dogma and/or egos. My own beliefs are being tested right now as what was once a conspiracy theory is now becoming more and more realistic as new information is made available.

Covid 19 origin(s)

I asked Bubba and his reply was:

"I reckon it started somehow, somewhere in China and the Chinese ain't gonna tell us."

[Lantanafrs2]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.ya...190906328.html


"You gotta go where the action is"

[TylerLieberman]

Why do we keep doing this as if this thread is going to end any different than the ones before it? lol

[serialk11r]

Wow this thread is still up? TCoat has gotten the gist of it, there really aren't any facts out there, and everyone is going to believe what they want to believe. I was looking deeply into this last year and decided I could sleep easy.

For those of you who want to sleep easier and tell yourself there isn't going to be a war, here's what I've compiled on the other side of the story (which no one gives a s*** about because it's not entertaining):

Every "lab leak" theorist I've seen so far has ignored these two papers:
https://www.reuters.com/article/heal...-idUSKBN27W1J2
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-h...-idINKBN23X2HQ

The implication of those results not being false positives is that the closest ancestor of the virus is endemic. However, I have not seen any publicized research around attempts to find the endemic ancestor at all. At the start of the pandemic, some doctors (and well...the POTUS) were wondering what the fuss was about, and they had a point: coronaviruses spread very easily, are commonly found in wild animals across the globe (e.g. IIRC the "original reservoir" of MERS hasn't been found though they detected it in camels), and no one goes to the hopsital for mild respiratory illness (which COVID19 kind of is, most people don't develop symptoms at all). It is indeed true that COVID19 is not very deadly (a bit less than weaker forms of smallpox, a little more than most influenza), and it's entirely possible its ancestor was just going around as "a mild flu", with a mutation turning it into "a more strenuous flu".

Okay let's say both of those papers were based on a pretty big coincidence of a huge number of false positives, or someone faked them...

Consider the timeline (assuming "US Intelligence" didn't just make up stuff out of thin air):
-Researchers get sick in November
-Earliest known cases found in November
-Lab researcher tells Scientific American the lab was investigated in December for the virus: https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...-coronavirus1/

How likely does it seem that the lab researchers (who would have blood tests to check if they caught the disease) would be found to have the virus, but nothing would be done for 2 months allowing the virus to spread and become an international embarassment?

Moving onto another thread of thought: Consider what happens if there is solid evidence presented that this is a lab leak. Obviously, that means the Chinese hid it for a long time and indeed "allowed it to spread" as Pompeo and Guiliani liked to say. This is the PERFECT ammo for the US government to get regime change, extort deals, whatever they want from China.

Does anyone remember this? https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...dumped-online/

Furthermore, remember that the US has the NSA, which is widely thought to have the best hacking capabilities in the world? I tend to think that they have been successfully snooping on all kinds of communications and are coming up empty handed.

Furthermore, remember that the French basically built that BSL-4 lab, and many US researchers collaborated on research. Back in March when no one cared about this, I read some virology professors online saying they are familiar with the coronaviruses studied at the lab and the live samples kept there, and SARS-COV-2 is different from them (the GoF experiments were done on related but different, viruses are not easy to just cook up or successfully mutate). Out of the vast numbers of people around the world who actively worked with that lab, no one has said anything to the contrary ever since.

Finally, getting a bit into the biology, I was reading a lot of these papers and articles a year ago trying to figure out if we were really going to have WWIII, because if we were I would need to get a bunker ASAP. I don't really feel like going into a lot of detail but here are my summarized thoughts on a bunch of the theories:

Mechanisms for how the virus emerged:
1. "Mojiang Miner Passage Hypothesis" - Apparently, there is no precedent for anywhere near the amount of mutation required to get from RaTG-13 to SARS-Cov-2 to happen that quickly, and furthermore that virus didn't seem to infect anyone else in 2013.
2. Gain of function research - Possible, but I've heard people in the field say that China actually has close to no expertise in this area (while the US does...another can of worms if you want to explore the idea that the CIA planted the virus to frame China , there's all the theories around Ralph Baric, Ft. Detrick, etc.), and this virus is very "clever".
2A: Accelerated evolution in live animals - Maybe, but this process isn't really going to get you a "designer" virus
2B: The "traceless" advanced gene editing techniques discussed - Possible, but furin cleavage sites have been found in plenty of betacoronaviruses in the wild

"But China hid data" - Yes this is actually true to a degree (sequences from November haven't been made public), though there was quite a lot of gene sequences released from January, and in the case that the virus is totally natural, they probably justifiably felt data shouldn't be shared with people on a witch hunt. Also, for people with certain opinions, any data they do see is dismissed as fake :P E.g. Alina Chan complains that raw lab safety logs haven't been released, but if they were...I don't think that would change any minds. Politics has so thoroughly tainted the discussion that nothing can be trusted at all from anyone.

"But why haven't they found the animal reservoir" - The Spanish Flu wasn't traced to Kansas (or Mexico IIRC is where some people think it's actually from) for well over a year, and the origins of many diseases have not been found IIRC. People who say the animal reservoir should have been easily found are simply wrong as far as I can tell.

"How come the virus infects people so readily from the start?" - That's assuming we know the virus appeared from nowhere. If it circulated silently, there is no mystery.

"But bioweapon!" - There is another term for biowarfare called biodefense I expect GoF research to be curtailed going forward but many parties have had an interest in it for the purposes of fighting an outbreak (manmade or natural).

Finally, I'll conclude with another observation: It's possible this virus is "connected" to the lab, but not actually a coverup or leak. If the researchers collecting bat poop samples got infected and spread it to people on a train or plane or bus, then the lab would have no record of the virus, the authorities would have no idea the outbreak is starting, and by the time the researchers are tested for that specific virus there would be no antigens left to definitively say whether they had it (antibody tests are not as accurate, and large percentages of the general population have been exposed already so it wouldn't be clear if they "started" the outbreak). In this situation, it's basically still a natural outbreak and no one can really be blamed for it.

Sweet dreams everyone

[serialk11r]

Oh yea, one more point to add about the endemic ancestory theory, IIRC when looking at the early genetic sequences, it's not completely conclusive that the early Wuhan samples were the progenitor of all the strains found around the world. At the beginning, people were talking about "A", "B" and "C" strains, and they noticed a lot of US infections were "A" strain while Wuhan had "B" strain.

This is a fun time sink: https://nextstrain.org/sars-cov-2

In particular, this chart: https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global
(notice how the ancestral clade is implied, and the earliest December sample is not conclusively the ancestor of the non-Asia outbreaks. All the connecting lines are AFAIK assumed from statistical likelihood, nothing is actually certain)

I get paid to do statistical modeling so I could probably go read a bit about phylogenetics and come up with some "probabilities" about how likely the Wuhan strains were the true progenitor by comparisons with RaTG-13 and RmYN02 but I don't really care anymore lol, the media will frame it however they want to and people will believe whatever they want to, the data is completely irrelevant at this point.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7211627/

[weederr33]

Originally Posted by TylerLieberman

Why do we keep doing this as if this thread is going to end any different than the ones before it? lol

Because now they can get creative without needing facts to support theories!

[Lantanafrs2]

Originally Posted by weederr33

Because now they can get creative without needing facts to support theories!

Do you realize how ridiculous that statement is?