I'm getting a Labour advert a lot in between YouTube videos. It's not great, just a picture of a bomb (an old school bomb that gets dropped out of a plane) with something about the Tories Mortgage Ticking Time bomb. Really basic, but at least they're trying.
I keep getting ones about ill fitting bras.
That sounds like it's a joke but it's not - given I mainly look at politics and history stuff I'm not sure how the algorithm went in this direction.
It says no clear evidence. AOEINEOA. What clear evidence could there be anyway? CCTV of avirus sneaking out of the back door?
In my lifetime there have been two lab leaks in the UK that I am aware of, Smallpox and Foot and Mouth. Both were provable lab leaks. So to say there can't be any clear evidence of a lab leak is obviously not correct.
It may well be a lab leak and there may not be any evidence that can be found, but that doesn't mean it is a lab leak. It may be, it may not be.
However unlike @leon I don't jump to conclusions. If leon didn't come out with so much tosh all the time (Do we all remember the mass alien ships over Ukraine?) we might take him more seriously. I can think of two pieces of evidence he provided for absolute proof it came from a lab that were completely dismantled here (one was from Fox news ffs).
Which is exactly the point: Likely but not proven is probably as good as we are going to get with an outbreak in China. They don't do openness there. So the claim of "no clear evidence" is still susceptible to the response: What clear evidence would you expect, given 1. China and 2. the catastrophic consequences of this leak?
I would want to know why a lab leak is likely, beyond that someone had a notion. There is epidemiological evidence for the epidemic starting in a market, which is also how the previous SARS is known to have started.
Aside from anything else “the nightmare of circumstantial evidence” - as was explicitly stated in the Fauci/Farrar emails at the beginning of the pandemic
Problem is I then have to Google the claim to see if it really is evidence. This is the full quote from Ian Lipkin:
It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.
So it seems not. The recent DNI report states
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
So Covid 19 doesn't match a virus the lab was known to be working on. We have to have some other reason to suspect a lab leak.
"a virus the lab was known to be working on" is rather the point. Again, this is mere absence of evidence. Evidence of absence would require a complete, audited list from the lab of everything it was up to.
Given that there is significant evidence China executed or otherwise silenced - forever - early covid whistleblowers, the idea they wouldn’t destroy evidence at the lab is fanciful. Indeed the opposite is true. They surely DID destroy evidence
Indeed, and they also destroyed evidence at the market. I don't think we've ever argued that China behaved responsibly or openly with regard to what happened.
Indeed.
From what we know, I think we can say for certain that China behaved irresponsibly.
I think the balance of probabilities is that it probably came from the Lab.
I think the less likely, but still possible option, is that it came naturally to and from the market without any involvement of the Lab.
"Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the f---ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it."
Nearly all pandemics come from zoonotic events. Eating “bush meat” or wild animals is a common origin. There was a “wet market” in Wuhan. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. There were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2, which would be consistent with a source of a group of animals in the market, but not with other theories of the virus’s origin.
In other words, the chocolate factory is the wet market. That’s exactly the sort of place people expected a new pandemic to appear.
My first WTF. I am astonished to find so many naive frequentists on a betting site. Does anyone here make any money from it?
Nearly all people are not called Zebedee - probably only 1 in 250,000 at most. If someone comes up to you and says Hi, I am Zebedee, do you discount the possibility of that being true because it is a 250,000/1 shot?
I once worked with a guy called Zebedee. True story.
Tories to lose all three, and move to around 22 in the opinion polls; Putin to be deposed ; Trump to be arrested and jailed ; and aliens to arrive, and make their presence felt, on the White House lawn.
All these to happen before August, but then I also would be worried about the impact on my holiday..
Yes, these will all come to pass but not until TSE is in charge.
Like
Like your like.*
*Robert, sort this nonsense out please.
It was an edict from Leon.
I fear in order to satisfy our most notorious senior poster WTF is here to stay.
Jees. It really wasn't an edict!
I said the Like button has several significant drawbacks and negative side-effects (which it does). People go in search of Likes, it encourages herding behaviour, it inhibits fresh and unpopular opinion. There is much data to show the damage Like buttons do to people on social media
But I hardly commanded that it be Removed Forthwith or any such bollox
Tories to lose all three, and move to around 22 in the opinion polls; Putin to be deposed ; Trump to be arrested and jailed ; and aliens to arrive, and make their presence felt, on the White House lawn.
All these to happen before August, but then I also would be worried about the impact on my holiday..
Yes, these will all come to pass but not until TSE is in charge.
Like
Like your like.*
*Robert, sort this nonsense out please.
It was an edict from Leon.
I fear in order to satisfy our most notorious senior poster WTF is here to stay.
Jees. It really wasn't an edict!
I said the Like button has several significant drawbacks and negative side-effects (which it does). People go in search of Likes, it encourages herding behaviour, it inhibits fresh and unpopular opinion. There is much data to show the damage Like buttons do to people on social media
But I hardly commanded that it be Removed Forthwith or any such bollox
I was more about people pushing the off-topic button, I think. That really annoys the mods.
Recent electoral form would suggest the Tories doing expectations management by being pessimistic about the outcome, and the real outcome being worse. Not sure how that would work - they predict losing all 3 and somehow end up losing 4?
Some scenario where the Conservatives lose all three and a campaign whoopsie by a sitting MP means that they also have to resign? Michael Dobbs writes Some Mothers Do Ave Em?
At that point, you might have to say that any karma hitting young Rishi has gone far enough.
It says no clear evidence. AOEINEOA. What clear evidence could there be anyway? CCTV of avirus sneaking out of the back door?
In my lifetime there have been two lab leaks in the UK that I am aware of, Smallpox and Foot and Mouth. Both were provable lab leaks. So to say there can't be any clear evidence of a lab leak is obviously not correct.
It may well be a lab leak and there may not be any evidence that can be found, but that doesn't mean it is a lab leak. It may be, it may not be.
However unlike @leon I don't jump to conclusions. If leon didn't come out with so much tosh all the time (Do we all remember the mass alien ships over Ukraine?) we might take him more seriously. I can think of two pieces of evidence he provided for absolute proof it came from a lab that were completely dismantled here (one was from Fox news ffs).
Which is exactly the point: Likely but not proven is probably as good as we are going to get with an outbreak in China. They don't do openness there. So the claim of "no clear evidence" is still susceptible to the response: What clear evidence would you expect, given 1. China and 2. the catastrophic consequences of this leak?
I would want to know why a lab leak is likely, beyond that someone had a notion. There is epidemiological evidence for the epidemic starting in a market, which is also how the previous SARS is known to have started.
Aside from anything else “the nightmare of circumstantial evidence” - as was explicitly stated in the Fauci/Farrar emails at the beginning of the pandemic
Problem is I then have to Google the claim to see if it really is evidence. This is the full quote from Ian Lipkin:
It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.
So it seems not. The recent DNI report states
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
So Covid 19 doesn't match a virus the lab was known to be working on. We have to have some other reason to suspect a lab leak.
"a virus the lab was known to be working on" is rather the point. Again, this is mere absence of evidence. Evidence of absence would require a complete, audited list from the lab of everything it was up to.
Given that there is significant evidence China executed or otherwise silenced - forever - early covid whistleblowers, the idea they wouldn’t destroy evidence at the lab is fanciful. Indeed the opposite is true. They surely DID destroy evidence
Indeed, and they also destroyed evidence at the market. I don't think we've ever argued that China behaved responsibly or openly with regard to what happened.
Indeed.
From what we know, I think we can say for certain that China behaved irresponsibly.
I think the balance of probabilities is that it probably came from the Lab.
I think the less likely, but still possible option, is that it came naturally to and from the market without any involvement of the Lab.
"Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the f---ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it."
Nearly all pandemics come from zoonotic events. Eating “bush meat” or wild animals is a common origin. There was a “wet market” in Wuhan. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. There were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2, which would be consistent with a source of a group of animals in the market, but not with other theories of the virus’s origin.
In other words, the chocolate factory is the wet market. That’s exactly the sort of place people expected a new pandemic to appear.
My first WTF. I am astonished to find so many naive frequentists on a betting site. Does anyone here make any money from it?
Nearly all people are not called Zebedee - probably only 1 in 250,000 at most. If someone comes up to you and says Hi, I am Zebedee, do you discount the possibility of that being true because it is a 250,000/1 shot?
Only once in my life has someone come up to me announcing their name as Zebedee. It must have been autumn 1989, or maybe 1990. It was, in fact, an ironic lie. Her name was Kate.
More to the point, in the case of COVID-19, no-one has appeared and said their name was Zebedee. The SARS-CoV-2 virus has pointedly not commented on its origins. If someone had some actual evidence for a lab leak, that would be a different matter.
All you've offered over the last day or so is AOEINEOA repeated over and over, like a mantra. Yet, in the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source, and with the background probabilities, then whether you are a frequentist or Bayesian, it's obvious what the likely answer is.
It says no clear evidence. AOEINEOA. What clear evidence could there be anyway? CCTV of avirus sneaking out of the back door?
In my lifetime there have been two lab leaks in the UK that I am aware of, Smallpox and Foot and Mouth. Both were provable lab leaks. So to say there can't be any clear evidence of a lab leak is obviously not correct.
It may well be a lab leak and there may not be any evidence that can be found, but that doesn't mean it is a lab leak. It may be, it may not be.
However unlike @leon I don't jump to conclusions. If leon didn't come out with so much tosh all the time (Do we all remember the mass alien ships over Ukraine?) we might take him more seriously. I can think of two pieces of evidence he provided for absolute proof it came from a lab that were completely dismantled here (one was from Fox news ffs).
Which is exactly the point: Likely but not proven is probably as good as we are going to get with an outbreak in China. They don't do openness there. So the claim of "no clear evidence" is still susceptible to the response: What clear evidence would you expect, given 1. China and 2. the catastrophic consequences of this leak?
I would want to know why a lab leak is likely, beyond that someone had a notion. There is epidemiological evidence for the epidemic starting in a market, which is also how the previous SARS is known to have started.
Aside from anything else “the nightmare of circumstantial evidence” - as was explicitly stated in the Fauci/Farrar emails at the beginning of the pandemic
Problem is I then have to Google the claim to see if it really is evidence. This is the full quote from Ian Lipkin:
It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.
So it seems not. The recent DNI report states
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
So Covid 19 doesn't match a virus the lab was known to be working on. We have to have some other reason to suspect a lab leak.
"a virus the lab was known to be working on" is rather the point. Again, this is mere absence of evidence. Evidence of absence would require a complete, audited list from the lab of everything it was up to.
Given that there is significant evidence China executed or otherwise silenced - forever - early covid whistleblowers, the idea they wouldn’t destroy evidence at the lab is fanciful. Indeed the opposite is true. They surely DID destroy evidence
Indeed, and they also destroyed evidence at the market. I don't think we've ever argued that China behaved responsibly or openly with regard to what happened.
Indeed.
From what we know, I think we can say for certain that China behaved irresponsibly.
I think the balance of probabilities is that it probably came from the Lab.
I think the less likely, but still possible option, is that it came naturally to and from the market without any involvement of the Lab.
"Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the f---ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it."
Nearly all pandemics come from zoonotic events. Eating “bush meat” or wild animals is a common origin. There was a “wet market” in Wuhan. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. There were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2, which would be consistent with a source of a group of animals in the market, but not with other theories of the virus’s origin.
In other words, the chocolate factory is the wet market. That’s exactly the sort of place people expected a new pandemic to appear.
My first WTF. I am astonished to find so many naive frequentists on a betting site. Does anyone here make any money from it?
Nearly all people are not called Zebedee - probably only 1 in 250,000 at most. If someone comes up to you and says Hi, I am Zebedee, do you discount the possibility of that being true because it is a 250,000/1 shot?
I once worked with a guy called Zebedee. True story.
I believe you, because any frequentist argument collapses in the face of any evidence to the contrary. If you hear that a 90 year old dies in a nursing home you can be virtually certain they died of CVD/cancer/dementia. If you are also told the police are treating it as suspicious, the odds of it being one of those three instantly reverse from long odds on to longer than evens.
As an aside did we lose the 'like' button after that debate the other day?
I think it was more @rcs1000 got fed up Leon complaining about it yesterday.
Leon may have disliked the Like button but I think everyone hates it disappearing and replacement with some random WFH option - that's only useful for responding to posts by Leon or HYUFD.
Er, what? I made one critique of the Like button!
My powers are mighty but not that mighty
Are, but you and I started it and the ball got rolling. I'm happy to take 50% of the blame if you take the other 50%. To be honest I think I am doing you a favour there, because if it wasn't for your response it would have died a death there and then. So yes you do appear to have the power.
It says no clear evidence. AOEINEOA. What clear evidence could there be anyway? CCTV of avirus sneaking out of the back door?
In my lifetime there have been two lab leaks in the UK that I am aware of, Smallpox and Foot and Mouth. Both were provable lab leaks. So to say there can't be any clear evidence of a lab leak is obviously not correct.
It may well be a lab leak and there may not be any evidence that can be found, but that doesn't mean it is a lab leak. It may be, it may not be.
However unlike @leon I don't jump to conclusions. If leon didn't come out with so much tosh all the time (Do we all remember the mass alien ships over Ukraine?) we might take him more seriously. I can think of two pieces of evidence he provided for absolute proof it came from a lab that were completely dismantled here (one was from Fox news ffs).
Which is exactly the point: Likely but not proven is probably as good as we are going to get with an outbreak in China. They don't do openness there. So the claim of "no clear evidence" is still susceptible to the response: What clear evidence would you expect, given 1. China and 2. the catastrophic consequences of this leak?
I would want to know why a lab leak is likely, beyond that someone had a notion. There is epidemiological evidence for the epidemic starting in a market, which is also how the previous SARS is known to have started.
Aside from anything else “the nightmare of circumstantial evidence” - as was explicitly stated in the Fauci/Farrar emails at the beginning of the pandemic
Problem is I then have to Google the claim to see if it really is evidence. This is the full quote from Ian Lipkin:
It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.
So it seems not. The recent DNI report states
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
So Covid 19 doesn't match a virus the lab was known to be working on. We have to have some other reason to suspect a lab leak.
"a virus the lab was known to be working on" is rather the point. Again, this is mere absence of evidence. Evidence of absence would require a complete, audited list from the lab of everything it was up to.
Given that there is significant evidence China executed or otherwise silenced - forever - early covid whistleblowers, the idea they wouldn’t destroy evidence at the lab is fanciful. Indeed the opposite is true. They surely DID destroy evidence
Indeed, and they also destroyed evidence at the market. I don't think we've ever argued that China behaved responsibly or openly with regard to what happened.
Indeed.
From what we know, I think we can say for certain that China behaved irresponsibly.
I think the balance of probabilities is that it probably came from the Lab.
I think the less likely, but still possible option, is that it came naturally to and from the market without any involvement of the Lab.
"Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the f---ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it."
Nearly all pandemics come from zoonotic events. Eating “bush meat” or wild animals is a common origin. There was a “wet market” in Wuhan. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. There were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2, which would be consistent with a source of a group of animals in the market, but not with other theories of the virus’s origin.
In other words, the chocolate factory is the wet market. That’s exactly the sort of place people expected a new pandemic to appear.
My first WTF. I am astonished to find so many naive frequentists on a betting site. Does anyone here make any money from it?
Nearly all people are not called Zebedee - probably only 1 in 250,000 at most. If someone comes up to you and says Hi, I am Zebedee, do you discount the possibility of that being true because it is a 250,000/1 shot?
I once worked with a guy called Zebedee. True story.
I believe you, because any frequentist argument collapses in the face of any evidence to the contrary. If you hear that a 90 year old dies in a nursing home you can be virtually certain they died of CVD/cancer/dementia. If you are also told the police are treating it as suspicious, the odds of it being one of those three instantly reverse from long odds on to longer than evens.
Tories to lose all three, and move to around 22 in the opinion polls; Putin to be deposed ; Trump to be arrested and jailed ; and aliens to arrive, and make their presence felt, on the White House lawn.
All these to happen before August, but then I also would be worried about the impact on my holiday..
Yes, these will all come to pass but not until TSE is in charge.
Like
Like your like.*
*Robert, sort this nonsense out please.
It was an edict from Leon.
I fear in order to satisfy our most notorious senior poster WTF is here to stay.
Jees. It really wasn't an edict!
I said the Like button has several significant drawbacks and negative side-effects (which it does). People go in search of Likes, it encourages herding behaviour, it inhibits fresh and unpopular opinion. There is much data to show the damage Like buttons do to people on social media
But I hardly commanded that it be Removed Forthwith or any such bollox
Maybe RCS is being a Cnut in demonstrating his actual powerlessness to turn back the tide of the WTF button...
Recent electoral form would suggest the Tories doing expectations management by being pessimistic about the outcome, and the real outcome being worse. Not sure how that would work - they predict losing all 3 and somehow end up losing 4?
Pre losing mid Bedfordshire. Or someone crossing the floor on the day of the elections.
Tories to lose all three, and move to around 22 in the opinion polls; Putin to be deposed ; Trump to be arrested and jailed ; and aliens to arrive, and make their presence felt, on the White House lawn.
All these to happen before August, but then I also would be worried about the impact on my holiday..
Yes, these will all come to pass but not until TSE is in charge.
Like
Like your like.*
*Robert, sort this nonsense out please.
It was an edict from Leon.
I fear in order to satisfy our most notorious senior poster WTF is here to stay.
Jees. It really wasn't an edict!
I said the Like button has several significant drawbacks and negative side-effects (which it does). People go in search of Likes, it encourages herding behaviour, it inhibits fresh and unpopular opinion. There is much data to show the damage Like buttons do to people on social media
But I hardly commanded that it be Removed Forthwith or any such bollox
I was more about people pushing the off-topic button, I think. That really annoys the mods.
Yes, I'm not a fan of the Like button and I reckon we should try going without it for a week. If we still miss it, bring it back, we tried and we didn't enjoy it. Fair nuff
But I see no justification at all for the Off topic button. On PB we ALWAYS go offtopic. Pointless
Tories to lose all three, and move to around 22 in the opinion polls; Putin to be deposed ; Trump to be arrested and jailed ; and aliens to arrive, and make their presence felt, on the White House lawn.
All these to happen before August, but then I also would be worried about the impact on my holiday..
Yes, these will all come to pass but not until TSE is in charge.
Like
Like your like.*
*Robert, sort this nonsense out please.
It was an edict from Leon.
I fear in order to satisfy our most notorious senior poster WTF is here to stay.
Jees. It really wasn't an edict!
I said the Like button has several significant drawbacks and negative side-effects (which it does). People go in search of Likes, it encourages herding behaviour, it inhibits fresh and unpopular opinion. There is much data to show the damage Like buttons do to people on social media
But I hardly commanded that it be Removed Forthwith or any such bollox
It says no clear evidence. AOEINEOA. What clear evidence could there be anyway? CCTV of avirus sneaking out of the back door?
In my lifetime there have been two lab leaks in the UK that I am aware of, Smallpox and Foot and Mouth. Both were provable lab leaks. So to say there can't be any clear evidence of a lab leak is obviously not correct.
It may well be a lab leak and there may not be any evidence that can be found, but that doesn't mean it is a lab leak. It may be, it may not be.
However unlike @leon I don't jump to conclusions. If leon didn't come out with so much tosh all the time (Do we all remember the mass alien ships over Ukraine?) we might take him more seriously. I can think of two pieces of evidence he provided for absolute proof it came from a lab that were completely dismantled here (one was from Fox news ffs).
Which is exactly the point: Likely but not proven is probably as good as we are going to get with an outbreak in China. They don't do openness there. So the claim of "no clear evidence" is still susceptible to the response: What clear evidence would you expect, given 1. China and 2. the catastrophic consequences of this leak?
I would want to know why a lab leak is likely, beyond that someone had a notion. There is epidemiological evidence for the epidemic starting in a market, which is also how the previous SARS is known to have started.
Aside from anything else “the nightmare of circumstantial evidence” - as was explicitly stated in the Fauci/Farrar emails at the beginning of the pandemic
Problem is I then have to Google the claim to see if it really is evidence. This is the full quote from Ian Lipkin:
It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.
So it seems not. The recent DNI report states
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
So Covid 19 doesn't match a virus the lab was known to be working on. We have to have some other reason to suspect a lab leak.
"a virus the lab was known to be working on" is rather the point. Again, this is mere absence of evidence. Evidence of absence would require a complete, audited list from the lab of everything it was up to.
Given that there is significant evidence China executed or otherwise silenced - forever - early covid whistleblowers, the idea they wouldn’t destroy evidence at the lab is fanciful. Indeed the opposite is true. They surely DID destroy evidence
Indeed, and they also destroyed evidence at the market. I don't think we've ever argued that China behaved responsibly or openly with regard to what happened.
Indeed.
From what we know, I think we can say for certain that China behaved irresponsibly.
I think the balance of probabilities is that it probably came from the Lab.
I think the less likely, but still possible option, is that it came naturally to and from the market without any involvement of the Lab.
"Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the f---ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it."
Nearly all pandemics come from zoonotic events. Eating “bush meat” or wild animals is a common origin. There was a “wet market” in Wuhan. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. There were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2, which would be consistent with a source of a group of animals in the market, but not with other theories of the virus’s origin.
In other words, the chocolate factory is the wet market. That’s exactly the sort of place people expected a new pandemic to appear.
My first WTF. I am astonished to find so many naive frequentists on a betting site. Does anyone here make any money from it?
Nearly all people are not called Zebedee - probably only 1 in 250,000 at most. If someone comes up to you and says Hi, I am Zebedee, do you discount the possibility of that being true because it is a 250,000/1 shot?
Only once in my life has someone come up to me announcing their name as Zebedee. It must have been autumn 1989, or maybe 1990. It was, in fact, an ironic lie. Her name was Kate.
More to the point, in the case of COVID-19, no-one has appeared and said their name was Zebedee. The SARS-CoV-2 virus has pointedly not commented on its origins. If someone had some actual evidence for a lab leak, that would be a different matter.
All you've offered over the last day or so is AOEINEOA repeated over and over, like a mantra. Yet, in the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source, and with the background probabilities, then whether you are a frequentist or Bayesian, it's obvious what the likely answer is.
Yes. I didn't say "my name is Z" is conclusive, I said it changed the odds.
Every time I have said that AOEINEOA has been in response to an implied claim that AOEIEOA. We are level pegging mantra-wise, and my version has the advantage of being true, so I win. "All you ever say is that it's an oblate spheroid" does not bolster the flat earth case.
"the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source" is mere fantasy. To believe it you have to believe that circumstantial evidence is conclusive in favour of the market and inadmissible in favour of the lab, and to ignore the huge debate about whether the furin cleavage site is likely to have arisen in nature.
It says no clear evidence. AOEINEOA. What clear evidence could there be anyway? CCTV of avirus sneaking out of the back door?
In my lifetime there have been two lab leaks in the UK that I am aware of, Smallpox and Foot and Mouth. Both were provable lab leaks. So to say there can't be any clear evidence of a lab leak is obviously not correct.
It may well be a lab leak and there may not be any evidence that can be found, but that doesn't mean it is a lab leak. It may be, it may not be.
However unlike @leon I don't jump to conclusions. If leon didn't come out with so much tosh all the time (Do we all remember the mass alien ships over Ukraine?) we might take him more seriously. I can think of two pieces of evidence he provided for absolute proof it came from a lab that were completely dismantled here (one was from Fox news ffs).
Which is exactly the point: Likely but not proven is probably as good as we are going to get with an outbreak in China. They don't do openness there. So the claim of "no clear evidence" is still susceptible to the response: What clear evidence would you expect, given 1. China and 2. the catastrophic consequences of this leak?
I would want to know why a lab leak is likely, beyond that someone had a notion. There is epidemiological evidence for the epidemic starting in a market, which is also how the previous SARS is known to have started.
Aside from anything else “the nightmare of circumstantial evidence” - as was explicitly stated in the Fauci/Farrar emails at the beginning of the pandemic
Problem is I then have to Google the claim to see if it really is evidence. This is the full quote from Ian Lipkin:
It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.
So it seems not. The recent DNI report states
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
So Covid 19 doesn't match a virus the lab was known to be working on. We have to have some other reason to suspect a lab leak.
"a virus the lab was known to be working on" is rather the point. Again, this is mere absence of evidence. Evidence of absence would require a complete, audited list from the lab of everything it was up to.
Given that there is significant evidence China executed or otherwise silenced - forever - early covid whistleblowers, the idea they wouldn’t destroy evidence at the lab is fanciful. Indeed the opposite is true. They surely DID destroy evidence
Indeed, and they also destroyed evidence at the market. I don't think we've ever argued that China behaved responsibly or openly with regard to what happened.
Indeed.
From what we know, I think we can say for certain that China behaved irresponsibly.
I think the balance of probabilities is that it probably came from the Lab.
I think the less likely, but still possible option, is that it came naturally to and from the market without any involvement of the Lab.
"Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the f---ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it."
Nearly all pandemics come from zoonotic events. Eating “bush meat” or wild animals is a common origin. There was a “wet market” in Wuhan. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. There were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2, which would be consistent with a source of a group of animals in the market, but not with other theories of the virus’s origin.
In other words, the chocolate factory is the wet market. That’s exactly the sort of place people expected a new pandemic to appear.
My first WTF. I am astonished to find so many naive frequentists on a betting site. Does anyone here make any money from it?
Nearly all people are not called Zebedee - probably only 1 in 250,000 at most. If someone comes up to you and says Hi, I am Zebedee, do you discount the possibility of that being true because it is a 250,000/1 shot?
I once worked with a guy called Zebedee. True story.
I believe you, because any frequentist argument collapses in the face of any evidence to the contrary. If you hear that a 90 year old dies in a nursing home you can be virtually certain they died of CVD/cancer/dementia. If you are also told the police are treating it as suspicious, the odds of it being one of those three instantly reverse from long odds on to longer than evens.
In a hope of burying the hatchet:
You have used this analogy (or variations of) several times. It is a good analogy, but does it apply or at least significantly apply.
No lab then probably wet market (dead 90 year old in home)
Lab that is doing related research. You have assumed it is therefore a no brainer (dead 90 year old with bullet wounds) and we are all being idiots by having an open mind
But unlike the dead old person with or without bullet wounds where you would be 99.9% sure he has either died of old person's illness or had been shot you don't know that with Wuhan because you like the rest of us don't have the knowledge and neither do the experts apparently as they can't decide. Why do you think you know better than them?
So just because there is a lab, without the detailed knowledge you don't know that it fits the no brainer scenario (Old people die with dementia, but if you see bullet wounds he has probably been shot). It might be it just moves it to a toss up.
If the experts don't know I suggest it would be arrogant for us to jump to the conclusion that the suspicious circumstances of a lab close by is definitive (unlike the 90 year old with bullet holes)
"the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source" is mere fantasy. To believe it you have to believe that circumstantial evidence is conclusive in favour of the market and inadmissible in favour of the lab, and to ignore the huge debate about whether the furin cleavage site is likely to have arisen in nature.
The evidence for the market is not circumstantial. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. That there were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2 is consistent with a reservoir of infected animals in the market.
I suspect it’s necessary so the mods can act quickly if someone writes something libellous - as long as it’s used appropriately and not for “posts I don’t like” I don’t see the problem.
It says no clear evidence. AOEINEOA. What clear evidence could there be anyway? CCTV of avirus sneaking out of the back door?
In my lifetime there have been two lab leaks in the UK that I am aware of, Smallpox and Foot and Mouth. Both were provable lab leaks. So to say there can't be any clear evidence of a lab leak is obviously not correct.
It may well be a lab leak and there may not be any evidence that can be found, but that doesn't mean it is a lab leak. It may be, it may not be.
However unlike @leon I don't jump to conclusions. If leon didn't come out with so much tosh all the time (Do we all remember the mass alien ships over Ukraine?) we might take him more seriously. I can think of two pieces of evidence he provided for absolute proof it came from a lab that were completely dismantled here (one was from Fox news ffs).
Which is exactly the point: Likely but not proven is probably as good as we are going to get with an outbreak in China. They don't do openness there. So the claim of "no clear evidence" is still susceptible to the response: What clear evidence would you expect, given 1. China and 2. the catastrophic consequences of this leak?
I would want to know why a lab leak is likely, beyond that someone had a notion. There is epidemiological evidence for the epidemic starting in a market, which is also how the previous SARS is known to have started.
Aside from anything else “the nightmare of circumstantial evidence” - as was explicitly stated in the Fauci/Farrar emails at the beginning of the pandemic
Problem is I then have to Google the claim to see if it really is evidence. This is the full quote from Ian Lipkin:
It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.
So it seems not. The recent DNI report states
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
So Covid 19 doesn't match a virus the lab was known to be working on. We have to have some other reason to suspect a lab leak.
"a virus the lab was known to be working on" is rather the point. Again, this is mere absence of evidence. Evidence of absence would require a complete, audited list from the lab of everything it was up to.
Given that there is significant evidence China executed or otherwise silenced - forever - early covid whistleblowers, the idea they wouldn’t destroy evidence at the lab is fanciful. Indeed the opposite is true. They surely DID destroy evidence
Indeed, and they also destroyed evidence at the market. I don't think we've ever argued that China behaved responsibly or openly with regard to what happened.
Indeed.
From what we know, I think we can say for certain that China behaved irresponsibly.
I think the balance of probabilities is that it probably came from the Lab.
I think the less likely, but still possible option, is that it came naturally to and from the market without any involvement of the Lab.
"Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the f---ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it."
Nearly all pandemics come from zoonotic events. Eating “bush meat” or wild animals is a common origin. There was a “wet market” in Wuhan. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. There were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2, which would be consistent with a source of a group of animals in the market, but not with other theories of the virus’s origin.
In other words, the chocolate factory is the wet market. That’s exactly the sort of place people expected a new pandemic to appear.
My first WTF. I am astonished to find so many naive frequentists on a betting site. Does anyone here make any money from it?
Nearly all people are not called Zebedee - probably only 1 in 250,000 at most. If someone comes up to you and says Hi, I am Zebedee, do you discount the possibility of that being true because it is a 250,000/1 shot?
I once worked with a guy called Zebedee. True story.
I believe you, because any frequentist argument collapses in the face of any evidence to the contrary. If you hear that a 90 year old dies in a nursing home you can be virtually certain they died of CVD/cancer/dementia. If you are also told the police are treating it as suspicious, the odds of it being one of those three instantly reverse from long odds on to longer than evens.
In a hope of burying the hatchet:
You have used this analogy (or variations of) several times. It is a good analogy, but does it apply or at least significantly apply.
No lab then probably wet market (dead 90 year old in home)
Lab that is doing related research. You have assumed it is therefore a no brainer (dead 90 year old with bullet wounds) and we are all being idiots by having an open mind
But unlike the dead old person with or without bullet wounds where you would be 99.9% sure he has either died of old person's illness or had been shot you don't know that with Wuhan because you like the rest of us don't have the knowledge and neither do the experts apparently as they can't decide. Why do you think you know better than them?
So just because there is a lab, without the detailed knowledge you don't know that it fits the no brainer scenario (Old people die with dementia, but if you see bullet wounds he has probably been shot). It might be it just moves it to a toss up.
If the experts don't know I suggest it would be arrogant for us to jump to the conclusion that the suspicious circumstances of a lab close by is definitive (unlike the 90 year old with bullet holes)
I have no view on the origin of the virus! I am not campaigning for a pro-lab theory, I am campaigning for basic epistemological rigour in assessing the odds. And the thing is, I see no fallacies being routinely pressed by lab leak theorists, and plenty by marketeers. I am just trying to improve the quality of the argument. We just don't know, and whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
There is now a date for the hearing - September 19 - 21. Mrs Justice Haldane will decide, which is interesting because she decided the ForWomenScotland2 case which ruled that a GRC changes a person's legal sex for all purposes. That is of course contrary to what the SNP argued in Holyrood during the passage of the Bill where they claimed this was merely a small piece of administrative tidying up. But it may make it easier for Westminster to argue that the effect of the GRR Bill does affect the EA and reserved matters and therefore is outwith Holyrood's competence. If @DavidL is around it would be interesting to get his thoughts.
More importantly, it likely means that the outcome, its implications and an almost certain appeal to the Supreme Court will be happening in the run up to a General Election, which may annoy/please different political parties, depending on the outcome, reactions etc.,.
Oh I just noticed the Off Topic button has gone - excellent.
I don't think I have ever used the Flag button, but I am slightly suspicious that you want to get rid of it to delay any future ban. I suspect that might be a vain hope.
"the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source" is mere fantasy. To believe it you have to believe that circumstantial evidence is conclusive in favour of the market and inadmissible in favour of the lab, and to ignore the huge debate about whether the furin cleavage site is likely to have arisen in nature.
The evidence for the market is not circumstantial. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. That there were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2 is consistent with a reservoir of infected animals in the market.
It says no clear evidence. AOEINEOA. What clear evidence could there be anyway? CCTV of avirus sneaking out of the back door?
In my lifetime there have been two lab leaks in the UK that I am aware of, Smallpox and Foot and Mouth. Both were provable lab leaks. So to say there can't be any clear evidence of a lab leak is obviously not correct.
It may well be a lab leak and there may not be any evidence that can be found, but that doesn't mean it is a lab leak. It may be, it may not be.
However unlike @leon I don't jump to conclusions. If leon didn't come out with so much tosh all the time (Do we all remember the mass alien ships over Ukraine?) we might take him more seriously. I can think of two pieces of evidence he provided for absolute proof it came from a lab that were completely dismantled here (one was from Fox news ffs).
Which is exactly the point: Likely but not proven is probably as good as we are going to get with an outbreak in China. They don't do openness there. So the claim of "no clear evidence" is still susceptible to the response: What clear evidence would you expect, given 1. China and 2. the catastrophic consequences of this leak?
I would want to know why a lab leak is likely, beyond that someone had a notion. There is epidemiological evidence for the epidemic starting in a market, which is also how the previous SARS is known to have started.
Aside from anything else “the nightmare of circumstantial evidence” - as was explicitly stated in the Fauci/Farrar emails at the beginning of the pandemic
Problem is I then have to Google the claim to see if it really is evidence. This is the full quote from Ian Lipkin:
It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.
So it seems not. The recent DNI report states
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
So Covid 19 doesn't match a virus the lab was known to be working on. We have to have some other reason to suspect a lab leak.
"a virus the lab was known to be working on" is rather the point. Again, this is mere absence of evidence. Evidence of absence would require a complete, audited list from the lab of everything it was up to.
Given that there is significant evidence China executed or otherwise silenced - forever - early covid whistleblowers, the idea they wouldn’t destroy evidence at the lab is fanciful. Indeed the opposite is true. They surely DID destroy evidence
Indeed, and they also destroyed evidence at the market. I don't think we've ever argued that China behaved responsibly or openly with regard to what happened.
Indeed.
From what we know, I think we can say for certain that China behaved irresponsibly.
I think the balance of probabilities is that it probably came from the Lab.
I think the less likely, but still possible option, is that it came naturally to and from the market without any involvement of the Lab.
"Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the f---ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it."
Nearly all pandemics come from zoonotic events. Eating “bush meat” or wild animals is a common origin. There was a “wet market” in Wuhan. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. There were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2, which would be consistent with a source of a group of animals in the market, but not with other theories of the virus’s origin.
In other words, the chocolate factory is the wet market. That’s exactly the sort of place people expected a new pandemic to appear.
My first WTF. I am astonished to find so many naive frequentists on a betting site. Does anyone here make any money from it?
Nearly all people are not called Zebedee - probably only 1 in 250,000 at most. If someone comes up to you and says Hi, I am Zebedee, do you discount the possibility of that being true because it is a 250,000/1 shot?
I once worked with a guy called Zebedee. True story.
I believe you, because any frequentist argument collapses in the face of any evidence to the contrary. If you hear that a 90 year old dies in a nursing home you can be virtually certain they died of CVD/cancer/dementia. If you are also told the police are treating it as suspicious, the odds of it being one of those three instantly reverse from long odds on to longer than evens.
In a hope of burying the hatchet:
You have used this analogy (or variations of) several times. It is a good analogy, but does it apply or at least significantly apply.
No lab then probably wet market (dead 90 year old in home)
Lab that is doing related research. You have assumed it is therefore a no brainer (dead 90 year old with bullet wounds) and we are all being idiots by having an open mind
But unlike the dead old person with or without bullet wounds where you would be 99.9% sure he has either died of old person's illness or had been shot you don't know that with Wuhan because you like the rest of us don't have the knowledge and neither do the experts apparently as they can't decide. Why do you think you know better than them?
So just because there is a lab, without the detailed knowledge you don't know that it fits the no brainer scenario (Old people die with dementia, but if you see bullet wounds he has probably been shot). It might be it just moves it to a toss up.
If the experts don't know I suggest it would be arrogant for us to jump to the conclusion that the suspicious circumstances of a lab close by is definitive (unlike the 90 year old with bullet holes)
I have no view on the origin of the virus! I am not campaigning for a pro-lab theory, I am campaigning for basic epistemological rigour in assessing the odds. And the thing is, I see no fallacies being routinely pressed by lab leak theorists, and plenty by marketeers. I am just trying to improve the quality of the argument. We just don't know, and whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
OK I have misunderstood. I thought you were in the lab camp 99%. Are there any saying it is the wet market 99% here that you are having to put that argument to. I don't think there are any. The only ones that do say it are only doing so to wind up Leon for fun. I don't think anyone here is decided (other than leon).
I am firmly in the 'I haven't got a clue' camp and I am relying on the consensus of experts who seem to fail to concur
"the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source" is mere fantasy. To believe it you have to believe that circumstantial evidence is conclusive in favour of the market and inadmissible in favour of the lab, and to ignore the huge debate about whether the furin cleavage site is likely to have arisen in nature.
The evidence for the market is not circumstantial. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. That there were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2 is consistent with a reservoir of infected animals in the market.
Is this the same Robert Garry mentioned in private emails, about Sars-Cov 2, at the outset of the pandemic? Emails which were kept private, and had to be FOIA'd into the public domain. Like these:
"On January 31, 2020, Dr. Kristian Andersen wrote in an email to Dr. Fauci and others: “The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered . . . . Eddie [Holmes], Bob [Garry], Mike [Farzan], and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.
Garry then replied:
On February 2, 2020, Garry similarly wrote, “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario . . . . I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature . . . . Of course, in the lab it would be easy . ."
And yet a couple of weeks later Garry co-authored a public paper in Nature, Proximal Origins, which stated:
"However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."
So he went from being "OMG this came from the lab", to "Not a single type of lab based scenario is possible", over a quick lunch?
Gee, I wonder how that happened. And I wonder why you are still relying on "Garry" even now
It says no clear evidence. AOEINEOA. What clear evidence could there be anyway? CCTV of avirus sneaking out of the back door?
In my lifetime there have been two lab leaks in the UK that I am aware of, Smallpox and Foot and Mouth. Both were provable lab leaks. So to say there can't be any clear evidence of a lab leak is obviously not correct.
It may well be a lab leak and there may not be any evidence that can be found, but that doesn't mean it is a lab leak. It may be, it may not be.
However unlike @leon I don't jump to conclusions. If leon didn't come out with so much tosh all the time (Do we all remember the mass alien ships over Ukraine?) we might take him more seriously. I can think of two pieces of evidence he provided for absolute proof it came from a lab that were completely dismantled here (one was from Fox news ffs).
Which is exactly the point: Likely but not proven is probably as good as we are going to get with an outbreak in China. They don't do openness there. So the claim of "no clear evidence" is still susceptible to the response: What clear evidence would you expect, given 1. China and 2. the catastrophic consequences of this leak?
I would want to know why a lab leak is likely, beyond that someone had a notion. There is epidemiological evidence for the epidemic starting in a market, which is also how the previous SARS is known to have started.
Aside from anything else “the nightmare of circumstantial evidence” - as was explicitly stated in the Fauci/Farrar emails at the beginning of the pandemic
Problem is I then have to Google the claim to see if it really is evidence. This is the full quote from Ian Lipkin:
It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.
So it seems not. The recent DNI report states
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
So Covid 19 doesn't match a virus the lab was known to be working on. We have to have some other reason to suspect a lab leak.
"a virus the lab was known to be working on" is rather the point. Again, this is mere absence of evidence. Evidence of absence would require a complete, audited list from the lab of everything it was up to.
Given that there is significant evidence China executed or otherwise silenced - forever - early covid whistleblowers, the idea they wouldn’t destroy evidence at the lab is fanciful. Indeed the opposite is true. They surely DID destroy evidence
Indeed, and they also destroyed evidence at the market. I don't think we've ever argued that China behaved responsibly or openly with regard to what happened.
Indeed.
From what we know, I think we can say for certain that China behaved irresponsibly.
I think the balance of probabilities is that it probably came from the Lab.
I think the less likely, but still possible option, is that it came naturally to and from the market without any involvement of the Lab.
"Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the f---ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it."
Nearly all pandemics come from zoonotic events. Eating “bush meat” or wild animals is a common origin. There was a “wet market” in Wuhan. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. There were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2, which would be consistent with a source of a group of animals in the market, but not with other theories of the virus’s origin.
In other words, the chocolate factory is the wet market. That’s exactly the sort of place people expected a new pandemic to appear.
My first WTF. I am astonished to find so many naive frequentists on a betting site. Does anyone here make any money from it?
Nearly all people are not called Zebedee - probably only 1 in 250,000 at most. If someone comes up to you and says Hi, I am Zebedee, do you discount the possibility of that being true because it is a 250,000/1 shot?
I once worked with a guy called Zebedee. True story.
I believe you, because any frequentist argument collapses in the face of any evidence to the contrary. If you hear that a 90 year old dies in a nursing home you can be virtually certain they died of CVD/cancer/dementia. If you are also told the police are treating it as suspicious, the odds of it being one of those three instantly reverse from long odds on to longer than evens.
In a hope of burying the hatchet:
You have used this analogy (or variations of) several times. It is a good analogy, but does it apply or at least significantly apply.
No lab then probably wet market (dead 90 year old in home)
Lab that is doing related research. You have assumed it is therefore a no brainer (dead 90 year old with bullet wounds) and we are all being idiots by having an open mind
But unlike the dead old person with or without bullet wounds where you would be 99.9% sure he has either died of old person's illness or had been shot you don't know that with Wuhan because you like the rest of us don't have the knowledge and neither do the experts apparently as they can't decide. Why do you think you know better than them?
So just because there is a lab, without the detailed knowledge you don't know that it fits the no brainer scenario (Old people die with dementia, but if you see bullet wounds he has probably been shot). It might be it just moves it to a toss up.
If the experts don't know I suggest it would be arrogant for us to jump to the conclusion that the suspicious circumstances of a lab close by is definitive (unlike the 90 year old with bullet holes)
I have no view on the origin of the virus! I am not campaigning for a pro-lab theory, I am campaigning for basic epistemological rigour in assessing the odds. And the thing is, I see no fallacies being routinely pressed by lab leak theorists, and plenty by marketeers. I am just trying to improve the quality of the argument. We just don't know, and whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
Bollocks. This is what conspiracy theorists do. They claim equivalence, they claim they just want to test theories, they say they don't have any skin in the game, it's all just an epistemological discussion.
It says no clear evidence. AOEINEOA. What clear evidence could there be anyway? CCTV of avirus sneaking out of the back door?
In my lifetime there have been two lab leaks in the UK that I am aware of, Smallpox and Foot and Mouth. Both were provable lab leaks. So to say there can't be any clear evidence of a lab leak is obviously not correct.
It may well be a lab leak and there may not be any evidence that can be found, but that doesn't mean it is a lab leak. It may be, it may not be.
However unlike @leon I don't jump to conclusions. If leon didn't come out with so much tosh all the time (Do we all remember the mass alien ships over Ukraine?) we might take him more seriously. I can think of two pieces of evidence he provided for absolute proof it came from a lab that were completely dismantled here (one was from Fox news ffs).
Which is exactly the point: Likely but not proven is probably as good as we are going to get with an outbreak in China. They don't do openness there. So the claim of "no clear evidence" is still susceptible to the response: What clear evidence would you expect, given 1. China and 2. the catastrophic consequences of this leak?
I would want to know why a lab leak is likely, beyond that someone had a notion. There is epidemiological evidence for the epidemic starting in a market, which is also how the previous SARS is known to have started.
Aside from anything else “the nightmare of circumstantial evidence” - as was explicitly stated in the Fauci/Farrar emails at the beginning of the pandemic
Problem is I then have to Google the claim to see if it really is evidence. This is the full quote from Ian Lipkin:
It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.
So it seems not. The recent DNI report states
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
So Covid 19 doesn't match a virus the lab was known to be working on. We have to have some other reason to suspect a lab leak.
"a virus the lab was known to be working on" is rather the point. Again, this is mere absence of evidence. Evidence of absence would require a complete, audited list from the lab of everything it was up to.
Given that there is significant evidence China executed or otherwise silenced - forever - early covid whistleblowers, the idea they wouldn’t destroy evidence at the lab is fanciful. Indeed the opposite is true. They surely DID destroy evidence
Indeed, and they also destroyed evidence at the market. I don't think we've ever argued that China behaved responsibly or openly with regard to what happened.
Indeed.
From what we know, I think we can say for certain that China behaved irresponsibly.
I think the balance of probabilities is that it probably came from the Lab.
I think the less likely, but still possible option, is that it came naturally to and from the market without any involvement of the Lab.
"Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the f---ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it."
Nearly all pandemics come from zoonotic events. Eating “bush meat” or wild animals is a common origin. There was a “wet market” in Wuhan. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. There were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2, which would be consistent with a source of a group of animals in the market, but not with other theories of the virus’s origin.
In other words, the chocolate factory is the wet market. That’s exactly the sort of place people expected a new pandemic to appear.
My first WTF. I am astonished to find so many naive frequentists on a betting site. Does anyone here make any money from it?
Nearly all people are not called Zebedee - probably only 1 in 250,000 at most. If someone comes up to you and says Hi, I am Zebedee, do you discount the possibility of that being true because it is a 250,000/1 shot?
I once worked with a guy called Zebedee. True story.
I believe you, because any frequentist argument collapses in the face of any evidence to the contrary. If you hear that a 90 year old dies in a nursing home you can be virtually certain they died of CVD/cancer/dementia. If you are also told the police are treating it as suspicious, the odds of it being one of those three instantly reverse from long odds on to longer than evens.
In a hope of burying the hatchet:
You have used this analogy (or variations of) several times. It is a good analogy, but does it apply or at least significantly apply.
No lab then probably wet market (dead 90 year old in home)
Lab that is doing related research. You have assumed it is therefore a no brainer (dead 90 year old with bullet wounds) and we are all being idiots by having an open mind
But unlike the dead old person with or without bullet wounds where you would be 99.9% sure he has either died of old person's illness or had been shot you don't know that with Wuhan because you like the rest of us don't have the knowledge and neither do the experts apparently as they can't decide. Why do you think you know better than them?
So just because there is a lab, without the detailed knowledge you don't know that it fits the no brainer scenario (Old people die with dementia, but if you see bullet wounds he has probably been shot). It might be it just moves it to a toss up.
If the experts don't know I suggest it would be arrogant for us to jump to the conclusion that the suspicious circumstances of a lab close by is definitive (unlike the 90 year old with bullet holes)
I have no view on the origin of the virus! I am not campaigning for a pro-lab theory, I am campaigning for basic epistemological rigour in assessing the odds. And the thing is, I see no fallacies being routinely pressed by lab leak theorists, and plenty by marketeers. I am just trying to improve the quality of the argument. We just don't know, and whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
Bollocks. This is what conspiracy theorists do. They claim equivalence, they claim they just want to test theories, they say they don't have any skin in the game, it's all just an epistemological discussion.
And you are quoting completely discredited scientists
"the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source" is mere fantasy. To believe it you have to believe that circumstantial evidence is conclusive in favour of the market and inadmissible in favour of the lab, and to ignore the huge debate about whether the furin cleavage site is likely to have arisen in nature.
The evidence for the market is not circumstantial. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. That there were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2 is consistent with a reservoir of infected animals in the market.
It says no clear evidence. AOEINEOA. What clear evidence could there be anyway? CCTV of avirus sneaking out of the back door?
In my lifetime there have been two lab leaks in the UK that I am aware of, Smallpox and Foot and Mouth. Both were provable lab leaks. So to say there can't be any clear evidence of a lab leak is obviously not correct.
It may well be a lab leak and there may not be any evidence that can be found, but that doesn't mean it is a lab leak. It may be, it may not be.
However unlike @leon I don't jump to conclusions. If leon didn't come out with so much tosh all the time (Do we all remember the mass alien ships over Ukraine?) we might take him more seriously. I can think of two pieces of evidence he provided for absolute proof it came from a lab that were completely dismantled here (one was from Fox news ffs).
Which is exactly the point: Likely but not proven is probably as good as we are going to get with an outbreak in China. They don't do openness there. So the claim of "no clear evidence" is still susceptible to the response: What clear evidence would you expect, given 1. China and 2. the catastrophic consequences of this leak?
I would want to know why a lab leak is likely, beyond that someone had a notion. There is epidemiological evidence for the epidemic starting in a market, which is also how the previous SARS is known to have started.
Aside from anything else “the nightmare of circumstantial evidence” - as was explicitly stated in the Fauci/Farrar emails at the beginning of the pandemic
Problem is I then have to Google the claim to see if it really is evidence. This is the full quote from Ian Lipkin:
It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.
So it seems not. The recent DNI report states
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
So Covid 19 doesn't match a virus the lab was known to be working on. We have to have some other reason to suspect a lab leak.
"a virus the lab was known to be working on" is rather the point. Again, this is mere absence of evidence. Evidence of absence would require a complete, audited list from the lab of everything it was up to.
Given that there is significant evidence China executed or otherwise silenced - forever - early covid whistleblowers, the idea they wouldn’t destroy evidence at the lab is fanciful. Indeed the opposite is true. They surely DID destroy evidence
Indeed, and they also destroyed evidence at the market. I don't think we've ever argued that China behaved responsibly or openly with regard to what happened.
Indeed.
From what we know, I think we can say for certain that China behaved irresponsibly.
I think the balance of probabilities is that it probably came from the Lab.
I think the less likely, but still possible option, is that it came naturally to and from the market without any involvement of the Lab.
"Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the f---ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it."
Nearly all pandemics come from zoonotic events. Eating “bush meat” or wild animals is a common origin. There was a “wet market” in Wuhan. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. There were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2, which would be consistent with a source of a group of animals in the market, but not with other theories of the virus’s origin.
In other words, the chocolate factory is the wet market. That’s exactly the sort of place people expected a new pandemic to appear.
My first WTF. I am astonished to find so many naive frequentists on a betting site. Does anyone here make any money from it?
Nearly all people are not called Zebedee - probably only 1 in 250,000 at most. If someone comes up to you and says Hi, I am Zebedee, do you discount the possibility of that being true because it is a 250,000/1 shot?
I once worked with a guy called Zebedee. True story.
I believe you, because any frequentist argument collapses in the face of any evidence to the contrary. If you hear that a 90 year old dies in a nursing home you can be virtually certain they died of CVD/cancer/dementia. If you are also told the police are treating it as suspicious, the odds of it being one of those three instantly reverse from long odds on to longer than evens.
In a hope of burying the hatchet:
You have used this analogy (or variations of) several times. It is a good analogy, but does it apply or at least significantly apply.
No lab then probably wet market (dead 90 year old in home)
Lab that is doing related research. You have assumed it is therefore a no brainer (dead 90 year old with bullet wounds) and we are all being idiots by having an open mind
But unlike the dead old person with or without bullet wounds where you would be 99.9% sure he has either died of old person's illness or had been shot you don't know that with Wuhan because you like the rest of us don't have the knowledge and neither do the experts apparently as they can't decide. Why do you think you know better than them?
So just because there is a lab, without the detailed knowledge you don't know that it fits the no brainer scenario (Old people die with dementia, but if you see bullet wounds he has probably been shot). It might be it just moves it to a toss up.
If the experts don't know I suggest it would be arrogant for us to jump to the conclusion that the suspicious circumstances of a lab close by is definitive (unlike the 90 year old with bullet holes)
It's not that the experts don't know, it is that many of them - the most deeply involved, the horribly implicated - are actively lying, and have been doing so since the notorious Lancet Letter of early 2020
Anyone who signed the Lancet Letter, or who co-authored the Proximal Origins paper, must be ignored FOR A START
"the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source" is mere fantasy. To believe it you have to believe that circumstantial evidence is conclusive in favour of the market and inadmissible in favour of the lab, and to ignore the huge debate about whether the furin cleavage site is likely to have arisen in nature.
The evidence for the market is not circumstantial. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. That there were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2 is consistent with a reservoir of infected animals in the market.
On a personal note yesterday's mayhem is over and this morning I exchanged on my Dad's house and it is being cleared on Friday for the new owners to move in. I could have done without all of that. Does anyone want a fridge? I have 5 to dispose of stacked in his garage. Only joking as I assume 4 of them don't work.
"the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source" is mere fantasy. To believe it you have to believe that circumstantial evidence is conclusive in favour of the market and inadmissible in favour of the lab, and to ignore the huge debate about whether the furin cleavage site is likely to have arisen in nature.
The evidence for the market is not circumstantial. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. That there were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2 is consistent with a reservoir of infected animals in the market.
It is, if course, entirely possible for the wet market to be both the focal point, and it to have been a lab leak.
That., of course, it almost certainly what happened. Leaked in the lab - the CDC more likely than the WIV - simply because of proximity - 300 metres away. Infected but pre-symptomatic lab worker went from the CDC to the market to buy a chicken. Bingo. Superspreader event, clustered around the market
It says no clear evidence. AOEINEOA. What clear evidence could there be anyway? CCTV of avirus sneaking out of the back door?
In my lifetime there have been two lab leaks in the UK that I am aware of, Smallpox and Foot and Mouth. Both were provable lab leaks. So to say there can't be any clear evidence of a lab leak is obviously not correct.
It may well be a lab leak and there may not be any evidence that can be found, but that doesn't mean it is a lab leak. It may be, it may not be.
However unlike @leon I don't jump to conclusions. If leon didn't come out with so much tosh all the time (Do we all remember the mass alien ships over Ukraine?) we might take him more seriously. I can think of two pieces of evidence he provided for absolute proof it came from a lab that were completely dismantled here (one was from Fox news ffs).
Which is exactly the point: Likely but not proven is probably as good as we are going to get with an outbreak in China. They don't do openness there. So the claim of "no clear evidence" is still susceptible to the response: What clear evidence would you expect, given 1. China and 2. the catastrophic consequences of this leak?
I would want to know why a lab leak is likely, beyond that someone had a notion. There is epidemiological evidence for the epidemic starting in a market, which is also how the previous SARS is known to have started.
Aside from anything else “the nightmare of circumstantial evidence” - as was explicitly stated in the Fauci/Farrar emails at the beginning of the pandemic
Problem is I then have to Google the claim to see if it really is evidence. This is the full quote from Ian Lipkin:
It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.
So it seems not. The recent DNI report states
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
So Covid 19 doesn't match a virus the lab was known to be working on. We have to have some other reason to suspect a lab leak.
"a virus the lab was known to be working on" is rather the point. Again, this is mere absence of evidence. Evidence of absence would require a complete, audited list from the lab of everything it was up to.
Given that there is significant evidence China executed or otherwise silenced - forever - early covid whistleblowers, the idea they wouldn’t destroy evidence at the lab is fanciful. Indeed the opposite is true. They surely DID destroy evidence
Indeed, and they also destroyed evidence at the market. I don't think we've ever argued that China behaved responsibly or openly with regard to what happened.
Indeed.
From what we know, I think we can say for certain that China behaved irresponsibly.
I think the balance of probabilities is that it probably came from the Lab.
I think the less likely, but still possible option, is that it came naturally to and from the market without any involvement of the Lab.
"Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the f---ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it."
Nearly all pandemics come from zoonotic events. Eating “bush meat” or wild animals is a common origin. There was a “wet market” in Wuhan. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. There were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2, which would be consistent with a source of a group of animals in the market, but not with other theories of the virus’s origin.
In other words, the chocolate factory is the wet market. That’s exactly the sort of place people expected a new pandemic to appear.
My first WTF. I am astonished to find so many naive frequentists on a betting site. Does anyone here make any money from it?
Nearly all people are not called Zebedee - probably only 1 in 250,000 at most. If someone comes up to you and says Hi, I am Zebedee, do you discount the possibility of that being true because it is a 250,000/1 shot?
I once worked with a guy called Zebedee. True story.
I believe you, because any frequentist argument collapses in the face of any evidence to the contrary. If you hear that a 90 year old dies in a nursing home you can be virtually certain they died of CVD/cancer/dementia. If you are also told the police are treating it as suspicious, the odds of it being one of those three instantly reverse from long odds on to longer than evens.
In a hope of burying the hatchet:
You have used this analogy (or variations of) several times. It is a good analogy, but does it apply or at least significantly apply.
No lab then probably wet market (dead 90 year old in home)
Lab that is doing related research. You have assumed it is therefore a no brainer (dead 90 year old with bullet wounds) and we are all being idiots by having an open mind
But unlike the dead old person with or without bullet wounds where you would be 99.9% sure he has either died of old person's illness or had been shot you don't know that with Wuhan because you like the rest of us don't have the knowledge and neither do the experts apparently as they can't decide. Why do you think you know better than them?
So just because there is a lab, without the detailed knowledge you don't know that it fits the no brainer scenario (Old people die with dementia, but if you see bullet wounds he has probably been shot). It might be it just moves it to a toss up.
If the experts don't know I suggest it would be arrogant for us to jump to the conclusion that the suspicious circumstances of a lab close by is definitive (unlike the 90 year old with bullet holes)
I have no view on the origin of the virus! I am not campaigning for a pro-lab theory, I am campaigning for basic epistemological rigour in assessing the odds. And the thing is, I see no fallacies being routinely pressed by lab leak theorists, and plenty by marketeers. I am just trying to improve the quality of the argument. We just don't know, and whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
Bollocks. This is what conspiracy theorists do. They claim equivalence, they claim they just want to test theories, they say they don't have any skin in the game, it's all just an epistemological discussion.
You are really, really invested in this, aren't you? Ask yourself why there is any reason to be.
It says no clear evidence. AOEINEOA. What clear evidence could there be anyway? CCTV of avirus sneaking out of the back door?
In my lifetime there have been two lab leaks in the UK that I am aware of, Smallpox and Foot and Mouth. Both were provable lab leaks. So to say there can't be any clear evidence of a lab leak is obviously not correct.
It may well be a lab leak and there may not be any evidence that can be found, but that doesn't mean it is a lab leak. It may be, it may not be.
However unlike @leon I don't jump to conclusions. If leon didn't come out with so much tosh all the time (Do we all remember the mass alien ships over Ukraine?) we might take him more seriously. I can think of two pieces of evidence he provided for absolute proof it came from a lab that were completely dismantled here (one was from Fox news ffs).
Which is exactly the point: Likely but not proven is probably as good as we are going to get with an outbreak in China. They don't do openness there. So the claim of "no clear evidence" is still susceptible to the response: What clear evidence would you expect, given 1. China and 2. the catastrophic consequences of this leak?
I would want to know why a lab leak is likely, beyond that someone had a notion. There is epidemiological evidence for the epidemic starting in a market, which is also how the previous SARS is known to have started.
Aside from anything else “the nightmare of circumstantial evidence” - as was explicitly stated in the Fauci/Farrar emails at the beginning of the pandemic
Problem is I then have to Google the claim to see if it really is evidence. This is the full quote from Ian Lipkin:
It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.
So it seems not. The recent DNI report states
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
So Covid 19 doesn't match a virus the lab was known to be working on. We have to have some other reason to suspect a lab leak.
"a virus the lab was known to be working on" is rather the point. Again, this is mere absence of evidence. Evidence of absence would require a complete, audited list from the lab of everything it was up to.
Given that there is significant evidence China executed or otherwise silenced - forever - early covid whistleblowers, the idea they wouldn’t destroy evidence at the lab is fanciful. Indeed the opposite is true. They surely DID destroy evidence
Indeed, and they also destroyed evidence at the market. I don't think we've ever argued that China behaved responsibly or openly with regard to what happened.
Indeed.
From what we know, I think we can say for certain that China behaved irresponsibly.
I think the balance of probabilities is that it probably came from the Lab.
I think the less likely, but still possible option, is that it came naturally to and from the market without any involvement of the Lab.
"Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the f---ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it."
Nearly all pandemics come from zoonotic events. Eating “bush meat” or wild animals is a common origin. There was a “wet market” in Wuhan. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. There were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2, which would be consistent with a source of a group of animals in the market, but not with other theories of the virus’s origin.
In other words, the chocolate factory is the wet market. That’s exactly the sort of place people expected a new pandemic to appear.
My first WTF. I am astonished to find so many naive frequentists on a betting site. Does anyone here make any money from it?
Nearly all people are not called Zebedee - probably only 1 in 250,000 at most. If someone comes up to you and says Hi, I am Zebedee, do you discount the possibility of that being true because it is a 250,000/1 shot?
I once worked with a guy called Zebedee. True story.
I believe you, because any frequentist argument collapses in the face of any evidence to the contrary. If you hear that a 90 year old dies in a nursing home you can be virtually certain they died of CVD/cancer/dementia. If you are also told the police are treating it as suspicious, the odds of it being one of those three instantly reverse from long odds on to longer than evens.
In a hope of burying the hatchet:
You have used this analogy (or variations of) several times. It is a good analogy, but does it apply or at least significantly apply.
No lab then probably wet market (dead 90 year old in home)
Lab that is doing related research. You have assumed it is therefore a no brainer (dead 90 year old with bullet wounds) and we are all being idiots by having an open mind
But unlike the dead old person with or without bullet wounds where you would be 99.9% sure he has either died of old person's illness or had been shot you don't know that with Wuhan because you like the rest of us don't have the knowledge and neither do the experts apparently as they can't decide. Why do you think you know better than them?
So just because there is a lab, without the detailed knowledge you don't know that it fits the no brainer scenario (Old people die with dementia, but if you see bullet wounds he has probably been shot). It might be it just moves it to a toss up.
If the experts don't know I suggest it would be arrogant for us to jump to the conclusion that the suspicious circumstances of a lab close by is definitive (unlike the 90 year old with bullet holes)
I have no view on the origin of the virus! I am not campaigning for a pro-lab theory, I am campaigning for basic epistemological rigour in assessing the odds. And the thing is, I see no fallacies being routinely pressed by lab leak theorists, and plenty by marketeers. I am just trying to improve the quality of the argument. We just don't know, and whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
Bollocks. This is what conspiracy theorists do. They claim equivalence, they claim they just want to test theories, they say they don't have any skin in the game, it's all just an epistemological discussion.
You are really, really invested in this, aren't you? Ask yourself why there is any reason to be.
An academic, I believe, possibly a scientist?
Most of the ardent marketeers on PB are in science in some way. @turbotubbs etc
Which is a shame, as it means we can't rely on the people who are supposed to be the experts. These physicians will not heal themselves
"the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source" is mere fantasy. To believe it you have to believe that circumstantial evidence is conclusive in favour of the market and inadmissible in favour of the lab, and to ignore the huge debate about whether the furin cleavage site is likely to have arisen in nature.
The evidence for the market is not circumstantial. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. That there were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2 is consistent with a reservoir of infected animals in the market.
"the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source" is mere fantasy. To believe it you have to believe that circumstantial evidence is conclusive in favour of the market and inadmissible in favour of the lab, and to ignore the huge debate about whether the furin cleavage site is likely to have arisen in nature.
The evidence for the market is not circumstantial. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. That there were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2 is consistent with a reservoir of infected animals in the market.
Yes. I deliberately didn't cherrypick the first paper I came across supporting my argument and post a link to it. Anyone who takes the trouble to Google furin cleavage artificial will see the number of papers on the other side.
"the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source" is mere fantasy. To believe it you have to believe that circumstantial evidence is conclusive in favour of the market and inadmissible in favour of the lab, and to ignore the huge debate about whether the furin cleavage site is likely to have arisen in nature.
The evidence for the market is not circumstantial. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. That there were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2 is consistent with a reservoir of infected animals in the market.
It is, if course, entirely possible for the wet market to be both the focal point, and it to have been a lab leak.
That., of course, it almost certainly what happened. Leaked in the lab - the CDC more likely than the WIV - simply because of proximity - 300 metres away. Infected but pre-symptomatic lab worker went from the CDC to the market to buy a chicken. Bingo. Superspreader event, clustered around the market
It's not obvious to me.
Wild -> lab -> market is plausible and you assert that the wild -> lab bit was happening (and I have no reason to disbelieve this) but the lab -> market bit still requires some lapses that are fairly rare and the timing has to be just right (they do happen, it is certainly possible)
Wild -> market is also plausible and while you assert that wild -> animal in market is unlikely (and again I have no reason to disbelieve) there's also potential for a chain of transmission through animals (or containers, surfaces, air) to market or even indeed a person infected elsewhere (not from lab, closer to large populations of bats) taking it to the market.
I don't see a strong reason to favour one of those over the other, on the available evidence.
All agencies continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection.
The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2.
It says no clear evidence. AOEINEOA. What clear evidence could there be anyway? CCTV of avirus sneaking out of the back door?
In my lifetime there have been two lab leaks in the UK that I am aware of, Smallpox and Foot and Mouth. Both were provable lab leaks. So to say there can't be any clear evidence of a lab leak is obviously not correct.
It may well be a lab leak and there may not be any evidence that can be found, but that doesn't mean it is a lab leak. It may be, it may not be.
However unlike @leon I don't jump to conclusions. If leon didn't come out with so much tosh all the time (Do we all remember the mass alien ships over Ukraine?) we might take him more seriously. I can think of two pieces of evidence he provided for absolute proof it came from a lab that were completely dismantled here (one was from Fox news ffs).
Which is exactly the point: Likely but not proven is probably as good as we are going to get with an outbreak in China. They don't do openness there. So the claim of "no clear evidence" is still susceptible to the response: What clear evidence would you expect, given 1. China and 2. the catastrophic consequences of this leak?
I would want to know why a lab leak is likely, beyond that someone had a notion. There is epidemiological evidence for the epidemic starting in a market, which is also how the previous SARS is known to have started.
Aside from anything else “the nightmare of circumstantial evidence” - as was explicitly stated in the Fauci/Farrar emails at the beginning of the pandemic
Problem is I then have to Google the claim to see if it really is evidence. This is the full quote from Ian Lipkin:
It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.
So it seems not. The recent DNI report states
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
So Covid 19 doesn't match a virus the lab was known to be working on. We have to have some other reason to suspect a lab leak.
"a virus the lab was known to be working on" is rather the point. Again, this is mere absence of evidence. Evidence of absence would require a complete, audited list from the lab of everything it was up to.
Given that there is significant evidence China executed or otherwise silenced - forever - early covid whistleblowers, the idea they wouldn’t destroy evidence at the lab is fanciful. Indeed the opposite is true. They surely DID destroy evidence
Indeed, and they also destroyed evidence at the market. I don't think we've ever argued that China behaved responsibly or openly with regard to what happened.
Indeed.
From what we know, I think we can say for certain that China behaved irresponsibly.
I think the balance of probabilities is that it probably came from the Lab.
I think the less likely, but still possible option, is that it came naturally to and from the market without any involvement of the Lab.
"Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the f---ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it."
Nearly all pandemics come from zoonotic events. Eating “bush meat” or wild animals is a common origin. There was a “wet market” in Wuhan. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. There were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2, which would be consistent with a source of a group of animals in the market, but not with other theories of the virus’s origin.
In other words, the chocolate factory is the wet market. That’s exactly the sort of place people expected a new pandemic to appear.
My first WTF. I am astonished to find so many naive frequentists on a betting site. Does anyone here make any money from it?
Nearly all people are not called Zebedee - probably only 1 in 250,000 at most. If someone comes up to you and says Hi, I am Zebedee, do you discount the possibility of that being true because it is a 250,000/1 shot?
I once worked with a guy called Zebedee. True story.
I believe you, because any frequentist argument collapses in the face of any evidence to the contrary. If you hear that a 90 year old dies in a nursing home you can be virtually certain they died of CVD/cancer/dementia. If you are also told the police are treating it as suspicious, the odds of it being one of those three instantly reverse from long odds on to longer than evens.
In a hope of burying the hatchet:
You have used this analogy (or variations of) several times. It is a good analogy, but does it apply or at least significantly apply.
No lab then probably wet market (dead 90 year old in home)
Lab that is doing related research. You have assumed it is therefore a no brainer (dead 90 year old with bullet wounds) and we are all being idiots by having an open mind
But unlike the dead old person with or without bullet wounds where you would be 99.9% sure he has either died of old person's illness or had been shot you don't know that with Wuhan because you like the rest of us don't have the knowledge and neither do the experts apparently as they can't decide. Why do you think you know better than them?
So just because there is a lab, without the detailed knowledge you don't know that it fits the no brainer scenario (Old people die with dementia, but if you see bullet wounds he has probably been shot). It might be it just moves it to a toss up.
If the experts don't know I suggest it would be arrogant for us to jump to the conclusion that the suspicious circumstances of a lab close by is definitive (unlike the 90 year old with bullet holes)
I have no view on the origin of the virus! I am not campaigning for a pro-lab theory, I am campaigning for basic epistemological rigour in assessing the odds. And the thing is, I see no fallacies being routinely pressed by lab leak theorists, and plenty by marketeers. I am just trying to improve the quality of the argument. We just don't know, and whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
Bollocks. This is what conspiracy theorists do. They claim equivalence, they claim they just want to test theories, they say they don't have any skin in the game, it's all just an epistemological discussion.
You are really, really invested in this, aren't you? Ask yourself why there is any reason to be.
I know why I'm invested in this. Pandemic response is part of my job. Why are you invested in this?
It says no clear evidence. AOEINEOA. What clear evidence could there be anyway? CCTV of avirus sneaking out of the back door?
In my lifetime there have been two lab leaks in the UK that I am aware of, Smallpox and Foot and Mouth. Both were provable lab leaks. So to say there can't be any clear evidence of a lab leak is obviously not correct.
It may well be a lab leak and there may not be any evidence that can be found, but that doesn't mean it is a lab leak. It may be, it may not be.
However unlike @leon I don't jump to conclusions. If leon didn't come out with so much tosh all the time (Do we all remember the mass alien ships over Ukraine?) we might take him more seriously. I can think of two pieces of evidence he provided for absolute proof it came from a lab that were completely dismantled here (one was from Fox news ffs).
Which is exactly the point: Likely but not proven is probably as good as we are going to get with an outbreak in China. They don't do openness there. So the claim of "no clear evidence" is still susceptible to the response: What clear evidence would you expect, given 1. China and 2. the catastrophic consequences of this leak?
I would want to know why a lab leak is likely, beyond that someone had a notion. There is epidemiological evidence for the epidemic starting in a market, which is also how the previous SARS is known to have started.
Aside from anything else “the nightmare of circumstantial evidence” - as was explicitly stated in the Fauci/Farrar emails at the beginning of the pandemic
Problem is I then have to Google the claim to see if it really is evidence. This is the full quote from Ian Lipkin:
It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.
So it seems not. The recent DNI report states
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
So Covid 19 doesn't match a virus the lab was known to be working on. We have to have some other reason to suspect a lab leak.
"a virus the lab was known to be working on" is rather the point. Again, this is mere absence of evidence. Evidence of absence would require a complete, audited list from the lab of everything it was up to.
Given that there is significant evidence China executed or otherwise silenced - forever - early covid whistleblowers, the idea they wouldn’t destroy evidence at the lab is fanciful. Indeed the opposite is true. They surely DID destroy evidence
Indeed, and they also destroyed evidence at the market. I don't think we've ever argued that China behaved responsibly or openly with regard to what happened.
Indeed.
From what we know, I think we can say for certain that China behaved irresponsibly.
I think the balance of probabilities is that it probably came from the Lab.
I think the less likely, but still possible option, is that it came naturally to and from the market without any involvement of the Lab.
"Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the f---ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it."
Nearly all pandemics come from zoonotic events. Eating “bush meat” or wild animals is a common origin. There was a “wet market” in Wuhan. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. There were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2, which would be consistent with a source of a group of animals in the market, but not with other theories of the virus’s origin.
In other words, the chocolate factory is the wet market. That’s exactly the sort of place people expected a new pandemic to appear.
My first WTF. I am astonished to find so many naive frequentists on a betting site. Does anyone here make any money from it?
Nearly all people are not called Zebedee - probably only 1 in 250,000 at most. If someone comes up to you and says Hi, I am Zebedee, do you discount the possibility of that being true because it is a 250,000/1 shot?
I once worked with a guy called Zebedee. True story.
I believe you, because any frequentist argument collapses in the face of any evidence to the contrary. If you hear that a 90 year old dies in a nursing home you can be virtually certain they died of CVD/cancer/dementia. If you are also told the police are treating it as suspicious, the odds of it being one of those three instantly reverse from long odds on to longer than evens.
In a hope of burying the hatchet:
You have used this analogy (or variations of) several times. It is a good analogy, but does it apply or at least significantly apply.
No lab then probably wet market (dead 90 year old in home)
Lab that is doing related research. You have assumed it is therefore a no brainer (dead 90 year old with bullet wounds) and we are all being idiots by having an open mind
But unlike the dead old person with or without bullet wounds where you would be 99.9% sure he has either died of old person's illness or had been shot you don't know that with Wuhan because you like the rest of us don't have the knowledge and neither do the experts apparently as they can't decide. Why do you think you know better than them?
So just because there is a lab, without the detailed knowledge you don't know that it fits the no brainer scenario (Old people die with dementia, but if you see bullet wounds he has probably been shot). It might be it just moves it to a toss up.
If the experts don't know I suggest it would be arrogant for us to jump to the conclusion that the suspicious circumstances of a lab close by is definitive (unlike the 90 year old with bullet holes)
I have no view on the origin of the virus! I am not campaigning for a pro-lab theory, I am campaigning for basic epistemological rigour in assessing the odds. And the thing is, I see no fallacies being routinely pressed by lab leak theorists, and plenty by marketeers. I am just trying to improve the quality of the argument. We just don't know, and whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
Bollocks. This is what conspiracy theorists do. They claim equivalence, they claim they just want to test theories, they say they don't have any skin in the game, it's all just an epistemological discussion.
You are really, really invested in this, aren't you? Ask yourself why there is any reason to be.
An academic, I believe, possibly a scientist?
Most of the ardent marketeers on PB are in science in some way. @turbotubbs etc
Which is a shame, as it means we can't rely on the people who are supposed to be the experts. These physicians will not heal themselves
bondegezou has, I think (from posts) some degree of expertise in this area. I may be wrong.
turbo and myself do not, particularly, but we do have an undertstanding of how science reaches conclusions from evidence.
I'd describe myself as an ardent agnostic on this, pending more evidence.
ETA: IIRC, bondegezou had some involvement in one of the SAGE committees, but I do not know in which area
"Proximal Origin was written by February 4, 2020, less than 48 hours after each of the authors privately expressed concern on the teleconference that COVID-19 originated in a lab."
“I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario . . . . I just can’t figure out how this [Coronavirus] gets accomplished in nature . . . . Of course, in the lab it would be easy . ."
To publicly publishing this, just 48 hours later:
"However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."
That's some amazing science, right there. Incredible. Nobel-worthy. Just 48 hours to do a complete 180. Wow. Hopefully we can see the science that proved that lab leak was simply impossible, that changed their minds quicker than most people change their choice of supper
All agencies continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection.
The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2.
"the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source" is mere fantasy. To believe it you have to believe that circumstantial evidence is conclusive in favour of the market and inadmissible in favour of the lab, and to ignore the huge debate about whether the furin cleavage site is likely to have arisen in nature.
The evidence for the market is not circumstantial. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. That there were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2 is consistent with a reservoir of infected animals in the market.
It is, if course, entirely possible for the wet market to be both the focal point, and it to have been a lab leak.
That., of course, it almost certainly what happened. Leaked in the lab - the CDC more likely than the WIV - simply because of proximity - 300 metres away. Infected but pre-symptomatic lab worker went from the CDC to the market to buy a chicken. Bingo. Superspreader event, clustered around the market
It's not obvious to me.
Wild -> lab -> market is plausible and you assert that the wild -> lab bit was happening (and I have no reason to disbelieve this) but the lab -> market bit still requires some lapses that are fairly rare and the timing has to be just right (they do happen, it is certainly possible)
Wild -> market is also plausible and while you assert that wild -> animal in market is unlikely (and again I have no reason to disbelieve) there's also potential for a chain of transmission through animals (or containers, surfaces, air) to market or even indeed a person infected elsewhere (not from lab, closer to large populations of bats) taking it to the market.
I don't see a strong reason to favour one of those over the other, on the available evidence.
If the outbreak had happened in any other city in China, then a purely zoonotic origin would be the most likely scenario. That it happened in the same city where bat diseases were being actively studied skews the probabilities the other way around.
BREAKING: Walt Nauta’s arraignment has been delayed until July 6. He he has been unable to find local counsel to represent him and he was unable to be present in court today as a result of flight delays. https://twitter.com/AnnaBower/status/1673691719051689985
Trump's trial is now probably unavoidably delayed until after the start of the primaries - which was always pretty likely, but the prosecution had given him the option of a speedy trial should have have wanted it. Trumpworld is clearly going with the usual delay as long as possible template.
All agencies continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection.
The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2.
With low confidence - a qualifier you omitted.
No, the FBI says it has "moderate" confidence
"FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday acknowledged that the bureau believes the Covid-19 pandemic was likely the result of a lab accident in Wuhan, China.
In his first public comments on the FBI’s investigation into the virus’ origins during an interview with Fox News, Wray said that “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”"
All agencies continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection.
The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2.
With low confidence - a qualifier you omitted.
Why lie? That phrase doesn't even appear in the document.
All agencies continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection.
The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2.
To put the bit you've quoted in its context:
The National Intelligence Council and four other IC agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARSCoV-2.
The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2, although for different reasons.
The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.
Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered. Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination. All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon.
Generally, I look to the scientific literature for a question of science. US intelligence agencies have, however, weighed in and lab leak theorists claimed this proved the lab leak. Yet here is the document: 5 agencies say not, 2 say yes, 2 pass. Until we are allowed to see what the Dept of Energy (whose expertise is nuclear weapons) and the FBI (whose expertise is domestic law enforcement) wrote in detail, there's not much more to say there. The document then goes on to dismantle the various lines of evidence claimed. For example:
Prior to collaborating on a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the WIV collaborated with the PLA on other vaccine and therapeutics relevant to coronaviruses. The IC assesses that this work was intended for public health needs and that the coronaviruses known to be used were too distantly related to have led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2.
And:
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
"the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source" is mere fantasy. To believe it you have to believe that circumstantial evidence is conclusive in favour of the market and inadmissible in favour of the lab, and to ignore the huge debate about whether the furin cleavage site is likely to have arisen in nature.
The evidence for the market is not circumstantial. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. That there were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2 is consistent with a reservoir of infected animals in the market.
It is, if course, entirely possible for the wet market to be both the focal point, and it to have been a lab leak.
That., of course, it almost certainly what happened. Leaked in the lab - the CDC more likely than the WIV - simply because of proximity - 300 metres away. Infected but pre-symptomatic lab worker went from the CDC to the market to buy a chicken. Bingo. Superspreader event, clustered around the market
It's not obvious to me.
Wild -> lab -> market is plausible and you assert that the wild -> lab bit was happening (and I have no reason to disbelieve this) but the lab -> market bit still requires some lapses that are fairly rare and the timing has to be just right (they do happen, it is certainly possible)
Wild -> market is also plausible and while you assert that wild -> animal in market is unlikely (and again I have no reason to disbelieve) there's also potential for a chain of transmission through animals (or containers, surfaces, air) to market or even indeed a person infected elsewhere (not from lab, closer to large populations of bats) taking it to the market.
I don't see a strong reason to favour one of those over the other, on the available evidence.
If the outbreak had happened in any other city in China, then a purely zoonotic origin would be the most likely scenario. That it happened in the same city where bat diseases were being actively studied skews the probabilities the other way around.
I'm not convinced by that. Research centres are often where they are for a reason.
It changes the probabilities - clearly if the nearest lab was 1000 miles away then explaining how it got from the lab to Wuhan without infections along the way would be tricky and lab leak is unlikely. But - on disclosed information at least - the first human cases are not that closely related to anything known in the labs. So it could be the labs are lying, it could be there was a leak some time ago and some local population incubated and transformed the virus or it could be the location of the lab is mere coincidence. All three are possible. The mere presence of the lab makes it possible as the source - and, of course, worth investigating - but far from certain (imho, obviously).
In 2013, the WIV collected animal samples from which they identified the bat coronavirus RaTG13, which is 96.2 percent similar to the COVID-19 virus. By 2018, the WIV had sequenced almost all of RaTG13, which is the second closest known whole genome match to SARS-CoV-2, after BANAL-52, which is 96.8 percent similar. Neither of these viruses is close enough to SARS-CoV-2 to be a direct progenitor.
And:
We assess that some scientists at the WIV have genetically engineered coronaviruses using common laboratory practices. The IC has no information, however, indicating that any WIV genetic engineering work has involved SARS-CoV-2, a close progenitor, or a backbone virus that is closely-related enough to have been the source of the pandemic.
And:
Several WIV researchers were ill in Fall 2019 with symptoms; some of their symptoms were consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19. The IC continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19. Consistent with standard practices, those researchers likely completed annual health exams as part of their duties in a highcontainment biosafety laboratory. The IC assesses that the WIV maintains blood samples and health records of all of their laboratory personnel—which are standard procedures in highcontainment laboratories.
• We have no indications that any of these researchers were hospitalized because of the symptoms consistent with COVID-19. One researcher may have been hospitalized in this timeframe for treatment of a non-respiratory medical condition.
• China’s National Security Commission investigated the WIV in early 2020 and took blood samples from WIV researchers. According to the World Health Organization's March 2021 public report, WIV officials including Shi Zhengli—who leads the WIV laboratory group that conducts coronavirus research—stated lab employee samples all tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.
It says no clear evidence. AOEINEOA. What clear evidence could there be anyway? CCTV of avirus sneaking out of the back door?
In my lifetime there have been two lab leaks in the UK that I am aware of, Smallpox and Foot and Mouth. Both were provable lab leaks. So to say there can't be any clear evidence of a lab leak is obviously not correct.
It may well be a lab leak and there may not be any evidence that can be found, but that doesn't mean it is a lab leak. It may be, it may not be.
However unlike @leon I don't jump to conclusions. If leon didn't come out with so much tosh all the time (Do we all remember the mass alien ships over Ukraine?) we might take him more seriously. I can think of two pieces of evidence he provided for absolute proof it came from a lab that were completely dismantled here (one was from Fox news ffs).
Which is exactly the point: Likely but not proven is probably as good as we are going to get with an outbreak in China. They don't do openness there. So the claim of "no clear evidence" is still susceptible to the response: What clear evidence would you expect, given 1. China and 2. the catastrophic consequences of this leak?
I would want to know why a lab leak is likely, beyond that someone had a notion. There is epidemiological evidence for the epidemic starting in a market, which is also how the previous SARS is known to have started.
Aside from anything else “the nightmare of circumstantial evidence” - as was explicitly stated in the Fauci/Farrar emails at the beginning of the pandemic
Problem is I then have to Google the claim to see if it really is evidence. This is the full quote from Ian Lipkin:
It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.
So it seems not. The recent DNI report states
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
So Covid 19 doesn't match a virus the lab was known to be working on. We have to have some other reason to suspect a lab leak.
"a virus the lab was known to be working on" is rather the point. Again, this is mere absence of evidence. Evidence of absence would require a complete, audited list from the lab of everything it was up to.
Given that there is significant evidence China executed or otherwise silenced - forever - early covid whistleblowers, the idea they wouldn’t destroy evidence at the lab is fanciful. Indeed the opposite is true. They surely DID destroy evidence
Indeed, and they also destroyed evidence at the market. I don't think we've ever argued that China behaved responsibly or openly with regard to what happened.
Indeed.
From what we know, I think we can say for certain that China behaved irresponsibly.
I think the balance of probabilities is that it probably came from the Lab.
I think the less likely, but still possible option, is that it came naturally to and from the market without any involvement of the Lab.
"Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the f---ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it."
Nearly all pandemics come from zoonotic events. Eating “bush meat” or wild animals is a common origin. There was a “wet market” in Wuhan. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. There were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2, which would be consistent with a source of a group of animals in the market, but not with other theories of the virus’s origin.
In other words, the chocolate factory is the wet market. That’s exactly the sort of place people expected a new pandemic to appear.
My first WTF. I am astonished to find so many naive frequentists on a betting site. Does anyone here make any money from it?
Nearly all people are not called Zebedee - probably only 1 in 250,000 at most. If someone comes up to you and says Hi, I am Zebedee, do you discount the possibility of that being true because it is a 250,000/1 shot?
That last example doesn't make sense. Even in a situation where a frequentist model is sensible like the UK National Lottery. It is still possible that someone buys a ticket and matches all 6 numbers. The probability is about 1/13 000 000 but it can still happen.
Oh, and I am neither a "Bayesian" nor a "Frequentist", but I happily use Bayesian and/or Frequentist frameworks depending on which approach is the most relevant.
Am I the only one on here who doesn't really give a shit if it was a lab leak or the wet fish market?
We will probably never know for sure, it makes littles difference now, and the Chinese government was culpable in any event.
I admit, it does all seem rather niche. I suspect some people are just very keen to establish themselves as soothsayers, fearless advocates of 'Lab Leak' when 'Science' was adamant that the wet market was the only game in town.
In 2013, the WIV collected animal samples from which they identified the bat coronavirus RaTG13, which is 96.2 percent similar to the COVID-19 virus. By 2018, the WIV had sequenced almost all of RaTG13, which is the second closest known whole genome match to SARS-CoV-2, after BANAL-52, which is 96.8 percent similar. Neither of these viruses is close enough to SARS-CoV-2 to be a direct progenitor.
And:
We assess that some scientists at the WIV have genetically engineered coronaviruses using common laboratory practices. The IC has no information, however, indicating that any WIV genetic engineering work has involved SARS-CoV-2, a close progenitor, or a backbone virus that is closely-related enough to have been the source of the pandemic.
And:
Several WIV researchers were ill in Fall 2019 with symptoms; some of their symptoms were consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19. The IC continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19. Consistent with standard practices, those researchers likely completed annual health exams as part of their duties in a highcontainment biosafety laboratory. The IC assesses that the WIV maintains blood samples and health records of all of their laboratory personnel—which are standard procedures in highcontainment laboratories.
• We have no indications that any of these researchers were hospitalized because of the symptoms consistent with COVID-19. One researcher may have been hospitalized in this timeframe for treatment of a non-respiratory medical condition.
• China’s National Security Commission investigated the WIV in early 2020 and took blood samples from WIV researchers. According to the World Health Organization's March 2021 public report, WIV officials including Shi Zhengli—who leads the WIV laboratory group that conducts coronavirus research—stated lab employee samples all tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.
Your hero, the boffin you proudly cite, went from privately saying this:
“I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario . . . . I just can’t figure out how this [Coronavirus] gets accomplished in nature . . . . Of course, in the lab it would be easy . ."
To publicly publishing this, just 48 hours later:
"However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."
It says no clear evidence. AOEINEOA. What clear evidence could there be anyway? CCTV of avirus sneaking out of the back door?
In my lifetime there have been two lab leaks in the UK that I am aware of, Smallpox and Foot and Mouth. Both were provable lab leaks. So to say there can't be any clear evidence of a lab leak is obviously not correct.
It may well be a lab leak and there may not be any evidence that can be found, but that doesn't mean it is a lab leak. It may be, it may not be.
However unlike @leon I don't jump to conclusions. If leon didn't come out with so much tosh all the time (Do we all remember the mass alien ships over Ukraine?) we might take him more seriously. I can think of two pieces of evidence he provided for absolute proof it came from a lab that were completely dismantled here (one was from Fox news ffs).
Which is exactly the point: Likely but not proven is probably as good as we are going to get with an outbreak in China. They don't do openness there. So the claim of "no clear evidence" is still susceptible to the response: What clear evidence would you expect, given 1. China and 2. the catastrophic consequences of this leak?
I would want to know why a lab leak is likely, beyond that someone had a notion. There is epidemiological evidence for the epidemic starting in a market, which is also how the previous SARS is known to have started.
Aside from anything else “the nightmare of circumstantial evidence” - as was explicitly stated in the Fauci/Farrar emails at the beginning of the pandemic
Problem is I then have to Google the claim to see if it really is evidence. This is the full quote from Ian Lipkin:
It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.
So it seems not. The recent DNI report states
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
So Covid 19 doesn't match a virus the lab was known to be working on. We have to have some other reason to suspect a lab leak.
"a virus the lab was known to be working on" is rather the point. Again, this is mere absence of evidence. Evidence of absence would require a complete, audited list from the lab of everything it was up to.
Given that there is significant evidence China executed or otherwise silenced - forever - early covid whistleblowers, the idea they wouldn’t destroy evidence at the lab is fanciful. Indeed the opposite is true. They surely DID destroy evidence
Indeed, and they also destroyed evidence at the market. I don't think we've ever argued that China behaved responsibly or openly with regard to what happened.
Indeed.
From what we know, I think we can say for certain that China behaved irresponsibly.
I think the balance of probabilities is that it probably came from the Lab.
I think the less likely, but still possible option, is that it came naturally to and from the market without any involvement of the Lab.
"Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean? Or it’s the f---ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it."
Nearly all pandemics come from zoonotic events. Eating “bush meat” or wild animals is a common origin. There was a “wet market” in Wuhan. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. There were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2, which would be consistent with a source of a group of animals in the market, but not with other theories of the virus’s origin.
In other words, the chocolate factory is the wet market. That’s exactly the sort of place people expected a new pandemic to appear.
My first WTF. I am astonished to find so many naive frequentists on a betting site. Does anyone here make any money from it?
Nearly all people are not called Zebedee - probably only 1 in 250,000 at most. If someone comes up to you and says Hi, I am Zebedee, do you discount the possibility of that being true because it is a 250,000/1 shot?
I once worked with a guy called Zebedee. True story.
I believe you, because any frequentist argument collapses in the face of any evidence to the contrary. If you hear that a 90 year old dies in a nursing home you can be virtually certain they died of CVD/cancer/dementia. If you are also told the police are treating it as suspicious, the odds of it being one of those three instantly reverse from long odds on to longer than evens.
In a hope of burying the hatchet:
You have used this analogy (or variations of) several times. It is a good analogy, but does it apply or at least significantly apply.
No lab then probably wet market (dead 90 year old in home)
Lab that is doing related research. You have assumed it is therefore a no brainer (dead 90 year old with bullet wounds) and we are all being idiots by having an open mind
But unlike the dead old person with or without bullet wounds where you would be 99.9% sure he has either died of old person's illness or had been shot you don't know that with Wuhan because you like the rest of us don't have the knowledge and neither do the experts apparently as they can't decide. Why do you think you know better than them?
So just because there is a lab, without the detailed knowledge you don't know that it fits the no brainer scenario (Old people die with dementia, but if you see bullet wounds he has probably been shot). It might be it just moves it to a toss up.
If the experts don't know I suggest it would be arrogant for us to jump to the conclusion that the suspicious circumstances of a lab close by is definitive (unlike the 90 year old with bullet holes)
I have no view on the origin of the virus! I am not campaigning for a pro-lab theory, I am campaigning for basic epistemological rigour in assessing the odds. And the thing is, I see no fallacies being routinely pressed by lab leak theorists, and plenty by marketeers. I am just trying to improve the quality of the argument. We just don't know, and whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
Bollocks. This is what conspiracy theorists do. They claim equivalence, they claim they just want to test theories, they say they don't have any skin in the game, it's all just an epistemological discussion.
You are really, really invested in this, aren't you? Ask yourself why there is any reason to be.
An academic, I believe, possibly a scientist?
Most of the ardent marketeers on PB are in science in some way. @turbotubbs etc
Which is a shame, as it means we can't rely on the people who are supposed to be the experts. These physicians will not heal themselves
bondegezou has, I think (from posts) some degree of expertise in this area. I may be wrong.
turbo and myself do not, particularly, but we do have an undertstanding of how science reaches conclusions from evidence.
I'd describe myself as an ardent agnostic on this, pending more evidence.
ETA: IIRC, bondegezou had some involvement in one of the SAGE committees, but I do not know in which area
I'm a psychologist and statistician by training, so I was on SAGE committees on behaviour. I'm not a virologist, although I try to keep up with the basics given its relevance to my work in pandemic response. I've worked on swine flu, COVID-19 and mpox. I was following COVID-19 since late Dec 2019 and started work on pandemic response at the start of Feb 2020.
All agencies continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection.
The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2.
To put the bit you've quoted in its context:
The National Intelligence Council and four other IC agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARSCoV-2.
The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2, although for different reasons.
The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.
Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered. Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination. All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon.
Generally, I look to the scientific literature for a question of science. US intelligence agencies have, however, weighed in and lab leak theorists claimed this proved the lab leak. Yet here is the document: 5 agencies say not, 2 say yes, 2 pass. Until we are allowed to see what the Dept of Energy (whose expertise is nuclear weapons) and the FBI (whose expertise is domestic law enforcement) wrote in detail, there's not much more to say there. The document then goes on to dismantle the various lines of evidence claimed. For example:
Prior to collaborating on a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the WIV collaborated with the PLA on other vaccine and therapeutics relevant to coronaviruses. The IC assesses that this work was intended for public health needs and that the coronaviruses known to be used were too distantly related to have led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2.
And:
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
It doesn't exactly justify your interpretation that, "The balance of probabilities is that it was a natural zoonotic event, as the new US intelligence document says."
The document doesn't say that at all. In fact it explicitly "does not address the merits of the two most likely pandemic origins hypotheses," but does confirm that some agencies think the lab leak origin is more likely.
"the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source" is mere fantasy. To believe it you have to believe that circumstantial evidence is conclusive in favour of the market and inadmissible in favour of the lab, and to ignore the huge debate about whether the furin cleavage site is likely to have arisen in nature.
The evidence for the market is not circumstantial. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. That there were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2 is consistent with a reservoir of infected animals in the market.
It is, if course, entirely possible for the wet market to be both the focal point, and it to have been a lab leak.
That., of course, it almost certainly what happened. Leaked in the lab - the CDC more likely than the WIV - simply because of proximity - 300 metres away. Infected but pre-symptomatic lab worker went from the CDC to the market to buy a chicken. Bingo. Superspreader event, clustered around the market
It's not obvious to me.
Wild -> lab -> market is plausible and you assert that the wild -> lab bit was happening (and I have no reason to disbelieve this) but the lab -> market bit still requires some lapses that are fairly rare and the timing has to be just right (they do happen, it is certainly possible)
Wild -> market is also plausible and while you assert that wild -> animal in market is unlikely (and again I have no reason to disbelieve) there's also potential for a chain of transmission through animals (or containers, surfaces, air) to market or even indeed a person infected elsewhere (not from lab, closer to large populations of bats) taking it to the market.
I don't see a strong reason to favour one of those over the other, on the available evidence.
If the outbreak had happened in any other city in China, then a purely zoonotic origin would be the most likely scenario. That it happened in the same city where bat diseases were being actively studied skews the probabilities the other way around.
Most large Chinese cities have labs studying coronaviruses. If you're worried about zoonotic infections in China, you're looking at bat diseases. So, if the outbreak had happened in any other city in China, there's a high chance there would have been a similar lab.
There is now a date for the hearing - September 19 - 21. Mrs Justice Haldane will decide, which is interesting because she decided the ForWomenScotland2 case which ruled that a GRC changes a person's legal sex for all purposes. That is of course contrary to what the SNP argued in Holyrood during the passage of the Bill where they claimed this was merely a small piece of administrative tidying up. But it may make it easier for Westminster to argue that the effect of the GRR Bill does affect the EA and reserved matters and therefore is outwith Holyrood's competence. If @DavidL is around it would be interesting to get his thoughts.
More importantly, it likely means that the outcome, its implications and an almost certain appeal to the Supreme Court will be happening in the run up to a General Election, which may annoy/please different political parties, depending on the outcome, reactions etc.,.
SNP minister Shirley-Anne Somerville, announcing amended children's rights bill: "Once again we find the democratic will of this Parliament blocked by Westminster"
In 2021, judges said it seemed original bill was drafted "in terms which deliberately exceed" Holyrood's competence
Politico - Supreme Court rejects ‘independent state legislature’ theory
The once-fringe legal theory broadly argued that state courts have little — or no — authority to question state legislatures on election laws for federal contests.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rebuffed a legal theory that argued that state legislatures have the authority to set election rules with little oversight from state courts, a major decision that turns away a conservative push to empower state legislatures.
By a 6-3 vote, the court rejected the “independent state legislature” theory in a case about North Carolina’s congressional map. The once-fringe legal theory broadly argued that state courts have little — or no — authority to question state legislatures on election laws for federal contests.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court’s opinion, joined by the three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, along with two conservatives, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
In doing so, the nation’s top court maintained the power of state courts to review election laws under state constitutions, while urging federal courts to “not abandon their own duty to exercise judicial review.”
Oh I just noticed the Off Topic button has gone - excellent.
I don't think I have ever used the Flag button, but I am slightly suspicious that you want to get rid of it to delay any future ban. I suspect that might be a vain hope.
I have never knowingly used the Off Topic button and have no idea what the flag button is for.
I do like the like button though. Thank you Richard for restoring this cherished feature.
All agencies continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection.
The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2.
To put the bit you've quoted in its context:
The National Intelligence Council and four other IC agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARSCoV-2.
The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2, although for different reasons.
The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.
Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered. Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination. All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon.
Generally, I look to the scientific literature for a question of science. US intelligence agencies have, however, weighed in and lab leak theorists claimed this proved the lab leak. Yet here is the document: 5 agencies say not, 2 say yes, 2 pass. Until we are allowed to see what the Dept of Energy (whose expertise is nuclear weapons) and the FBI (whose expertise is domestic law enforcement) wrote in detail, there's not much more to say there. The document then goes on to dismantle the various lines of evidence claimed. For example:
Prior to collaborating on a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the WIV collaborated with the PLA on other vaccine and therapeutics relevant to coronaviruses. The IC assesses that this work was intended for public health needs and that the coronaviruses known to be used were too distantly related to have led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2.
And:
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
It doesn't exactly justify your interpretation that, "The balance of probabilities is that it was a natural zoonotic event, as the new US intelligence document says."
The document doesn't say that at all. In fact it explicitly "does not address the merits of the two most likely pandemic origins hypotheses," but does confirm that some agencies think the lab leak origin is more likely.
It says that that's what the majority of US intelligence agencies believe, that it's more likely to be a natural zoonotic event. It also goes through the key lab leak claims one by one and shows they don't hold. But, yes, I was putting all that in my own words; you are free to interpret the document differently.
On topic: Yes, I expect the Conservatives to lose the lot. Kicking useless Governments at by-elections is tradition, and this lot are supremely useless.
Best wishes also to OGH with the recovery. You're obviously far from the only person with the means to shell out for private treatment who has done so to avoid years waiting in considerable pain for the disintegrating NHS to do anything about it. My Mum likewise paid a fortune for private surgery earlier in the year.
Meanwhile, whilst rising interest rates result in endless column inches of handwringing in newspapers about the "mortgage timebomb," people who have been suffering much worse for much longer continue to be mostly overlooked.
The total collapse in affordability for low income private renters is alarming.
In some parts of England there are now literally no properties available to rent for households receiving housing benefit.
We’ve been working with crisis and Zoopla. The data is grim.
Amongst the miserable revelations in this thread, 25% of all households seeking homelessness support - not just struggling to pay the rent, but actually seeking help with homelessness or the imminent threat thereof - were working households. It's quite something when we've got to the point where not merely does a substantial fraction of the working population face an entire lifetime of renting (and therefore, by extension, of working until they drop to pay for it, so ruinously expensive has it become,) but that work for some people pays so badly that they can't even afford a roof over their heads.
Am I the only one on here who doesn't really give a shit if it was a lab leak or the wet fish market?
We will probably never know for sure, it makes littles difference now, and the Chinese government was culpable in any event.
More culpable if its a lab leak, IMO. If it is, they ought to be shunned as much as Russia have been since Novichok, IMO.
I don't mean to beat broken drum here, but the *kind* of lab like is also important.
At the one end of the spectrum, you have leaks that the director was unaware of, or which happened on the way to the lab. Perhaps a courier got bit by a bat while collecting samples? Or perhaps there was a guy who secretly snuck animals out of the lab and sold them at the wet market (and had done so for years), without any idea of the dangers he was putting people in.
At the other, you have the failure of a containment vessel in the lab, where genetically modified viruses were stored, and which infected half a dozen employees, and which was covered up by all and sundry.
And, of course, there are dozens of possibilities in between.
I think we'd all agree that the degree of culpability in the first scenario is dramatically less than in the last.
"the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source" is mere fantasy. To believe it you have to believe that circumstantial evidence is conclusive in favour of the market and inadmissible in favour of the lab, and to ignore the huge debate about whether the furin cleavage site is likely to have arisen in nature.
The evidence for the market is not circumstantial. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. That there were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2 is consistent with a reservoir of infected animals in the market.
It is, if course, entirely possible for the wet market to be both the focal point, and it to have been a lab leak.
That., of course, it almost certainly what happened. Leaked in the lab - the CDC more likely than the WIV - simply because of proximity - 300 metres away. Infected but pre-symptomatic lab worker went from the CDC to the market to buy a chicken. Bingo. Superspreader event, clustered around the market
It's not obvious to me.
Wild -> lab -> market is plausible and you assert that the wild -> lab bit was happening (and I have no reason to disbelieve this) but the lab -> market bit still requires some lapses that are fairly rare and the timing has to be just right (they do happen, it is certainly possible)
Wild -> market is also plausible and while you assert that wild -> animal in market is unlikely (and again I have no reason to disbelieve) there's also potential for a chain of transmission through animals (or containers, surfaces, air) to market or even indeed a person infected elsewhere (not from lab, closer to large populations of bats) taking it to the market.
I don't see a strong reason to favour one of those over the other, on the available evidence.
If the outbreak had happened in any other city in China, then a purely zoonotic origin would be the most likely scenario. That it happened in the same city where bat diseases were being actively studied skews the probabilities the other way around.
Most large Chinese cities have labs studying coronaviruses. If you're worried about zoonotic infections in China, you're looking at bat diseases. So, if the outbreak had happened in any other city in China, there's a high chance there would have been a similar lab.
Is that true?
Wasn't the head of the WIV famous for her bat coronavirus studies?
"the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source" is mere fantasy. To believe it you have to believe that circumstantial evidence is conclusive in favour of the market and inadmissible in favour of the lab, and to ignore the huge debate about whether the furin cleavage site is likely to have arisen in nature.
The evidence for the market is not circumstantial. The early cases were clustered around the market. Environmental analyses found the virus in the market. That there were two initial strains of SARS-COV-2 is consistent with a reservoir of infected animals in the market.
It is, if course, entirely possible for the wet market to be both the focal point, and it to have been a lab leak.
That., of course, it almost certainly what happened. Leaked in the lab - the CDC more likely than the WIV - simply because of proximity - 300 metres away. Infected but pre-symptomatic lab worker went from the CDC to the market to buy a chicken. Bingo. Superspreader event, clustered around the market
It's not obvious to me.
Wild -> lab -> market is plausible and you assert that the wild -> lab bit was happening (and I have no reason to disbelieve this) but the lab -> market bit still requires some lapses that are fairly rare and the timing has to be just right (they do happen, it is certainly possible)
Wild -> market is also plausible and while you assert that wild -> animal in market is unlikely (and again I have no reason to disbelieve) there's also potential for a chain of transmission through animals (or containers, surfaces, air) to market or even indeed a person infected elsewhere (not from lab, closer to large populations of bats) taking it to the market.
I don't see a strong reason to favour one of those over the other, on the available evidence.
If the outbreak had happened in any other city in China, then a purely zoonotic origin would be the most likely scenario. That it happened in the same city where bat diseases were being actively studied skews the probabilities the other way around.
Most large Chinese cities have labs studying coronaviruses. If you're worried about zoonotic infections in China, you're looking at bat diseases. So, if the outbreak had happened in any other city in China, there's a high chance there would have been a similar lab.
This doesn't seem to be true. The number of BSL-4 labs in China is very small.
Oh I just noticed the Off Topic button has gone - excellent.
I don't think I have ever used the Flag button, but I am slightly suspicious that you want to get rid of it to delay any future ban. I suspect that might be a vain hope.
I have never knowingly used the Off Topic button and have no idea what the flag button is for.
I do like the like button though. Thank you Richard for restoring this cherished feature.
Comments
@rcs1000 will probably be up now. I know he is busy running a business but hopefully can fit in the restoration of the 'like' button today 👍
I said the Like button has several significant drawbacks and negative side-effects (which it does). People go in search of Likes, it encourages herding behaviour, it inhibits fresh and unpopular opinion. There is much data to show the damage Like buttons do to people on social media
But I hardly commanded that it be Removed Forthwith or any such bollox
At that point, you might have to say that any karma hitting young Rishi has gone far enough.
More to the point, in the case of COVID-19, no-one has appeared and said their name was Zebedee. The SARS-CoV-2 virus has pointedly not commented on its origins. If someone had some actual evidence for a lab leak, that would be a different matter.
All you've offered over the last day or so is AOEINEOA repeated over and over, like a mantra. Yet, in the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source, and with the background probabilities, then whether you are a frequentist or Bayesian, it's obvious what the likely answer is.
I said you lot were revolting, I mean in revolt.
But I see no justification at all for the Off topic button. On PB we ALWAYS go offtopic. Pointless
It must be boring being a monitor sometimes. They need an outlet
Not that I was chasing cheap WTFs or anything...
GET RID OF THE FLAG BUTTON
Stay away from high windows, lads
Every time I have said that AOEINEOA has been in response to an implied claim that AOEIEOA. We are level pegging mantra-wise, and my version has the advantage of being true, so I win. "All you ever say is that it's an oblate spheroid" does not bolster the flat earth case.
"the absence of evidence for a lab leak, and in the presence of evidence for the market as the source" is mere fantasy. To believe it you have to believe that circumstantial evidence is conclusive in favour of the market and inadmissible in favour of the lab, and to ignore the huge debate about whether the furin cleavage site is likely to have arisen in nature.
Channel 4, nine o'clock tonight.
You have used this analogy (or variations of) several times. It is a good analogy, but does it apply or at least significantly apply.
No lab then probably wet market (dead 90 year old in home)
Lab that is doing related research. You have assumed it is therefore a no brainer (dead 90 year old with bullet wounds) and we are all being idiots by having an open mind
But unlike the dead old person with or without bullet wounds where you would be 99.9% sure he has either died of old person's illness or had been shot you don't know that with Wuhan because you like the rest of us don't have the knowledge and neither do the experts apparently as they can't decide. Why do you think you know better than them?
So just because there is a lab, without the detailed knowledge you don't know that it fits the no brainer scenario (Old people die with dementia, but if you see bullet wounds he has probably been shot). It might be it just moves it to a toss up.
If the experts don't know I suggest it would be arrogant for us to jump to the conclusion that the suspicious circumstances of a lab close by is definitive (unlike the 90 year old with bullet holes)
The cleavage site debate is on social media. It is not a debate in virology, e.g. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2214427119
I mentioned in this header - https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2023/04/23/the-scottish-question/ - the possible timing implications of the Scottish government's challenge to Westminster's S.35 Order preventing the Gender Recognition Bill Scottish coming into force.
There is now a date for the hearing - September 19 - 21. Mrs Justice Haldane will decide, which is interesting because she decided the ForWomenScotland2 case which ruled that a GRC changes a person's legal sex for all purposes. That is of course contrary to what the SNP argued in Holyrood during the passage of the Bill where they claimed this was merely a small piece of administrative tidying up. But it may make it easier for Westminster to argue that the effect of the GRR Bill does affect the EA and reserved matters and therefore is outwith Holyrood's competence. If @DavidL is around it would be interesting to get his thoughts.
More importantly, it likely means that the outcome, its implications and an almost certain appeal to the Supreme Court will be happening in the run up to a General Election, which may annoy/please different political parties, depending on the outcome, reactions etc.,.
I don't think I have ever used the Flag button, but I am slightly suspicious that you want to get rid of it to delay any future ban. I suspect that might be a vain hope.
The Next Great Plague can be anytime after that.
I am firmly in the 'I haven't got a clue' camp and I am relying on the consensus of experts who seem to fail to concur
Is this the same Robert Garry mentioned in private emails, about Sars-Cov 2, at the outset of the pandemic? Emails which were kept private, and had to be FOIA'd into the public domain. Like these:
"On January 31, 2020, Dr. Kristian Andersen wrote in an email to Dr. Fauci and others:
“The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so
one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features
(potentially) look engineered . . . . Eddie [Holmes], Bob [Garry], Mike [Farzan], and
myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.
Garry then replied:
On February 2, 2020, Garry similarly wrote, “I really can’t think of a plausible natural
scenario . . . . I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature . . . . Of course,
in the lab it would be easy . ."
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Letter-to-Dr-Garry.pdf
It is the same Robert Garry, right?
And yet a couple of weeks later Garry co-authored a public paper in Nature, Proximal Origins, which stated:
"However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."
So he went from being "OMG this came from the lab", to "Not a single type of lab based scenario is possible", over a quick lunch?
Gee, I wonder how that happened. And I wonder why you are still relying on "Garry" even now
Anyone who signed the Lancet Letter, or who co-authored the Proximal Origins paper, must be ignored FOR A START
Russell's teapot is still up there in space. Stop talking about things that are theoretically possible and show me some decent evidence.
Most of the ardent marketeers on PB are in science in some way. @turbotubbs etc
Which is a shame, as it means we can't rely on the people who are supposed to be the experts. These physicians will not heal themselves
Again, what is there to be so angry about?
Wild -> lab -> market is plausible and you assert that the wild -> lab bit was happening (and I have no reason to disbelieve this) but the lab -> market bit still requires some lapses that are fairly rare and the timing has to be just right (they do happen, it is certainly possible)
Wild -> market is also plausible and while you assert that wild -> animal in market is unlikely (and again I have no reason to disbelieve) there's also potential for a chain of transmission through animals (or containers, surfaces, air) to market or even indeed a person infected elsewhere (not from lab, closer to large populations of bats) taking it to the market.
I don't see a strong reason to favour one of those over the other, on the available evidence.
All agencies continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection.
The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2.
turbo and myself do not, particularly, but we do have an undertstanding of how science reaches conclusions from evidence.
I'd describe myself as an ardent agnostic on this, pending more evidence.
ETA: IIRC, bondegezou had some involvement in one of the SAGE committees, but I do not know in which area
"Proximal Origin was written by February 4, 2020, less than 48 hours after each of the
authors privately expressed concern on the teleconference that COVID-19 originated in a lab."
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Letter-to-Dr-Garry.pdf
So Garry went from privately saying THIS
“I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario . . . . I just can’t figure out how this [Coronavirus] gets accomplished in nature . . . . Of course, in the lab it would be easy . ."
To publicly publishing this, just 48 hours later:
"However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."
That's some amazing science, right there. Incredible. Nobel-worthy. Just 48 hours to do a complete 180. Wow. Hopefully we can see the science that proved that lab leak was simply impossible, that changed their minds quicker than most people change their choice of supper
https://twitter.com/AnnaBower/status/1673691719051689985
Trump's trial is now probably unavoidably delayed until after the start of the primaries - which was always pretty likely, but the prosecution had given him the option of a speedy trial should have have wanted it.
Trumpworld is clearly going with the usual delay as long as possible template.
"FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday acknowledged that the bureau believes the Covid-19 pandemic was likely the result of a lab accident in Wuhan, China.
In his first public comments on the FBI’s investigation into the virus’ origins during an interview with Fox News, Wray said that “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”"
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/wray-fbi-covid-origins-lab-china/index.html
"CNN reported in 2021, citing two sources familiar with the matter, that the FBI had “moderate confidence” in the lab-leak theory."
We will probably never know for sure, it makes littles difference now, and the Chinese government was culpable in any event.
The National Intelligence Council and four other IC agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARSCoV-2.
The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2, although for different reasons.
The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.
Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered. Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination. All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon.
Generally, I look to the scientific literature for a question of science. US intelligence agencies have, however, weighed in and lab leak theorists claimed this proved the lab leak. Yet here is the document: 5 agencies say not, 2 say yes, 2 pass. Until we are allowed to see what the Dept of Energy (whose expertise is nuclear weapons) and the FBI (whose expertise is domestic law enforcement) wrote in detail, there's not much more to say there. The document then goes on to dismantle the various lines of evidence claimed. For example:
Prior to collaborating on a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the WIV collaborated with the PLA on other vaccine and therapeutics relevant to coronaviruses. The IC assesses that this work was intended for public health needs and that the coronaviruses known to be used were too distantly related to have led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2.
And:
Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
IF so, a triumph of the human spirit! Or something . . .
My main takeaway is that Lukashenka is an incredibly verbose old fncker.
Lukashenko is starting to reveal the alleged details of his negotiations with Prigozhin (thread):
*This is Google Translate, which is not familiar with some expressions. I made a few corrections so you can get the gist of what is being said
https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1673695100671602688
It changes the probabilities - clearly if the nearest lab was 1000 miles away then explaining how it got from the lab to Wuhan without infections along the way would be tricky and lab leak is unlikely. But - on disclosed information at least - the first human cases are not that closely related to anything known in the labs. So it could be the labs are lying, it could be there was a leak some time ago and some local population incubated and transformed the virus or it could be the location of the lab is mere coincidence. All three are possible. The mere presence of the lab makes it possible as the source - and, of course, worth investigating - but far from certain (imho, obviously).
In 2013, the WIV collected animal samples from which they identified the bat coronavirus RaTG13, which is 96.2 percent similar to the COVID-19 virus. By 2018, the WIV had sequenced almost all of RaTG13, which is the second closest known whole genome match to SARS-CoV-2, after BANAL-52, which is 96.8 percent similar. Neither of these viruses is close enough to SARS-CoV-2 to be a direct progenitor.
And:
We assess that some scientists at the WIV have genetically engineered coronaviruses using common laboratory practices. The IC has no information, however, indicating that any WIV genetic engineering work has involved SARS-CoV-2, a close progenitor, or a backbone virus that is closely-related enough to have been the source of the pandemic.
And:
Several WIV researchers were ill in Fall 2019 with symptoms; some of their symptoms were consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19. The IC continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19. Consistent with standard practices,
those researchers likely completed annual health exams as part of their duties in a highcontainment biosafety laboratory. The IC assesses that the WIV maintains blood samples and health records of all of their laboratory personnel—which are standard procedures in highcontainment laboratories.
• We have no indications that any of these researchers were hospitalized because of the symptoms consistent with COVID-19. One researcher may have been hospitalized in this timeframe for treatment of a non-respiratory medical condition.
• China’s National Security Commission investigated the WIV in early 2020 and took blood samples from WIV researchers. According to the World Health Organization's March 2021 public report, WIV officials including Shi Zhengli—who leads the WIV laboratory group that conducts coronavirus research—stated lab employee samples all tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.
We should stick to politics in which we are all experts and none of us agree.
Oh, and I am neither a "Bayesian" nor a "Frequentist", but I happily use Bayesian and/or Frequentist frameworks depending on which approach is the most relevant.
“I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario . . . . I just can’t figure out how this [Coronavirus] gets accomplished in nature . . . . Of course, in the lab it would be easy . ."
To publicly publishing this, just 48 hours later:
"However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."
Bravo, bravo
The document doesn't say that at all. In fact it explicitly "does not address the merits of the two most likely pandemic origins hypotheses," but does confirm that some agencies think the lab leak origin is more likely.
In 2021, judges said it seemed original bill was drafted "in terms which deliberately exceed" Holyrood's competence
https://twitter.com/chrismusson/status/1673701891140730881?
The once-fringe legal theory broadly argued that state courts have little — or no — authority to question state legislatures on election laws for federal contests.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rebuffed a legal theory that argued that state legislatures have the authority to set election rules with little oversight from state courts, a major decision that turns away a conservative push to empower state legislatures.
By a 6-3 vote, the court rejected the “independent state legislature” theory in a case about North Carolina’s congressional map. The once-fringe legal theory broadly argued that state courts have little — or no — authority to question state legislatures on election laws for federal contests.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court’s opinion, joined by the three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, along with two conservatives, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
In doing so, the nation’s top court maintained the power of state courts to review election laws under state constitutions, while urging federal courts to “not abandon their own duty to exercise judicial review.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/27/supreme-court-rejects-independent-state-legislature-theory-00103793
I do like the like button though. Thank you Richard for restoring this cherished feature.
Best wishes also to OGH with the recovery. You're obviously far from the only person with the means to shell out for private treatment who has done so to avoid years waiting in considerable pain for the disintegrating NHS to do anything about it. My Mum likewise paid a fortune for private surgery earlier in the year.
Meanwhile, whilst rising interest rates result in endless column inches of handwringing in newspapers about the "mortgage timebomb," people who have been suffering much worse for much longer continue to be mostly overlooked.
The total collapse in affordability for low income private renters is alarming.
In some parts of England there are now literally no properties available to rent for households receiving housing benefit.
We’ve been working with crisis and Zoopla. The data is grim.
https://twitter.com/DanielHewittITV/status/1673669670396653576
Amongst the miserable revelations in this thread, 25% of all households seeking homelessness support - not just struggling to pay the rent, but actually seeking help with homelessness or the imminent threat thereof - were working households. It's quite something when we've got to the point where not merely does a substantial fraction of the working population face an entire lifetime of renting (and therefore, by extension, of working until they drop to pay for it, so ruinously expensive has it become,) but that work for some people pays so badly that they can't even afford a roof over their heads.
Britain's entire socio-economic system is shot.
At the one end of the spectrum, you have leaks that the director was unaware of, or which happened on the way to the lab. Perhaps a courier got bit by a bat while collecting samples? Or perhaps there was a guy who secretly snuck animals out of the lab and sold them at the wet market (and had done so for years), without any idea of the dangers he was putting people in.
At the other, you have the failure of a containment vessel in the lab, where genetically modified viruses were stored, and which infected half a dozen employees, and which was covered up by all and sundry.
And, of course, there are dozens of possibilities in between.
I think we'd all agree that the degree of culpability in the first scenario is dramatically less than in the last.
Wasn't the head of the WIV famous for her bat coronavirus studies?