Lab Leak?
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I am obviously not a fan of mainland China and their policies and (probably) coverup of the COVID virus.
But, how do you think the spread and containment of COVID would have been different if it was known from the beginning that it was a laboratory leak?
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To be clear, my 80% figure is my prior on whether the DARPA document with the project veritas (sic) watermark was real or fake. Not on lab leak in general. I think the lab leak hypothesis is more likely than not.
I’m still at 80% fake on the doc.
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Guess where the Chinese bat virus wasn't found?
But there’s one line in the MIT Technology Review article I want to focus upon for a moment: “But one year after the WHO’s visit to Wuhan, the disease detectives have yet to find the guilty animal or other indisputable evidence of natural origins.”
The WHO team visit to Wuhan was in February 2021, so this means after two years of looking, and “tens of thousands” of samples, no one has found SARS-CoV-2 naturally occurring in animals in and around Wuhan, China.
As noted earlier this week, SARS-CoV-2 is spreading like wildfire among American white-tailed deer. The CDC affirms “many mammals, including cats, dogs, bank voles, ferrets, fruit bats, hamsters, mink, pigs, rabbits, racoon dogs, tree shrews, and white-tailed deer can be infected with the virus.” Gorillas at the Dallas zoo, snow leopards at a Bloomington zoo, lions at the Akron Zoo, – you name the animal, there’s a good chance they’ve caught Covid-19. And of course, we know how contagious this virus is among human beings.
So why is this virus so hard to find in Chinese bats? If this virus originated in a bat, and naturally evolved to maximize its ability to infect bats, and is genetically most similar to other viruses found in bats in China… why is SARS-CoV-2 proving impossible to find in bats in China? To modify Jon Stewart’s memorable metaphor, this is like finding chocolate everywhere except in the Hershey’s factory.
There are three options:
- SARS-CoV-2 was in at least one of the animals in the local wet markets, but by the time anyone started looking for it, all traces of it were gone – even though this is a really contagious virus. I’m hoping natural-origin theorists would at least concede that this is unexpected.
- SARS-CoV-2 was in at least one of the animals in the local wet markets, and someone in an investigation did find it, but covered it up because they didn’t want to have to shut down the city’s wet markets. (For what it is worth, which is not much, this is the natural-origin scenario I find most likely.)
- SARS-CoV-2 was never in any of the animals in the wet market, because it originated someplace else – like, say the giant repositories of novel bat coronavirus samples being used in research, including gain-of-function research, in one of the city’s multiple research labs.
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Remember when the lab leak theory was all tin-foil-hat conspiracy stuff?
Yeah...
[Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Agency Now Says](https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a?mod=hp_lead_pos1
The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.
The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office.
The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.
The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.
The Energy Department made its judgment with “low confidence,” according to people who have read the classified report.
The FBI previously came to the conclusion that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak in 2021 with “moderate confidence” and still holds to this view.)
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Why would the Department of Energy oversee biological research labs? And why would the Department of Energy have it’s own intelligence division?
Me/rry/Christmas
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DoE is in charge of the nuclear stockpile. One can imagine intelligence functions around that.
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DoE is in charge of the nuclear stockpile. One can imagine intelligence functions around that.
Yep, I thought about that afterward, but still would have figured they would be working collaboratively with one of the Alphabet Agencies.
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Didn’t Horace travel to China in October, 2019?
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If not for COVID, I'd still be living in CA and going into the office five days a week. What a nightmare.
Lemons, meet lemonade.
Part of my life coaching business is to ask my clients what the worst day of their lives was. They'll often refer to something horribly traumatic. Then I'll go back in my calendar and tell them something good that happened to me that day. Then, the healing begins.
Education is extremely important.
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@LuFins-Dad said in Lab Leak?:
DoE is in charge of the nuclear stockpile. One can imagine intelligence functions around that.
Yep, I thought about that afterward, but still would have figured they would be working collaboratively with one of the Alphabet Agencies.
That seems to not be the case as a rule. Just like every agency has its own enforcement division.
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Well, at least we can go back to eating bat sandwiches!
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FBI AgreesL
FBI Director Christopher Wray said Tuesday that the Covid pandemic was probably the result of a laboratory leak in China, providing the first public confirmation of the bureau’s classified judgment of how the virus that led to the deaths of nearly seven million people worldwide first emerged.
“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Mr. Wray told Fox News. “Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.”
Mr. Wray added that the Chinese government has been trying to “thwart and obfuscate” the investigation that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, other parts of the U.S. government and foreign partners have been carrying out into the origin of the pandemic, but that the bureau’s work continues.
The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the FBI had come to the conclusion with “moderate confidence” in 2021 that the Covid-19 pandemic was likely the result of an accidental lab leak and still holds to this view.
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New emails uncovered by House Republicans probing the COVID-19 pandemic reveal the deceptive nature of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
They show he “prompted” or commissioned — and had final approval on — a scientific paper written specifically in February 2020 to disprove the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.
Eight weeks later, Fauci stood at a White House press conference alongside President Donald Trump and cited that paper as evidence that the lab leak theory was implausible while pretending it had nothing to do with him and he did not know the authors.
“There was a study recently,” he told reporters on April 17, 2020, when asked if the virus could have come from a Chinese lab, “where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences … in bats as they evolve and the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.
“So, the paper will be available. I don’t have the authors right now, but we can make it available to you.”
Read the committee's report here.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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New emails uncovered by House Republicans probing the COVID-19 pandemic reveal the deceptive nature of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
They show he “prompted” or commissioned — and had final approval on — a scientific paper written specifically in February 2020 to disprove the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.
Eight weeks later, Fauci stood at a White House press conference alongside President Donald Trump and cited that paper as evidence that the lab leak theory was implausible while pretending it had nothing to do with him and he did not know the authors.
“There was a study recently,” he told reporters on April 17, 2020, when asked if the virus could have come from a Chinese lab, “where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences … in bats as they evolve and the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.
“So, the paper will be available. I don’t have the authors right now, but we can make it available to you.”
Read the committee's report here.
Man, that story will be huge in three years when the legacy media acknowledges it…
