Covid-19 likely to be man made

Mic 1972

patnor1011 wrote: »

Well, seeing how things evolve and how "facts" change at a whim depending on situation or "need" we should be quite happy we can discuss some topics.
Simple mentioning of certain topics few months ago would result in scores of insults, personal attacks and ultimately a thread ban.

They are baby steps compared to the switch that is happening outside, you can actually talk about it on Facebook and Twitter now.
Anyway, the tide is clearly changing ;-)

Timberrrrrrrr

patnor1011 wrote: »

Well, seeing how things evolve and how "facts" change at a whim depending on situation or "need" we should be quite happy we can discuss some topics.
Simple mentioning of certain topics few months ago would result in scores of insults, personal attacks and ultimately a thread ban.

I have followed this thread from the start and don't recall any "insults or personal attacks", care to show who made these against you or others? As for thread bans....People get themselves banned due to thier own posting.

geospatial

King Mob wrote: »

There's many papers that detail the zoonotic origin for the virus.

I am not aware of any scientific paper that details zootonic origin. There is speculation on how zootonic origin could have happened, there are comparisons to prior zootonic events like SARS-1 and MERS, etc. Nobody has yet answered the questions on how the unique features of SARS-2 emerged.

The origin possibilities are zootonic (directly from bats or an intermediary), signal passaging in nature (a mink farm for example), signal passaging in a lab,
and genetic engineering in a lab. There is no direct evidence for any of them, zootonic is the most likely but as yet has no direct evidence.

King Mob

geospatial wrote: »

I am not aware of any scientific paper that details zootonic origin. There is speculation on how zootonic origin could have happened, there are comparisons to prior zootonic events like SARS-1 and MERS, etc. Nobody has yet answered the questions on how the unique features of SARS-2 emerged.

The origin possibilities are zootonic (directly from bats or an intermediary), signal passaging in nature (a mink farm for example), signal passaging in a lab,
and genetic engineering in a lab. There is no direct evidence for any of them, zootonic is the most likely but as yet has no direct evidence.

The claim was that there was:

"no credible evidence of natural evolution".

Do you agree with this statement?

patnor1011

Timberrrrrrrr wrote: »

I have followed this thread from the start and don't recall any "insults or personal attacks", care to show who made these against you or others? As for thread bans....People get themselves banned due to thier own posting.

I never said it happened on this thread.
Plenty of examples on main covid threads. Simple mentioning of topics like virus lab leak accidental or deliberate, vitamins or if you said that covid vaccine will not give you immunity from covid infection would result in internet crucifixion and thread ban.
The only place where topics like this were permitted to talk about is conspiracy theory forum which is funny because it will actually lead to increase of "conspiracy theory turned out true" cases.

King Mob

patnor1011 wrote: »

...or deliberate, vitamins or if you said that covid vaccine will not give you immunity from covid infection would result in internet crucifixion and thread ban.
The only place where topics like this were permitted to talk about is conspiracy theory forum .

Well yes, because these things are conspiracy claims.

patnor1011

patnor1011 wrote: »

I never said it happened on this thread.
Plenty of examples on main covid threads. Simple mentioning of topics like virus lab leak accidental or deliberate, vitamins or if you said that covid vaccine will not give you immunity from covid infection would result in internet crucifixion and thread ban.
The only place where topics like this were permitted to talk about is conspiracy theory forum which is funny because it will actually lead to increase of "conspiracy theory turned out true" cases.

I've actually been considering starting a thread on this topic in the conspiracy theories forum..

It's been happening across the site for a couple of years anyway..Primarily around the same topics that Facebook and YouTube etc have been accused of censoring..

Are we being subjected to, not downright censorship, but a strategic manipulation of the conversation, where anyone holding a viewpoint outside of what is deemed appropriate (the general liberal/MSM consensus) is harangued until they either give up or react and get banned?..

geospatial

King Mob wrote: »

The claim was that there was:
"no credible evidence of natural evolution".
Do you agree with this statement?

I wouldn't agree with that statement, the way I would put it is there is no direct evidence for natural origin and no direct evidence for any of the other possible origins I gave you. There is circumstantial evidence for all possibilities, which lead to the various hypotheses.

So for example the fact that SARS-2 is a betacoronavirus with similarities to SARS-1 and MERS is circumstantial evidence of zootonic origin. The fact that SARS-2 closest relative (BTCoV/4991 or RaTG13) was collected in a cave in Yunnan in 2013 by WIV researchers and brought back to their lab is circumstantial evidence of a lab origin.

In terms of the science, the two biggest areas of contention are how well adapted SARS-2 is to humans, and the furin cleavage site. There are dozens of papers on both topics with no compelling answers as yet.

Dohnjoe

patnor1011 wrote: »

Ok, no credible evidence for lab escape and so far no credible evidence of natural evolution or jumping species. All we have is maybe, probably and highly likely.
So, isn't it a little premature to call people conspiracy theorists if they go for possible lab leak theory?

I suggest reading my post again (and looking at the title of the thread)

Dohnjoe

geospatial wrote: »

It was an investigation completely controlled by the CCP, they set the rules, they provided the data that they choose to provide, they determined what access the investigators would have or not have.

Two quotes from the attached CNN article: "Dominic Dwyer a member of the WHO team told Reuters last week that the team had requested raw patient data on the 174 early cases and been refused, and were instead provided a summary". Why would the CCP refuse to provide this data? Because maybe it shows the early cases were centered around the WIV?

On the lab leak hypothesis: Here's our ubiquitous friend Peter Daszak again "We found no tangible evidence or real leads on that, despite asking really hard question of the WIV". Really hard questions? Like can we see your data that was taken down from your servers in Nov 2019, and see your lab notebooks, and see your lab safety records". Nope, didn't ask for any of that. Just asked did anyone at the WIV test positive for Covid, answer was no, case closed.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/31/asia/who-report-criticism-intl-hnk/index.html

And as mentioned I don't 100% trust the above investigation for all the obvious reasons

Likewise the US investigation is going to have conflicts of interest (and limited access) so the notion of them discovering some sort of definitive smoking gun is probably quite low

Barring some dramatic discovery, I suspect it will be a long time before we know for sure, if we ever know. I don't see some multinational independent fully transparent investigation taking place in China will full access given by China, do you?

Trigger

[Deleted User] wrote: »

I've actually been considering starting a thread on this topic in the conspiracy theories forum..

It's been happening across the site for a couple of years anyway..Primarily around the same topics that Facebook and YouTube etc have been accused of censoring..

Are we being subjected to, not downright censorship, but a strategic manipulation of the conversation, where anyone holding a viewpoint outside of what is deemed appropriate (the general liberal/MSM consensus) is harangued until they either give up or react and get banned?..

Mod: this is not the thread to discuss such topics, I'd suggest you start a helpdesk thread if you feel strongly about this on Boards- please stay on topic

Dohnjoe

geospatial wrote: »

I wouldn't agree with that statement, the way I would put it is there is no direct evidence for natural origin and no direct evidence for any of the other possible origins I gave you. There is circumstantial evidence for all possibilities, which lead to the various hypotheses.

Most of the experts looking at the genome see no evidence it's been tampered with. That's the overwhelming scientific view. Are you saying it's just as likely this virus is "man-made"?

There's a hypothesis that the world is flat, it doesn't mean it has any veracity

King Mob

geospatial wrote: »

I wouldn't agree with that statement,

So why didn't you comment on it?

It's been repeatedly claimed on this thread over and over that there's nothing supporting the zoonotic origin.
It's been claimed that there's no papers supporting the idea.
And when those papers are produced they have been claimed to be false, fraudulent and not peer reviewed.

When patnor and other conspiracy theorists are claiming that, they aren't applying the nuance you seem to want to assume.

You also say that all possibilities are on the table, yet earlier you said that your argeed that some conspiracy theories could be discounted, like the idea that the virus was a bioweapon.

What other possibilities are you referring to beyond the zoonotic origin and a gain of function origin?
What studies support these options or the claims that the virus was altered?

geospatial

Dohnjoe wrote: »

Likewise the US investigation is going to have conflicts of interest (and limited access) so the notion of them discovering some sort of definitive smoking gun is probably quite low

Barring some dramatic discovery, I suspect it will be a long time before we know for sure, if we ever know. I don't see some multinational independent fully transparent investigation taking place in China will full access given by China, do you?

So the good news is the new US investigation involves scientists who are open to the idea of a lab leak, not just those who dismissed the possibility from early Feb 2020. If we are going to demand openness and transparency from China, we should exhibit it ourselves.

But I agree, without access to relevant data, it's very hard to make progress. I think what it will take is some very firm negotiation where Xi is told that China will be treated like a pariah state unless they provide access. It's in China's interest to be open and transparent, regardless of their public outrage they are not stupid.

The best outcome is obviously one that includes China in a global effort to detect pathogens early, regardless of their origin, and have a coordinated global response.

patnor1011

Dohnjoe wrote: »

Most of the experts looking at the genome see no evidence it's been tampered with.

Most of the experts simply means that some of them do see it the other way. If there would be nothing of concern there you could say "all of them".

Dohnjoe wrote: »

That's the overwhelming scientific view. Are you saying it's just as likely this virus is "man-made"?

There's a hypothesis that the world is flat, it doesn't mean it has any veracity

Nothing overwhelming here so far. For what we know so far, study or search only started and we know so little about this topic exactly because we need more time to find the answers.

Dohnjoe

geospatial wrote: »

So the good news is the new US investigation involves scientists who are open to the idea of a lab leak, not just those who dismissed the possibility from early Feb 2020.

I am interested in investigations which want to get to the truth rather than being "more open" to a particular outcome

I am getting more and more of a feeling that some "impartial" posters here are really gunning for that one particular outcome

But I agree, without access to relevant data, it's very hard to make progress. I think what it will take is some very firm negotiation where Xi is told that China will be treated like a pariah state unless they provide access. It's in China's interest to be open and transparent, regardless of their public outrage they are not stupid.

The best outcome is obviously one that includes China in a global effort to detect pathogens early, regardless of their origin, and have a coordinated global response.

Indeed, but extremely unlikely, China holds the cards on this one.

Dohnjoe

patnor1011 wrote: »

Most of the experts simply means that some of them do see it the other way. If there would be nothing of concern there you could say "all of them".

No. They don't "see it" one way or another, it's not random lay-people "aving an opinion". They use method to demonstrate it. Which is why there is a significant amount of evidence (inc. published) from scientists demonstrating that the virus evolved naturally. There is little evidence that it was manipulated or engineered.

If there would be nothing of concern there you could say "all of them".

"All of them" doesn't really exist in science, there are always outliers, e.g. there are scientists (plural) who maintain that the Earth is only several thousand years old, however the evidence demonstrating that the Earth is billions of years old is stronger, ergo that's the scientific consensus.

astrofool

geospatial wrote: »

So the good news is the new US investigation involves scientists who are open to the idea of a lab leak, not just those who dismissed the possibility from early Feb 2020. If we are going to demand openness and transparency from China, we should exhibit it ourselves.

But I agree, without access to relevant data, it's very hard to make progress. I think what it will take is some very firm negotiation where Xi is told that China will be treated like a pariah state unless they provide access. It's in China's interest to be open and transparent, regardless of their public outrage they are not stupid.

The best outcome is obviously one that includes China in a global effort to detect pathogens early, regardless of their origin, and have a coordinated global response.

I'm pretty sure the WHO investigation only discounted a lab leak after the investigation, not beforehand. If the US investigation sees the same evidence it's highly likely they will reach the same conclusion and discount the lab leak theory as well.

cnocbui

patnor1011 wrote: »

Most of the experts simply means that some of them do see it the other way. If there would be nothing of concern there you could say "all of them".

Nothing overwhelming here so far. For what we know so far, study or search only started and we know so little about this topic exactly because we need more time to find the answers.

That is not true. The Norwegian virologist Dr Birger Sorensen and professor Angus Dalgleish in the UK published a paper a year ago stating Covid-19 was likely man made in a lab. They were shut down pretty hard at the time. Now they look like being vindicated.

Jun 7, 2020,03:42pm EDT|3,046,747 views
Controversial Coronavirus Lab Origin Claims Dismissed By Experts

New claims that the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was engineered have been dismissed by scientific and intelligence experts.

The authors of a British-Norwegian vaccine study—accepted by the Quarterly Review of Biophysics—claim that the coronavirus's spike protein contains sequences that appear to be artificially inserted.

In their paper, the Norwegian scientist Birger Sørensen and British oncologist Angus Dalgleish claim to have identified "inserted sections placed on the SARS-CoV-2 spike surface" that explains how the virus interacts with cells in the human body. Virologists, however, note that similar sections appear naturally in other viruses.
Accidental release claims challenged

Sir Richard Dearlove, who was head of MI6 from 1999 to 2004, told the Daily Telegraph that Sørensen and Dalgleish’s research shows that the pandemic may have started at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He added that he thought it unlikely to have been released deliberately, but that China had clearly tried to cover up the release.

The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 virus has no “credible natural ancestor" and was created by Chinese scientists who were working on a “Gain of Function" project in a Wuhan lab, the Daily Mail reported on Sunday, citing a new research paper by British professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr Birger Sorensen.

The new research claims that scientists took a natural coronavirus “backbone" found in Chinese cave bats and spliced onto it a new “spike", turning it into the deadly and highly transmissible COVID-19.

The paper also quotes that researchers found “unique fingerprints" in COVID-19 samples that they say could only have arisen from manipulation in a laboratory.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2020/06/07/controversial-coronavirus-lab-origin-claims-dismissed-by-experts/

Dohnjoe

cnocbui wrote: »

That is not true. The Norwegian virologist Dr Birger Sorensen and professor Angus Dalgleish in the UK published a paper a year ago stating Covid-19 was likely man made in a lab. They were shut down pretty hard at the time. Now they look like being vindicated.



https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2020/06/07/controversial-coronavirus-lab-origin-claims-dismissed-by-experts/

This has come up in this thread already. The final paper they produced didn't acknowledge any man-made link.

https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-claims/

Dohnjoe

Dohnjoe wrote: »

This has come up in this thread already. The final paper they produced didn't acknowledge any man-made link.

Why do you think they changed their mind?..

geospatial

Dohnjoe wrote: »

Most of the experts looking at the genome see no evidence it's been tampered with. That's the overwhelming scientific view. Are you saying it's just as likely this virus is "man-made"?

What evidence would you expect to see? First of all if SARS-2 evolved via passaging in a lab there would be no way to distinguish it genomically from one that evolved via passaging say on a mink farm, or via recombination within another animal. It's even arguable that if it evolved via a splicing experiment, it would be very difficult to detect tampering due to the techniques used.

I don't think any scientist is saying it is "man made" as in made from scratch, even though it could be done. What credible scientists like Alina Chan, David Relman, Nikolai Petrovsky and others are saying is that it could have been manipulated and this may be the most parsimonious explanation for how well adapted it is to humans. If you add that to all the other circumstantial evidence it's not a weak hypothesis.

I hope we find it came from nature, and think that's the most likely, but it's head in the sand stuff claiming it couldn't have been manipulated. What's the evidence for that? The fact we've made many similar chimera viruses in labs
since 2003, and most of that recent work (at least that we know of) has been done in Wuhan. One of the additional pieces of circumstantial evidence is that the BSL-4 lab opened in WIV in 2018, did they start working on more dangerous pathogens and experiments then?

astrofool

cnocbui wrote: »

That is not true. The Norwegian virologist Dr Birger Sorensen and professor Angus Dalgleish in the UK published a paper a year ago stating Covid-19 was likely man made in a lab. They were shut down pretty hard at the time. Now they look like being vindicated.



https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2020/06/07/controversial-coronavirus-lab-origin-claims-dismissed-by-experts/

Another few choice quotes:

The report’s authors also claim the lack of mutation in the virus since its discovery, suggests it was already fully adapted to humans. However, there have been several published studies noting evolution and mutation among SARS-CoV-2 strains.

Highlighting this one again:

Virologists, however, note that similar sections appear naturally in other viruses.

Grødeland also says that Sørensen's paper offered no biological confirmation on the relevance of positively charged patches.

A follow up paper was promised, but I don't believe that has been forthcoming yet (edit: it was forthcoming and had an entirely different conclusion) and new articles have been written based on the same June 2020 paper whose hypothesis was discounted as wrong by virologists as the sections of the spike protein that were meant to be man made do actually occur already in nature.

This also seems to be the basis for GeoSpatial's gain of function argument, but it is not built from any evidence that this occurred.

This is a waste of time..

astrofool

Deleted User wrote: »

Why do you think they changed their mind?..

Why do you think they changed their mind?

I mean, in their first paper the conclusion was based on faulty data that the sections of the spike protein didn't exist in nature, this was proven 100% false, unless they had new evidence then the second paper was of course going to have a different conclusion.

That's how science works.

geospatial

astrofool wrote: »

I'm pretty sure the WHO investigation only discounted a lab leak after the investigation, not beforehand. If the US investigation sees the same evidence it's highly likely they will reach the same conclusion and discount the lab leak theory as well.

The WHO were denied access to the relevant data to rule out a lab leak, or didn't ask for it. The lead investigator for that portion of the investigation had already decided in early 2020 that a lab leak was impossible, "pure baloney" he called it.

astrofool

astrofool wrote: »

Why do you think they changed their mind?

I mean, in their first paper the conclusion was based on faulty data that the sections of the spike protein didn't exist in nature, this was proven 100% false, unless they had new evidence then the second paper was of course going to have a different conclusion.

That's how science works.

The vanity fair article details the pressure that was applied to anyone who went against the natural origin hypothesis..

It's funny how, even after the acceptance of the lab leak theory, and the details of the cover up, people are still being berated for that viewpoint..

Science?..some of you wouldn't know what science was if it bit you..

astrofool

geospatial wrote: »

The WHO were denied access to the relevant data to rule out a lab leak, or didn't ask for it. The lead investigator for that portion of the investigation had already decided in early 2020 that a lab leak was impossible, "pure baloney" he called it.

OK, so you're basing the lab leak theory on the basis that the lead investigator from the WHO into the origins is either not to be trusted or is unfit to do their job.

Ignoring that other investigators would have to go along with this as well and also not challenge the results of the investigation and not leak this to anyone (I mean there's the cover up there if you wanted to pursue it), it just doesn't seem anyway likely.

astrofool

Deleted User wrote: »

The vanity fair article details the pressure that was applied to anyone who went against the natural origin hypothesis..

It's funny how, even after the acceptance of the lab leak theory, and the details of the cover up, people are still being berated for that viewpoint..

Science?..some of you wouldn't know what science was if it bit you..

So you think other scientists forced them to publish another paper reaching a different conclusion, ignoring the fact that the one piece of evidence they used in their original paper was in fact completely wrong?

Come on CQD, explain science and how it works. Stop reaching for the insults immediately when you're challenged.

Well..it's not going with whatever is politically expedient..