DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Covid Part XII

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan-china-intelligence/index.html

CNN
—
The US Department of Energy has assessed that the Covid-19 pandemic most likely came from a laboratory leak in China, according to a newly updated classified intelligence report.

Two sources said that the Department of Energy assessed in the intelligence report that it had “low confidence” the Covid-19 virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan.

Intelligence agencies can make assessments with either low, medium or high confidence. A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion.

The latest assessment further adds to the divide in the US government over whether the Covid-19 pandemic began in China in 2019 as the result of a lab leak or whether it emerged naturally. The various intelligence agencies have been split on the matter for years. In 2021, the intelligence community declassified a report that showed four agencies in the intelligence community had assessed with low confidence that the virus likely jumped from animals to humans naturally in the wild, while one assessed with moderate confidence that the pandemic was the result of a laboratory accident.

Department of Energy?

I say we wait until we hear from the IRS.
Or the Forestry Department.

One of sixteen intelligence agencies asked by the Biden organization to investigate the issue.

this was already discovered years ago.

It spread from a rip in a scientist's PPE in Wuhan.

Maybe.

Wasn’t someone on here just ridiculed for mentioning this as a possibility? I’m thinking it was Fate but I’m not sure. I do know that social media outlets were suspending accounts over this.

Where have you seen those specifics?

I've always felt it made more sense that it was a lab leak... I like to believe it was accidental... but have always felt that it likely was a lab leak...

Myself, I never disputed that it came from any of the places that have been mentioned over the years.

What I objected to and still do, is that the past admin tried to make that the urgent story. The urgency came from the spread of the disease in the US and around the world. That's what needed addressed.

Finding the cause and placing blame can come after people are taken care of and protected as much as possible. At least that was my thinking then and if I had a do over, I'd still think the same..

Wouldn't a lab leak be accidental?

j/c...

At least it's no longer "debunked" and racist.

Low confidence doesn't instill a great deal of assurance.

More confidence than a government saying it's been debunked 15 minutes after it happened.

#science

I guess when you pick and choose which government agency report you wish to believe that supports your own preconceived notions it helps a lot. Even if it qualifies as "low confidence".

Strawman.

I'm not picking and choosing anything. Just pointing out that there was no way for any government to say anything had been debunked in early 2020... yet ours did.

Well then thank Joe Biden for his decision that all of these agencies investigate.

First, it is important to investigate and discover the cause early because the most significant evidence will not be attainable a few months after the outbreak. The playbook requires immediate investigation and data gathering. And it is not a problem to both mitigate the risks of spread and to investigate the origins at the same time. We have done it in the past. The uncertainty in the origins stems from the inability to have international experts gathering data and taking samples during the early stages of the outbreak.

The WHO, media, and NIH played a major role in this by working to spread misinformation about the origins of the pandemic. They spread hoaxes like the pangolin theory, where significant biological data was claimed to have been discovered. This took the pressure off of them to actually get people into China to investigate the origins and the time delay will prevent us from ever being able to gather any further significant data on the origins.

As a member of the WHO, China has an obligation to allow international inspectors into their country and the WHO has a an obligation to seek the truth, and the other member countries of the WHO have an obligation to their citizens to apply pressure to China as soon as it became clear that they were violating their international agreements by preventing inspections. That is the way it is supposed to work on paper. Clearly, the system is completely broken and corrupted.

The uncertainty in this new report is not a reflection of holes in the lab leak hypothesis, it is a reflection of the failure of the WHO and government around the world to do their job during the earliest stages of the pandemic.

I don't agree that the past admin was making this the urgent story and not sure why it matters if they did. This was an international issue and high ranking government officials lack the competence to have a valid opinion on this issue. Case in point, they have unnamed employees in energy deciding what did or did not happen, and the government as a whole is so incompetent that they cannot even keep a classified report out of the media. The opinions of the administrations and governments as a whole are completely irrelevant.

The problem really stems from media wanting to push a narrative and not having the understanding to know who is a competent source, who is an incompetent source, and who might be a compromised source. They effectively spent 2 years astroturfing for the CCP.

The only reliable sources early in the pandemic were a few scientists that had the background and freedom to post independently, but they lacked to megaphone to reach mainstream audiences.
I posted this independent article in early summer of 2020.
https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-m...f-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748
His analysis has held up over time, but as far as I know, this guy was never interviewed on any major news network. Most of the information that we have now, we had back then, but the people with megaphones to reach the mainstream lacked either the willingness or competence to pursue an analysis. It is taking government organizations 3 years to catch up to this guy.

Don't trust government organizations when it comes to scientific analysis. If you live in East Palestine and they tell you that your glow-in-the-dark water is safe to drink, don't drink the water.

QFT... not that the truth really matters to most.

But creating a truth matters to many.

Thank Joe for waiting 18 months to ask why the outbreak began in the city with a lab housing one of the world's most extensive collections of bad viruses, doing some of the most aggressive research, with our tax dollars?

Most people with an IQ above 12 made those associations within 18 minutes.

I'm not reading agency reports for the truth... merely the irony.

Amen.

That's been the real story here.

At least this president did it. But never mind that. I see you're still writing your own scenario and accusing anyone who doesn't go along with it as having an IQ of less than 12. Not that I expected anything less.

Imagine a murder occurs and there are multiple suspects. Then the victims body is cremated without an autopsy and the crime scene is burned to the ground without gathering any evidence.
Three years later, detectives from all over the city begin to "investigate" the crime by having a series of meetings and writing reports. The Police Chief appears on the meeting touting the great progress of their investigation, but they won't know anything for several more years until all of the detectives have additional meetings and write more reports and form a consensus. The press dutifully notes this information and disseminates it as if the process completely reasonable and not even a little bit absurd.

That is why the intelligence of everyone involved deserves to be mocked.

Yes, I'm sure all of those scientists that reached the conclusion it came from the market have IQ's less than 12. You guys really need to stop with that crap.

Oh, no; not at all. I'm sure they're mostly very intelligent people. They just happen to be blatant liars; toeing the line as #science became politics.

There was no conclusion, only a narrative. A scientific conclusion was absolutely impossible as there was no proof it became 'humanized' through a secondary infection of an animal. So stating with conviction that it didn't come from a lab was a 100% lie. You should just go ahead and accept facts as facts and quit making a fool of yourself.

So they went from having IQ's lower than 12 to blatant liars? I'm not sure you even hear yourself. If you do and stand by that, I feel sorry for you. You have gone from them being stupid, to being liars and anyone believing otherwise as being as fool. Man, you are pretty desperate to make anyone who doesn't believe your narrative look like they are beneath you. I'll keep you in my prayers. It sounds like you need them.

We're not talking about those scientists right now. We are talking about government organizations creating a report. Those organizations may have semi-competent scientists at the bench level that are tasked with finding answers to an unsolvable problem and in effect responding "we don't have the data to reach a conclusion". Over top of them they have about 9 layers of clueless bureaucrats looking to enhance their own careers by pretending to be experts and saying "we need more time to reach a consensus".

Consensus has no value in this matter, only evidence and analysis is important and right now, we have no ability to gather more evidence and we have analyzed everything that can be analyzed. That hasn't changed in the last 2 years.

“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”
- Galileo Galilei

I have no idea what you're talking about. Here's what I'm talking about.


You can talk about anything you like. It seems Fate has gone off the deep edge with his accusations here. Much the way he points his fingers at the far left liberals on this board of doing the same thing.

He was talking about what was happening at that time.

You have a very hard time with reading comprehension.

Anyone with an IQ above 12 made the association that a lab housing one of the world's most extensive collections of bad viruses, particularly coronaviruses, and happened to be ground zero for the outbreak... had a solid likelihood of being involved. Our government waited 18 months to explore the idea.

Scientists said it was not true, debunked; all the way up to "impossible". Those were lies. They were lies because they had no possibility of being true without evidence... of which there was none. Science is not stating an opinion as fact. If we based all science on hypothesis, we would be wrong most of the time. It doesn't become fact until a hypothesis is proven true. Science 101.

So yes, if you believe what they were saying was true, fact, and grounded in science; you are a fool.

The FBI report came back as Moderate Confidence. I have a feeling most if not all reports will comeback as it being the most likely cause.

So far four of them have concluded otherwise already.

Sure man, sure. According to some everything is political and those who don't believe what you are peddling are fools. It's not difficult to understand.

1. My uncle was part of a team who did the genome sequencing for the virus.
2. It was very well known in the community that it came from the Wuhan lab.
3. They were working on modifications of the coronavirus at the WIV for quite a while.
3a. *There has never been a virus (unmodified in nature) that makes you lose both your taste and smell the way covid does.
4. The US funded the study of SARS at WIH through Grant R01AI110964 https://taggs.hhs.gov/Detail/AwardDetail?arg_AwardNum=R01AI110964&arg_ProgOfficeCode=104
5. The smoking gun was these 3 lab researchers had Covid-19 before everyone in Nov of 2019. They went to the hospital where it started to spread. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/heal...ied-3-wuhan-lab-researchers-who-n1268327

Here’s how scientists know the coronavirus came from bats and wasn’t made in a lab

One of the conspiracy theories that have plagued attempts to keep people informed during the pandemic is the idea that the coronavirus was created in a laboratory. But the vast majority of scientists who have studied the virus agree that it evolved naturally and crossed into humans from an animal species, most likely a bat.

How exactly do we know that this virus, SARS-CoV-2, has a “zoonotic” animal origin and not an artificial one? The answers lie in the genetic material and evolutionary history of the virus, and understanding the ecology of the bats in question.

An estimated 60% of known infectious diseases and 75% of all new, emerging, or re-emerging diseases in humans have animal origins. SARS-CoV-2 is the newest of seven coronaviruses found in humans, all of which came from animals, either from bats, mice or domestic animals. Bats were also the source of the viruses causing Ebola, rabies, Nipah and Hendra virus infections, Marburg virus disease, and strains of Influenza A virus.

The genetic makeup or “genome” of SARS-CoV-2 has been sequenced and publicly shared thousands of times by scientists all over the world. If the virus had been genetically engineered in a lab there would be signs of manipulation in the genome data. This would include evidence of an existing viral sequence as the backbone for the new virus, and obvious, targeted inserted (or deleted) genetic elements.

But no such evidence exists. It is very unlikely that any techniques used to genetically engineer the virus would not leave a genetic signature, like specific identifiable pieces of DNA code.

The genome of SARS-CoV-2 is similar to that of other bat coronaviruses, as well as those of pangolins, all of which have a similar overall genomic architecture. Differences between the genomes of these coronaviruses show natural patterns typical of coronavirus evolution. This suggests that SARS-CoV-2 evolved from a previous wild coronavirus.

One of the key features that makes SARS-CoV-2 different from the other coronaviruses is a particular “spike” protein that binds well with another protein on the outside of human cells called ACE2. This enables the virus to hook into and infect a variety of human cells. However, other related coronaviruses do have similar features, providing evidence that they have evolved naturally rather than being artificially added in a lab.

Coronaviruses and bats are locked in an evolutionary arms race in which the viruses are constantly evolving to evade the bat immune system and bats are evolving to withstand infections from coronaviruses. A virus will evolve multiple variants, most of which will be destroyed by the bat’s immune system, but some will survive and pass to other bats.

Some scientists have suggested that SARS-CoV-2 may have come from another known bat virus (RaTG13) found by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The genomes of these two viruses are 96% similar to one another.

This might sound very close but in evolutionary terms this actually makes them significantly different and the two have been shown to share a common ancestor. This shows that RaGT13 is not the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2.

In fact, SARS-CoV-2 most likely evolved from a viral variant that couldn’t survive for a long period of time or that persists at low levels in bats. Coincidentally, it evolved the ability to invade human cells and accidentally found its way into us, possibly by means of an intermediate animal host, where it then thrived. Or an initially harmless form of the virus might have jumped directly into humans and then evolved to become harmful as it passed between people.

Genetic variations

The mixing or “recombination” of distinct coronavirus genomes in nature is one of the mechanisms that brings about novel coronaviruses. There is now further evidence that this process could be involved in the generation of SARS-CoV-2.

Since the pandemic started, the SARS-CoV-2 virus appears to have started evolving into two distinct strains, acquiring adaptations for more efficient invasion of human cells. This could have occurred through a mechanism known as a selective sweep, through which beneficial mutations help a virus to infect more hosts and so become more common in the viral population. This is a natural process that can ultimately reduce the genetic variation between individual viral genomes.

The same mechanism would account for the lack of diversity seen in the many SARs-CoV-2 genomes that have been sequenced. This indicates that the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 could have been circulating in bat populations for a considerable amount of time. It then would have acquired the mutations that allowed it to spill over from bats into other animals, including humans.

It is also important to remember that around one in five of all mammal species on Earth are bats, with some found only in certain locations and others migrating across vast distances. This diversity and geographical spread makes it a challenge to identify which group of bats SARS-CoV-2 originally came from.

There is evidence that early cases of COVID-19 occurred outside of Wuhan in China and had no clear link to the city’s wet market where the pandemic is thought to have begun. But that isn’t evidence of a conspiracy.

It could simply be that infected people accidentally brought the virus into the city and then the wet market, where the enclosed, busy conditions increased the chances of the disease spreading rapidly. This includes the possibility of one of the scientists involved in bat coronavirus research in Wuhan unknowingly becoming infected and bringing the virus back from where their subject bats lived. This would still be considered natural infection, not a laboratory leak.

Only through robust science and the study of the natural world will we be able to truly understand the natural history and origins of zoonotic diseases like COVID-19. This is pertinent because our ever-changing relationship and increasing contact with wildlife is raising the risk of new deadly zoonotic diseases emerging in humans. SARS-CoV-2 is not the first virus that we have acquired

https://theconversation.com/heres-h...from-bats-and-wasnt-made-in-a-lab-141850

But we know, we know. If you believe this you must be a fool. Scientists using actual science are political pawns and have IQ's less than 12.

No Pit, everything is not political. But it's pretty easy to see what is when it's gift-wrapped for you. Well, easy for some.

Yes, it's a giant government conspiracy and all of these scientists are in on it. Once again I'm not sure you even hear yourself.

Do I hear myself saying what you say I said whether I said it or not?

No. I quit hearing that mess in early 2013, shortly after I joined the board.

You certainly did claim these scientists were bring political and that as such it was gift wrapped. That certainly implies that these scientists were working in concert to push a government agenda. I'm not sure how far from a government conspiracy you think that is. Because according to the logic you're promoting here it sounds quite the same.

Uncle George Santos no doubt.

You are the definition of a bully.