freeman3

Researchers have cooked data

You're saying he cooked his data?
Based on what evidence?

freeman3

So just because he published that doesnt mean it is assumed that he his views had evolved for good scientific reasons.

Anderesen

"it specifically means we thought—on preliminary look—that the virus could have been engineered and/or manipulated. Turns out the data suggest otherwise—which is the conclusion of our paper."

In a separate tweet Andersen wrote: "As I have said many times, we seriously considered a lab leak a possibility. However, significant new data, extensive analyses and many discussions led to the conclusions in our paper.

freeman3

His research does not answer that question. The only way for him to answer that is for the researcher to answer it himself.

Maybe you want to reread your linked article. Quoting Andersen doing just this...

Andersen

In a separate tweet, Andersen wrote: "Conspiracies have created a narrative where we all 'dismissed it [the lab leak hypothesis] out of hand'."

"That's absurd and couldn't be further from the truth. It's just that the data don't support the hypothesis."

The key quote from Lentzos

While acknowledging there was, “as of yet, little concrete evidence,” she noted

You dont get away with not answering the central question: why did Anderson completely change his mind in 4 days? Please address that.

And no I did not say he cooked his data. I said you were making assumptions about researchers not being subject to human foibles. So when evidence comes forth undermining research it needs to be explained. And he--recognizing the need--at least tried to explain. Your whole mantra that he explained it in his paper was just annoying and not a reasonable argument.

RJ's post on Lentzos is right on point. And your response--that as yet there is little concrete evidence for the lab leak hypothesis--is not on point and rsther annoying. The point is that why was there this a scientific rush to judgment when there was little concrete eviddnce to support any theory?And she talked about scientists fearing for their grants, fearing for their careers. The WSJ articles talks about certain scientific cliques having vested interests in the lab leak hypothesis being labeled a conspiracy theory.

"Ms. Lentzos counsels against idealizing scientists and in favor of 'seeing science and scientific activity, and how the community works, not as this inner sacred sanctum that’s devoid of any conflicts of interests, or agendas, or any of that stuff, but seeing it as also a social activity, where there are good players and bad players.'"

Exactly.

freeman3

You dont get away with not answering the central question: why did Anderson completely change his mind in 4 days? Please address that.

Because he was presented with the results of the analysis on the covid genome. He's repeatedly written this...
When presented with new evidence, new conclusions are drawn. Even if the evidence comes a day later..

freeman3

The point is that why was there this a scientific rush to judgment when there was little concrete evidence to support any theory?

First, there is no judgement. There is a leading hypothesis. Which is strongly supported by available evidence.
If new evidence comes to light , not just "theories" based on circumstance or unconfirmed rumour, then I'm sure that scientists will react appropriately.

freeman3

And your response--that as yet there is little concrete evidence for the lab leak hypothesis--is not on point and rather annoying

I can understand that it annoys you. You've decided that something you imagine happened, happened. And you don't want to acknowledge that the evidence does not support your theory.

"Ms. Lentzos counsels against idealizing scientists and in favor of 'seeing science and scientific activity, and how the community works, not as this inner sacred sanctum that’s devoid of any conflicts of interests, or agendas, or any of that stuff, but seeing it as also a social activity, where there are good players and bad players.

Ms. Lentzos advances a theory with no concrete evidence to support it, and she broadly accuses other scientists of abandoning the scientific method.
That's rich with hypocrisy.

I understand why you do not wish to respond--there is no way to explain going from it looks like some of it was bioengineered...to in 4 days calling such a theory "crackpot". If I were you, ,I would not lose credibility in trying to defend it. You need to concede the point and move on to another defense. By trying to justify it youre simply conceding that youre completely and irretrievably biased here.

You claim "evidence" supporting that it came from Nature...but there is no such clear evidence. Thats an "opinion" based on looking at the virus. There is a considerable amount of difference of opinion in the scientific community on that and the opinion is at best a tentative assessment awaiting actual evidence. (yes, if you could tell with a high degree if confidence just by looking at the virus that it came from the Wild that would be significant evidence but from what I can tell this is more "conjecture" than evidence--hence the disagreement in the scientific community.) If they found a bat near Wuhan with a virus similar to Covid..now that would be powerful evidence. Researchers at the Wuhan bio lab in November getting sick with Covid would be strong evidence, if proven. You throw around the term "evidence" without considering what it actually means in this context. I daresay 25 years of being a lawyer helps me to assess what is and isnt significant evidence

Lentzos discusses her experiences. What's your experience working in a lab? She isnt going to name names, please. But frankly her description sounds like how any group of humans act--people who want to advance their career, get acceptance/recognition and want to obtain grant money, etc. That's the messy reality of human beings. From my perspective, you try to idealize expert/scientists and why their expertise should be valued..that doesnt mean theyre above critique.

Anyway, I tire of this discussion. I doubt I will participate anymore, at least unless there is a new development. Who am I trying to convince here?

Freeman3
[quoteT]hats an "opinion" based on looking at the virus. [/quote]

What you call "looking at the virus"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591- ... /figures/1

While the analyses above suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may bind human ACE2 with high affinity, computational analyses predict that the interaction is not ideal7 and that the RBD sequence is different from those shown in SARS-CoV to be optimal for receptor binding7,11. Thus, the high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.

Freeman3

Researchers at the Wuhan bio lab in November getting sick with Covid would be strong evidence, if proven.

Why hasn't anyone come forward with evidence to support this rumor after all this time?
No names. No confirmation they were sick. No medical reports.
Just internet rumors' that Mike Pompeo kept referring to...

freeman3

I daresay 25 years of being a lawyer helps me to assess what is and isnt significant evidence

And is this based upon how many years as a bioscientist? Virologist?
There's a reason expertise is valued and why.

freeman3

From my perspective, you try to idealize expert/scientists and why their expertise should be valued..that doesnt mean theyre above critique.

So you'll agree that her making claims for which she admits she has "no concrete evidence", is something that we should all criticize.

There are 5 (five) scientists who jointly published the article in Nature. There is no one agreeing with Lentzos idle conjecture.

While the analyses above suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may bind human ACE2 with high affinity, computational analyses predict that the interaction is not ideal7 and that the RBD sequence is different from those shown in SARS-CoV to be optimal for receptor binding7,11. Thus, the high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.

GIGO. Who knows what exact virus was in the bats Chinese scientists were working with and therefore whether making predictions with computer software bases on SARs have any validity ? What if the lab got a bat virus that already had a coronavirus similar to Covid?
If you were working forward from SARs and were tweaking the SARs virus this wouldnt be the way to go based on software predictions..well, maybe thats true. But it certainly does not rule out a lab leak. Not one bit. Or that it was tinkered with in some ways in gain-in-function research and the virus also evolved naturally in some ways before then. They found a bat in Yunnan province (not Wuhan) in 2013 that was much closer to Covid than SARs. But they have no such bats near Wuhan. Nature assembles the arguments for and against a lab leak:


https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3

As you contended of course leaks from a lab are just an absurd idea. How would happen...oh wait, there were two separate leaks from labs in Beijing that caused several people to get sick during the SARs outbreak. (See Nature article,).

Why hasn't anyone come forward with evidence

to support this rumor after all this time?
No names. No confirmation they were sick. No medical reports. 
Just internet rumors' that Mike Pompeo kept referring to... 

Nonsense. This is secret US intel. They are not going to divulge sources. China not cooperating is the reason we dont have this information. You are familiar that China is a totalitarian country, right? You cant just go in and interview people and obtain records

And is this based upon how many years as a bioscientist? Virologist? 
There's a reason expertise is valued and why.

I am not giving expert opinions. But I have a good bullshit detector from crossexamining many experts whose speciality is bullshit.

So you'll agree that her making claims for which she admits she has "no concrete evidence", is something that we should all criticize. 

There are 5 (five) scientists who jointly published the article in Nature. There is no one agreeing with Lentzos idle conjecture.

Uh, no. She has anecdotal experiences of being a scientist which sounds right from my experience from being a human being. And there is evidence that a large swath of scientistic community closed ranks against the lab leak hypothesis prematurely. You appear to have this communistic faith in the impartality of experts, which is funny because experts in such societies do not have the freedom to say what they want.

freeman3

Who knows what exact virus was in the bats Chinese scientists were working with and therefore whether making predictions with computer software bases on SARs have any validity ?

well, I'm going to assume that a project based upon the study of corona virus in bats is going to be run by virologists, and other scientists who know what they are doing. And that interested scientists will closely follow their published work and/or if they have affiliations unpublished work. So, I'm going to say that "people with expert knowledge " will know what "exact viruses" are found. It is, after all, what all the research was about...


freeman3

What if the lab got a bat virus that already had a coronavirus similar to Covid?

Possible. However a level 4 lab having a bat with this virus will be a lot less likely to spread to other animals than a bat in a cave with tourists or farmers frequenting the cave. Or a bat near a forest where their night time hunting would have them come into contact with other animals. Or a bat that had been captured for food and kept in a cage next to other animals - like say pangolins or rabbits?

In the first case you've got all kinds of levels of security run by people who are intimate with the danger inherent in what they are doing.
In the remainder you have ignorant farmers, tourists and shop keepers... Which one is the easier route and will offer the greatest chance of zoonotic transfer? Especially since there is near certainty that the virus first evolved in another animal before humans.

freeman3

Nonsense. This is secret US intel. They are not going to divulge sources.

Sure. Like US intelligence isn't
a) often wrong
b) often duplicitous
c) motivated to produce "intelligence" to support geopolitical goals...
d) misrepresented by politicians like Mike Pompeo.

freeman3

I am not giving expert opinions. But I have a good bullshit detector from crossexamining many experts whose speciality is bullshit

Well the topic is more accurately bat shit... But sure, you're a self proclaimed expert.

freeman3

You appear to have this communistic faith in the impartiality of experts, which is funny because experts in such societies do not have the freedom to say what they want

There are experts from all over the world involved in this research. They make conclusions based upon evidence in hand, not conjecture. (Although conjecture may start a line of inquiry)
If anything substantive is actually found I'm sure that we will find they react to any new information carefully, and in a fulsome and professional manner.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/06/15/jon_stewart_on_lab_leak_theory_the_disease_is_the_same_name_as_the_lab.html

Stewart joked: "There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania, what do you think happened? I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel made it with a cocoa bean. Or it’s the @#$! chocolate factory!"

Considering I was in Hershey at the Chocolate Factory this afternoon, I found this quite amusing...

The link above (somehow i can't edit the response) is the gold standard in answering the question about the conspiracies around a "Wuhan lab leak"

Its on a site called Quara. Be sure to click on more.

There are no conspiracy theories about the Wuhan lab being the cause of the outbreak. That's the label China wants applied to it. We dont know what caused the outbreak. The problem is that China is a powerful country trying to shut down a reasonable possible cause of the pandemic. As I previously poited out there were two separate lab leaks in China with regard to SARs that caused small outbreaks. The US shut-down gain of function research in 2014 until 2017 because of lab mishaps in 2014. So this contention by you since the beginning that this is a crackpot theory is clearly misplaced. Very reputable, credentialed scientists since the beginning have cautioned against ruling out a lab leak. I'm not a Trump supporter; I dont have a bias against China other than theyre a totalitarian country that doesnt respect individual rights. But I dont like it when debate gets affected by power. And it was clear early that there was a rush to scientific judgment on what caused the pandemic. I mean, no one has ever been able to give a clear explanation as how this pandemic started in Wuhan when there arent any bats in an unban setting like Wuhan and the bats that have been found to have coronavirus viruses close to Covid have habitats several hundred miles away. There are bats that do have coronaviruses similar to Covid--they are in that Wuhan lab. China has not able to find a bat in the wild that has a virus similar to Covid. They have not been able to find an intermediate host. These are all significant facts. Just because you are doing scientific research does not mean you should discard common sense. If there are no bats...then they couldnt cause Covid, right? Right?

It is also a very, very odd coincidence that the Chinese CDC moved its own lab to a location near that Wuhan market. Huh, why would they do that? And of course we have the US intel report saying three Chinese researchers got sick at the lab.

Against that you have the one study saying computer modeling suggests that it was not bioengineered. I already pointed out the hazards of computer modeling using the SARs virus when the lab would have likely been modeling with a virus that was different from SARs and closer to Covid.Even if that study was accurate it does not rule out that the lab had a bat which had the Covid virus which had originated without bioengineering


Power should not get in the way of truth. The problem is that China not going to let us find the truth. Ruling out hypotheses for political reasons and not scientific ones should not be part of the scientific process.

So I am not really interested in some quora discussion. I am awaiting some clear-cut scientific evidence.

Freeman3

There are no conspiracy theories about the Wuhan lab being the cause of the outbreak

Once upon a time … there was a prophet called Sun Myung Moon (of Moonies fame). This prophet founded a paper called the Washington Times. On 26 January 2020, this paper cried “Wolf!” claiming the virus originated in “a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program”, quoting Dany Shoham a retired “Israeli biological warfare analyst”. But there was no evidence.

And then, on 17 February 2020, the Republican senator from Arkansas, Tom Cotton cried “Wolf!” He claimed on Fox News that a Chinese lab was the source. But he had no evidence.

And on 22 February 2020, Steven Mosher, a “Virginia-based pro-life advocate” with no expertise in the field or indeed knowledge cried “Wolf!” Steve painted a blood-soaked scenario where a “horseshoe bat” was “sold from the lab … to the nearby wet market for a very good price”. But there was no evidence.

And on 21 April 2020, in the Wall Street Journal, Tom Cotton cried “Wolf!” again. He claimed a “Chinese coverup”, saying that the evidence “all points towards the Wuhan labs”. But he had no actual evidence.

And on 30 April 2020, President Trump cried “Wolf!” and claimed that he had evidence that the virus originated in a Chinese lab. We’re still waiting for that evidence.

And then lots of people cried “Wolf!” Many, many. But there was no evidence.

And on 5 May 2020, Jair Bolsonaro cried “Wolf!”, claiming that the Chinese specifically developed the virus as a potent bioweapon (more or less at the same time also claiming it was just a ‘mild flu’). But yet again there was no evidence.

And on 14 September 2020, someone called Li-Meng Yan cried “Wolf!” She even posted an excruciatingly bad paper about this on line. Neither she nor her sponsor (Steve Bannon) however had any evidence.

freeman3

So this contention by you since the beginning that this is a crackpot theory is clearly misplaced.

The theory started with crackpots...

T

hey’ve had plenty of time to show the evidence, and one of them was the then president of the USA—not lacking in resources. We must conclude that they have no substantial evidence, especially as any evidence would have powerfully aided their China-bashing.

So what do they currently have? Weak or anecdotal evidence, along the lines of:

There is a virology institute in Wuhan that in the past has collaborated with other BSL-4 labs in performing gain-of-function (GOF) experiments.
Several staff at this institute are said to have been unwell with a flu-like illness, at the height of an unequivocal outbreak of influenza in November 2019 in Wuhan, occurring initially mainly in children and later in adults.
SARS-CoV-2 is substantially different from SARS-CoV-1, and indeed from other sarbecoviruses. It has a furin cleavage site (which has been found in other coronaviruses, but not in the viruses closest in sequence) and a receptor-binding-domain (RBD) that is identical to the RBD from pangolin coronaviruses.
The Wuhan Institute helpfully provided two virus sequences that closely resemble SARS-CoV-2: RaTG13[2] and later, RmYN02,[3] respectively 96.3% and 97.2% similar to SARS-CoV-2.
I know of no evidence other than excessively vague speculation that the US or anyone else planted the virus in China. Other ‘evidence’ of a lab leak is even weaker:

Wuhan is distant from major Chinese areas where bat coronaviruses have commonly been collected;
About one third of the original cases identified in December had direct contact with a “wet market”—14 km away from the lab[4]—but this seems to have been aggressively cleaned up by the Chinese authorities, potentially obscuring evidence. There is reported evidence of contamination of the market with SARS-CoV-2, but the Chinese investigators subsequently asserted that this was perhaps more likely to represent a superspreader event than the initial site of infection.
Researchers from the institute have previously collected specimens from a cave in the south of China and might conceivably have become infected.
Modified viruses have previously escaped from labs, elsewhere.

There are two interesting observations here. The first is that a number of the assertions about an institutional origin are based on evidence provided by the Chinese researchers—evidence that they not only could have but surely would have suppressed if they were ‘guilty’. The second is that I haven’t yet seen an argument from those vocally asserting a lab origin that tries to present the ‘other side’.

freeman3

And of course we have the US intel report saying three Chinese researchers got sick at the lab.

Several staff at this institute are said to have been unwell with a flu-like illness, at the height of an unequivocal outbreak of influenza in November 2019 in Wuhan, occurring initially mainly in children and later in adults.

All of the claims you are repeating are debunked in the article I linked you to... I copied and pasted a few to highlight that. It would be easier if you took the time to read it.