Covid: FBI chief Christopher Wray says China lab leak 'most likely'

[On Fire]

Covid: FBI chief Christopher Wray says China lab leak 'most likely'

Christopher Wray says the FBI has "for quite some time" settled on a potential lab incident in Wuhan.

www.bbc.co.uk

FBI Director Christopher Wray has said that the bureau believes Covid-19 "most likely" originated in a "Chinese government-controlled lab".

 

[SpookyFrank]

The noted epidemiologists at the FBI...

 

[JimW]

That's great, we can completely relax about the possibility of any other pandemics due to species leaps in the wild then.

 

[Karl Masks]

I thought the FBI were no longer trustworthy after raiding mar a Lago? So clearly this is all lies

 

[High Voltage]

BotF has a different take on this and the "confidence level" as to the accuracy of the report, he doesn't regard it as being that high



Edit: added quote from the BBC article to demonstrate an example of a confidence level being given to a report

An unclassified report released by the US top spy official in October 2021 also said that four US intelligence agencies had assessed with "low confidence" that it had originated with an infected animal or a related virus.

 

[gentlegreen]

I reckon the bat guano industry was more likely to be the source.

 

[Yossarian]

I guess we'll have to see what comes out in the next few months if there's any more transparency about how the FBI etc. arrived at their findings - this was a long, but good about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, apparently there had long been safety issues and internal communications suggest there was some kind of accident in November 2019.

Without the cooperation of China’s government, we can’t know exactly what did or didn’t happen at the WIV, or what precise set of circumstances unleashed SARS-CoV-2. But the dispatches that Reid unearthed, when overlaid with additional evidence the Senate team compiled, point to a catastrophe in the making: political pressure to excel, inadequate resources to safeguard risky work and an effort to skirt blame once a crisis hit.

As Reid sees it, the international community must continue to demand answers. “If you just throw your hands in the air and say, ‘We’ll never know because it’s China,’ and just move on — if you take that defeatist approach to things — you can’t prepare yourself to prevent something like this from happening in the future.”

COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan Lab

The Wuhan lab at the center of suspicions about the pandemic’s onset was far more troubled than known, documents unearthed by a Senate team reveal. Tracing the evidence, Vanity Fair and ProPublica give the clearest view yet of a biocomplex in crisis.

www.propublica.org

 

[Yossarian]

That's great, we can completely relax about the possibility of any other pandemics due to species leaps in the wild then.

This writer argues that the partisanship around the origins of COVID meant there wasn't a public conversation about "the safety of certain kinds of scientific research, in which virologists collected rare viruses out in the wild, brought them to facilities in or near cities and in some cases tinkered with them there to help prevent or better respond to future pandemics."

This puts us in a strange epistemological limbo for such a mystery: No genuine proof seems to have arrived, one way or the other, three years on, in part because investigations have been largely stonewalled by China. That means that anyone contemplating the origins of the pandemic and its relevance for lab safety is operating to some degree from positions of ambiguity and probability.

But if you had been told, back in 2019, that this would be the state of knowledge in 2023, would it not seem extremely weird to you that there has not been a broad public conversation about the wisdom of potentially dangerous virological research in the meantime? That so much more oxygen had been eaten up by partisan theater than by public debate over the policy implications of such a possibility?

Opinion | We’ve Been Talking About the Lab-Leak Hypothesis All Wrong …

archived 28 Feb 2023 22:43:44 UTC

archive.is

 

[Pickman's model]

I thought the FBI were no longer trustworthy after raiding mar a Lago? So clearly this is all lies

Sure many people thought the fbi no longer trustworthy after cointelpro or after the x-files. But I'm not surprised you waited until mal

 

[elbows]

It was always going to be tricky. Various agencies wont share their evidence and analysis properly in a timely way. Politics and 'diplomatic issues' get in the way, China gets in the way, several shadowy worlds dont want to be exposed. And even without those problems, actually collecting the evidence wouldnt be the easiest thing in the world to do unless you get lucky and the gaps in the zoonotic chain/history of the virus are neatly filled.

Some of the implications are unpalatable, some people express far too much certainty, including a whole bunch of scientists who are wedded to direct zoonotic theories. Some scientists dont like the implications for their fields research activities, etc etc. I dont blame them for failing to be convinced without seeing the evidence, but they should apply that same standard to the non-lab version of events too, where the evidence hasnt been that impressive to date either. Some of them are just relying on repetition and shouting zoonotic on twitter, and it simply isnt good enough. At least the early attempts to manufacture the impression of a tidy expert consensus failed.

The BBC misses a key point when they say the following as part of Covid origin: Why the Wuhan lab-leak theory is being taken seriously

Given the massive human toll of the pandemic - with the recorded deaths of about 6.9 million people worldwide - most scientists think understanding how and where the virus originated is crucial to prevent it happening again.

If the "zoonotic" theory is proved correct, it could affect activities such as farming and wildlife exploitation. In Denmark, fears about the spread of the virus through mink farming led to millions of mink being culled.

But there are also big implications for scientific research and international trade if theories related to a laboratory leak or frozen food chains are confirmed.

No, you dont need to know which scenario was actually responsible for this pandemic in order to reduce the chances of future pandemics. If both vectors are plausible, which they are, then you should tackle all these risks, since either of them could be responsible for the next pandemic regardless of which one was actually responsible for this one.