RevRico said:I'm still not seeing what the big deal is, but it sure does make a great distraction doesn't it?
hey, did you guys forget about jeffrey epstein?
RevRico said:I'm still not seeing what the big deal is, but it sure does make a great distraction doesn't it?
hey, did you guys forget about jeffrey epstein?
In reply to AngryCorvair :
He didn't kill himself.
In reply to Dr. Hess :
I read that Sen. Tom Cotton ordered his hit.
Driven5 said:RX Reven' said:What is our objective…
Protect the innocent by placing the burden of proof on the accuser (i.e. assume the virus didn’t originate in a wild animal market in the absence of definitive evidence that it did).
Identify the most probable explanation (set alpha risk “saying wild animal market when not wild animal market” and beta risk “not saying wild animal market when wild anmimal market” at the same level). In this case, the fact that the virus broke out within ~1,000’ of a wild animal market in a country of 3.7 million square miles is wildly, wildly unlikely to happen by chance.
Altered to show the equal and opposite speculative argument.
Hi Driven5,
Given that China has thousands of wild animal markets but only one BLS-4, in my opinion, your alteration is not equal and opposite.
Thought experiment…
I claim to be a great dart thrower and you respond by asking me to prove it.
BTW, this is what we refer to as the probabilistic resource…the virus breaking out near a wild animal market (thousands of opportunities) is wildly less coincidental than it breaking out near a BLS-4 (one opportunity)...I don’t want to sound like a female hygiene product but statistical analysis is actually what I do for a living.
Of course, it’s possible that I’m a poor dart thrower that just happened to get lucky (what I think you mean by speculative) but the odds are very low which takes us back to my “identify the most probable explanation” comment.
This topic has become contentious and I don’t want to exacerbate the problem so I may not post in it again.
Take care,
Brett
In reply to RX Reven' :
The equal and opposite argument can just as easily be made about the statistical probability of transmission to humans through the level of precautions taken at a BLS-4 facility vs the level of precautions taken at wild animal markets.
But he didn't say anything, he just said it is a possibility. My dad, a VERY successful man whose life for the last 35 years has revolved around making sure millions of 1s and 0s are in their places (he's one of the guys that keeps bad guys from hacking our military and govt stuff) used to tell me
"If you dont know for SURE what it is, you cannot say what it isn't"
Until the is irrefutable proof how it started noone will be able to say 100% that it wasnt a weapon or created in a lab.
Driven5 said:In reply to RX Reven' :
The equal and opposite argument can just as easily be made about the statistical probability of transmission to humans through the level of precautions taken at a BLS-4 facility vs the level of precautions taken at wild animal markets.
I agree with you in theory that we have a conditional probability (likelihood of bug escaping from wild animal market if it exists) and (likelihood of bug escaping from BSL-4 if it exists) but we can’t even make a primitive estimate of what those probabilities are…good practice is to assume equivalence unless you are confident in your ability to assign probabilities.
In theory, practice is the same as theory, but in practice, it isn’t. 
Justjim75 said:Until the is irrefutable proof how it started noone will be able to say 100% that it wasnt a weapon or created in a lab.
No, Sen Cotton has said much more than simply that it is a possibility.
There is already pretty irrefutable proof (genome analysis) that it was not a weapon and was not 'created' in a lab...Granted, for some people there is no amount of proof great enough to overcome their pre-conclusions. There is a very large difference between an engineered pathogen created in a lab and a naturally occurring pathogen being studied in a lab.
So what there is no irrefutable proof of at this point, is that it was not transmitted to a human at the lab and (contrary to Sen Cotton's claims) that it was not transmitted to a human at the wild animal market.
One reason I'm inclined to dismiss the bioweapon theory out of hand is that this doesn't look like a good bioweapon. They didn't have a good way to protect their own people against it, its incubation period means that you'd have to wait a while between sending in the bioweapon and launching an attack, and launching an attack when you have the most of your enemies out of action also maximizes the risk to your own troops. Even if it were a first draft - you'd think if this was intended as a weapon, they'd have had some idea of how to treat it at ready. A bioweapon isn't any good if it has a very real probability of doing more damage to your own side than the enemy. Even if they'd planned to use it for terrorism - deploying it against a civilian population at a distance instead of an enemy army on the other side of the border - the risk of it getting back to China would be pretty big.
That doesn't rule out other reasons the virus could have escaped from a BSL4 lab, though. It could have been from an outbreak in another part of the country, some sort of new animal illness being studied, a leftover sample from the last SARS outbreak with an unusual mutation, even a botched attempt to develop a live-virus SARS vaccine. And I doubt the Chinese government would be very forthcoming if they'd dropped the ball on containing a virus, even if they had good reasons to be studying it.
Overall, this is a case where I think there are multiple ways this could be adequately explained by stupidity instead of malice.
I don't think malice has really been implied anywhere, Matt. I suspect stupidity. I suspect they were playing with the virus and it got out. You know how scientists are: Lessee, I could take this here thing, splice in something else and I wonder what would happen? Oh, cool, look at that. Whoopsie.
In reply to Driven5 :
Do you have any first hand proof or are you, like the rest of us, just guessing? I do not support, deny or defend any specific theory, but if you think the Communists in China wouldn't catch (if its naturally occurring) or create this stuff and release it to test it on their own overcrowded population, you are naive. Again, not saying they did, but these are people that drown children born of the less preferred gender. Communists have starved their people to death by the tens of millions at a time, to think there isn't a possibility they took it for a test drive to thin their own herd some before they shipped it to us with the fentanyl and kids toys with lead paint on it,iis silly to me.
E36 M3, if there's no funny biz why wont they let us help?
I don't want to contribute to getting the thread locked, so i deleted a previous inflammatory comment and will check back for rebuttals, but i wont post again here.
Summary of my feelings?
China is our enemy, all governments lie, and anything is possible
In reply to Justjim75 :
If you're not willing to look for, or listen to, what the global scientific community of experts that are currently studying the genome of this virus has to say, then I don't know what else to tell you.
Is there some reason to suspect this "lab" would not have regular (not bio engineered) viruses in it? I would think they would certainly be studying natural occurrences.
I am not sure why there is the assumption that if it came out of the lab, it has to be bio-engineered? As pointed out, if it was engineered, it's a pretty bad job (not really what you want in a bio weapon). Unless, or course, you assume they released it on purpose (which, if they knew anything about it, was grandly stupid).
In reply to Eurotrash_Ranch :
How did they do a census of the trolls? Did they take a poll? EDIT: I see the post i was replying to was deleted. Nothing to see here, carry on..
Looks like China does not want the internet talking about the Corona:
In reply to 06HHR :
lol, deleted and reposted with an archive so they don't come after me :)
Yes, just pasting in text will keep its format. Try pasting it into notepad (or Word etc) first, then cutting and pasting here.
Regarding the headline: seems pretty standard ops for China.
Dr. Hess said:You know how scientists are: Lessee, I could take this here thing, splice in something else and I wonder what would happen? Oh, cool, look at that. Whoopsie.
... what?
Ok conspiracy theories aside here's my somewhat sane thoughts.
Why would they lock down that many people if it wasn't much worse than a standard flu/SARS?
Two high profile doctors have died from it in Wuhan. That tells me that it's not just lethal to the young and infirm. You would think those two had access to the best care.
The Japanese couple that were in Hawaii recently is a prime example that this will get out no matter the quarantine.
The Japanese cusses cruise ship failed quarantine also shows it's probably more easily spread.
The argument against all that is why haven't we seen this spread in the Western world?
I don't think the lockdown is unreasonable. It's appears to be not terribly deadly to most, but is very dangerous in communicability. The primary issue being that it appears to be communicable BEFORE symptoms are shown, making containing it much more difficult and the only real effective option being a lockdown.
But who knows, it may have mutated in China already since it seems to have a lot of hosts there...
Containment (2016) was a fun TV series. Not totally realistic, but brought up a lot of relevant situations.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4421578/
MadScientistMatt said:I'm not sure how much of the bad information out of China is intentional, and how much is a case of the Chinese government simply not knowing. How do you go about estimating the number of people who caught this virus, assumed it was a cold or flu, and just stayed at home living on chicken noodle soup until they felt better instead of going to see a doctor?
They expel foreign media and have refused to allow officials from WHO or CDC to even come into the country. They may have changed their policy on this. Maybe does not indicate any guilt, but it certainly does not inspire confidence.
It is in the USA. 110 suspected cases here 3 weeks ago, which is the most recent citation I saw out there.
They had people "quarantined" at Travis AFB, then let them go, prematurely in my estimation. This cat is out of the bag already.
WSJ reported today that 5400 Californians are currently "self-quarantining" due to travel history. Went on to say that Washington state has roughly 400 "self-monitoring" and is estimating it is costing $200,000 a week to provide support and services for them.
In reply to Driven5 :
If you aren't going to read and understand what I've written, i dont have anything else to say.
Coronavirus 'spike' protein just mapped, leading way to vaccine: https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-spike-protein-structure.html?utm_source=notification
Of Note:
Still, McLellan thinks a vaccine is likely about 18 to 24 months away. That's "still quite fast compared to normal vaccine development, which might take like 10 years," he said.
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