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Things that are true: "Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time." Th

by CMay 2y ago

Things that are true: "Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time." The Department of Energy concluded with low confidence that it was a lab leak. The FBI concluded with moderate confidence that it was a lab leak. The CIA's new report also concludes that they have low confidence that it was a lab leak. It's important to note that low confidence is a positive number, not a negative number. The wet market theory loses some credibility given some data points, but the lab leak theory remains plausible. China has had lab leak origins in the past, so this would not have been unprecedented. China obstructed and delayed the investigation. Whether it leaked from a lab or not, China covered it up. China covering it up is not necessarily evidence that it was a lab leak. If there was any truth to it (which they may not even know), they probably wouldn't want it reflecting poorly on the state. China is big on "social harmony", so you don't have the right to know. Whatever happened wasn't necessarily intentional. China made some deeply embarrassing and shameful decisions around this time and they won't want to promote them, but they were also not alone in making mistakes. If China concluded it was a lab leak internally and shared that, there wouldn't have been as much need for the world to speculate, analyze and investigate so much which only hurt China's reputation more. Coincidences occur, serendipity occurs. Most people have experienced one. As a result, proximity to the lab is not solid proof, but it is not the only datapoint either. If China was more transparent and cooperative, there could have been more information to make higher confidence conclusions with.

RajT88 2y ago
> "Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time." Officials are saying that, true. I have "low confidence" it actually is true. Everyone since the election has been scrambling to kowtow to the new boss to avoid his wrath.
- mrandish 2y ago
  > Officials are saying that, true. I have no idea if the report's conclusions are correct, but I doubt a report like that was created in three or four days. Tasking expert analysts, reassigning the manpower necessary and going through legal and secrecy review in 96 hours would be extraordinary for a large bureaucratic agency. Sure, it could happen but that kind of all-hands, crisis urgency is hard to keep quiet. It's something we'd hear about from insider leaks. I think it's more plausible that the report existed (because we know the CIA did look into it multiple times already) and the previous director had decided not to release it. And now the new director decided differently. Both of those decisions (not release vs release) were probably politically motivated to some extent but we don't have to jump to assuming an entire new report was fabricated with different conclusions practically overnight. After all, most government agencies that looked into it already concluded with low or medium confidence that it was a lab leak. It's not like the CIA report conclusion is an outlier here.
  - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
    They've had two months to prep for the new felon.
    - RajT88 2y ago
      Two months, exactly. And like as not built on internal reports started long ago.
      - ioulaum 2y ago
        But they also say that there's no new evidence of any kind. They are just choosing to believe the lab leak hypothesis now, because they spent more time thinking about the conditions of the labs before Covid started. ... And it's still low confidence... Since there's no evidence. Sad stuff, really. Any self respecting person would just not express their opinion in such a situation. Just about the only value of this new report is that it tells Trump what he wants to hear.
    - _blk 2y ago
      [flagged]
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> the agency was not bending its views to a new boss Trump has thrown the China hawks under the bus. To the extent anyone is winning accolades by pushing this hypothesis, it's in giving Trump leverage in a trade negotiation. That's too marginal to motivate an adverse conclusion at the CIA. (Counterfactual: Soviet bureaucrats would notoriously produce reports for every possible conclusion, and then pick the one that would please the boss.)
- twh123751 2y ago
  > ... giving Trump leverage in a trade negotiation. That is a perfectly valid hypothesis. In the EU there are also doubts as to what Trump's actual goals are. People are preparing for the scenario that first Biden and now Trump are driving a wedge between the EU and China, whereupon Trump will suddenly change course and be China's best friend. (The unspoken second thesis is that the same scheme applies to Russia): https://www.politico.eu/article/fear-and-loathing-in-davos-eu-frets-about-its-lose-lose-choice-between-trumps-us-and-xis-china/ https://www.politico.eu/article/fear-and-loathing-in-davos-e... "There’s another scenario that has the Europeans worried: After getting a reluctant EU onside with his anti-Beijing agenda, the famously fickle Trump could U-turn and end up ganging up on the bloc with his “very, very good friend” Xi Jinping, China’s president." "There’s precedent for that: In 2020, after years of escalating hostility during Trump’s first term in office, Washington and Beijing struck a mini trade deal aiming to increase U.S. exports to China and to ease their trade war." "Now, Trump has billionaire China dove Elon Musk in his ear — and he needs Washington to retain good ties with Beijing to keep his electric vehicle company Tesla afloat."
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    My point is nobody at the CIA is winning a promotion for helping on a trade negotiation like this. It's unlikely this was politically motivated in substance. (Timing may be.)
    - snailmailstare 2y ago
      I'm not sure what they would be doing with their time if they didn't have the substance and multiple reports of various quality for such a hypothesis.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
There are a few things to consider that I’ll add, which further bolster the idea that China has systematically covered up up a lab leak that caused the COVID-19 pandemic: 1. Coronaviruses are hard to contain, even if you have good practices. For example, the earlier SARS outbreak (from the early 2000s) had several documented lab leaks, including multiple within China (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7096887/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7096887/). 2. The US state department was aware that China was conducting dangerous research on coronaviruses on poorly managed labs a few years before the COVID-19 pandemic (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin-chaos-under-heaven-wuhan-lab-book-excerpt-474322 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...). 3. The WHO got completely manipulated by China, either willingly or just due to their incompetence. For example, it is well documented now that the WHO publicly praised the Chinese government but privately was concerned and frustrated by the lack of transparency and sharing of vital information, including blocking visits to Wuhan (https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-china-blocked-who-chinese-scientists-early-coronavirus-outbreak-n1222246 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-china-blocked...). 4. The NIAID (Fauci’s agency, under NIH) conducted gain of function research through a third party, EcoHealth Alliance. The grants are all public and document gain of function research, which was illegal since President Obama had banned it through an executive order. There was evidence that the NIH helped EcoHealth craft their grant language in a way to avoid oversight processes that would have blocked the grant (https://theintercept.com/2021/11/03/coronavirus-research-ecohealth-nih-emails/ https://theintercept.com/2021/11/03/coronavirus-research-eco...). Note that the president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, is a listed author on gain of function publications from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. After years of trying to bury this, the Biden administration finally blocked funding to EcoHealth in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/health/us-government-suspends-fundingforvirus-research-group-at-center-of-covid-19-origin-controversy/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/health/us-government-suspends...). 5. China only allowed a WHO visit over a year after they knew of the COVID-19 outbreak, in early 2021. They only allowed specific people to participate in the investigation, and the only person allowed from the US, was the same Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance who participated in the research at Wuhan Institute of Virology (https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/03/asia/wuhan-coronavirus-who-bat-lab-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/03/asia/wuhan-coronavirus-who-ba...).
aussieguy1234 2y ago
> China obstructed and delayed the investigation. You can only assume from this that whatever was going to be found would have been unfavorable to them. Although that would be the case with both the market theory and the lab leak theory.
- PoignardAzur 2y ago
  You can, in fact, imagine other things. For example, maybe the people shutting down the investigation had no idea what it would find and just didn't want to take the chance.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- newsclues 2y ago
  Or you understand that there is going to be a viral outbreak and you can choose: save the rest of the world from the pandemic or limit information and allow people to spread the virus globally to ensure that your nation doesn’t suffer disproportionately.
Leary 2y ago
Things that are true: The first large cluster of infections was associated with the Huanan Seafood Market, and retrospective analyses of influenza-like-illness patients and blood donations in Wuhan found no evidence of earlier circulation. Sampling of many individuals prior to December 2019 showed no positives for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, suggesting that the virus did not spread widely before the market outbreak. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not known to have possessed a sufficiently close backbone strain to engineer SARS-CoV-2, and there is no public data indicating they had undisclosed viruses that match it. Specific genomic features, like the furin cleavage site, appear suboptimal for an engineered virus (e.g. the PRRAR sequence and an out-of-frame insertion), which fits with a virus evolving naturally rather than through targeted gain-of-function work. Several closely related bat coronaviruses have partial insertions near the S1/S2 region, suggesting that such changes can occur naturally over time and need not be artificially inserted. A negative binomial pattern of SARS-CoV-2 transmission, with many zero-spreader events and a small number of superspreader events, is consistent with a spillover followed by rapid amplification in a crowded market setting. Evidence of multiple potential intermediate animal hosts (e.g. wildlife farmed animals) further increases the probability that a bat coronavirus evolved into SARS-CoV-2 through natural spillover events rather than intentional engineering. Early cases identified at the market and lack of widespread pre-epidemic infection clusters elsewhere in Wuhan align with the idea of a swift zoonotic jump to humans in late 2019.
- scarab92 2y ago
  Forgive the silly question, but does the lab leak theory entail the virus being engineered in the lab, or simply sampled from nature by researchers then not adequately contained? I’m not clear on what exactly is being alleged by these agencies?
  - Fomite 2y ago
    One of the key parts of the lab leak hypothesis is that, depending on who is advancing it, it ranges from "poor biocontainment of a natural virus" to "engineered and released" with everything in between.
hnbad 2y ago
I'm not sure what the Department of Energy's qualifications are (I know they're in charges of nukes so maybe also bioweapons?) but I don't see what relevance the FBI's opinion has.
- casefields 2y ago
  DOE has its own massive farm of experts: https://www.energy.gov/intelligence/office-intelligence-and-counterintelligence https://www.energy.gov/intelligence/office-intelligence-and-... There’s 17 intelligence agencies that all staff knowledgeable experts on all sorts of topics. Our government is Leviathan.
- Fomite 2y ago
  The National Labs, where a tremendous amount of infectious disease work is done for national-scale questions. I've worked with them in the past, and considered taking a job with them - of the various agencies, they're the ones who have weighed in with probably the most expertise.
morepedantic 2y ago
>China covering it up is not necessarily evidence that it was a lab leak. Yes it is, but the evidence is non-specific. China will attempt to cover up 100% of lab leaks. China may attempt to cover up zoonosis. The cover up is consistent with either theory, but it is the only reaction consistent with a lab leak.
- raziel2p 2y ago
  "China will attempt to cover up 100% of lab leaks. China may attempt to cover up zoonosis." this is a blind assumption. they may just be covering up 100% of all things, especially when the international community (i.e. Trump) is trying to push/blame them.
- petre 2y ago
  Cover-ups are a cultural thing in East Asia because reputation is paramount. They'll attempt to cover up anything that makes them look bad as means to protect their reputation. So the second part of your statement is not necessarily true.
  - morepedantic 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002%E2%80%932004_SARS_outbreak#November_2002 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002%E2%80%932004_SARS_outbrea... China attempted information control on SARS-1, but rolled most of it back by April. They still haven't done this for SARS-2. That's not proof, but is a difference. Enough small differences can add up to a large difference.
    - petre 2y ago
      That was during Hu's tenure which was quite different than what it is today. Still, their natural impulse is to cover up facts.
maxglute 2y ago
>If China concluded it was a lab leak internally and shared that, This insinuates the only reasonable conclusion is PRC lab leak. The only fact is we don't know where covid originated, only PRC was the first to detect and acknowledge it, and for doing so, US under PRC hawk admin tried to weaponize for propaganda war. PRC can still say covid come out of Fort Detrick, and until US opens up soveriegn US soil to WHO investigation (good luck now), then this is all a US coverup and it would be perfecty cromulant position and as "true" as anything CIA claims. >If China was more transparent and cooperative If US under Trump and Pompeo wasn't utterly antagonistic to PRC during time frame, there might have been more cooperation. This new CIA spin is continuation of the same geopolitical games.

by CMay 2y ago

RajT88 2y ago

> "Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time." Officials are saying that, true. I have "low confidence" it actually is true. Everyone since the election has been scrambling to kowtow to the new boss to avoid his wrath.

mrandish 2y ago
> Officials are saying that, true. I have no idea if the report's conclusions are correct, but I doubt a report like that was created in three or four days. Tasking expert analysts, reassigning the manpower necessary and going through legal and secrecy review in 96 hours would be extraordinary for a large bureaucratic agency. Sure, it could happen but that kind of all-hands, crisis urgency is hard to keep quiet. It's something we'd hear about from insider leaks. I think it's more plausible that the report existed (because we know the CIA did look into it multiple times already) and the previous director had decided not to release it. And now the new director decided differently. Both of those decisions (not release vs release) were probably politically motivated to some extent but we don't have to jump to assuming an entire new report was fabricated with different conclusions practically overnight. After all, most government agencies that looked into it already concluded with low or medium confidence that it was a lab leak. It's not like the CIA report conclusion is an outlier here.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  They've had two months to prep for the new felon.
  - RajT88 2y ago
    Two months, exactly. And like as not built on internal reports started long ago.
    - ioulaum 2y ago
      But they also say that there's no new evidence of any kind. They are just choosing to believe the lab leak hypothesis now, because they spent more time thinking about the conditions of the labs before Covid started. ... And it's still low confidence... Since there's no evidence. Sad stuff, really. Any self respecting person would just not express their opinion in such a situation. Just about the only value of this new report is that it tells Trump what he wants to hear.
  - _blk 2y ago
    [flagged]

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> the agency was not bending its views to a new boss Trump has thrown the China hawks under the bus. To the extent anyone is winning accolades by pushing this hypothesis, it's in giving Trump leverage in a trade negotiation. That's too marginal to motivate an adverse conclusion at the CIA. (Counterfactual: Soviet bureaucrats would notoriously produce reports for every possible conclusion, and then pick the one that would please the boss.)

twh123751 2y ago
> ... giving Trump leverage in a trade negotiation. That is a perfectly valid hypothesis. In the EU there are also doubts as to what Trump's actual goals are. People are preparing for the scenario that first Biden and now Trump are driving a wedge between the EU and China, whereupon Trump will suddenly change course and be China's best friend. (The unspoken second thesis is that the same scheme applies to Russia): https://www.politico.eu/article/fear-and-loathing-in-davos-eu-frets-about-its-lose-lose-choice-between-trumps-us-and-xis-china/ https://www.politico.eu/article/fear-and-loathing-in-davos-e... "There’s another scenario that has the Europeans worried: After getting a reluctant EU onside with his anti-Beijing agenda, the famously fickle Trump could U-turn and end up ganging up on the bloc with his “very, very good friend” Xi Jinping, China’s president." "There’s precedent for that: In 2020, after years of escalating hostility during Trump’s first term in office, Washington and Beijing struck a mini trade deal aiming to increase U.S. exports to China and to ease their trade war." "Now, Trump has billionaire China dove Elon Musk in his ear — and he needs Washington to retain good ties with Beijing to keep his electric vehicle company Tesla afloat."
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  My point is nobody at the CIA is winning a promotion for helping on a trade negotiation like this. It's unlikely this was politically motivated in substance. (Timing may be.)
  - snailmailstare 2y ago
    I'm not sure what they would be doing with their time if they didn't have the substance and multiple reports of various quality for such a hypothesis.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

There are a few things to consider that I’ll add, which further bolster the idea that China has systematically covered up up a lab leak that caused the COVID-19 pandemic: 1. Coronaviruses are hard to contain, even if you have good practices. For example, the earlier SARS outbreak (from the early 2000s) had several documented lab leaks, including multiple within China (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7096887/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7096887/). 2. The US state department was aware that China was conducting dangerous research on coronaviruses on poorly managed labs a few years before the COVID-19 pandemic (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin-chaos-under-heaven-wuhan-lab-book-excerpt-474322 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...). 3. The WHO got completely manipulated by China, either willingly or just due to their incompetence. For example, it is well documented now that the WHO publicly praised the Chinese government but privately was concerned and frustrated by the lack of transparency and sharing of vital information, including blocking visits to Wuhan (https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-china-blocked-who-chinese-scientists-early-coronavirus-outbreak-n1222246 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-china-blocked...). 4. The NIAID (Fauci’s agency, under NIH) conducted gain of function research through a third party, EcoHealth Alliance. The grants are all public and document gain of function research, which was illegal since President Obama had banned it through an executive order. There was evidence that the NIH helped EcoHealth craft their grant language in a way to avoid oversight processes that would have blocked the grant (https://theintercept.com/2021/11/03/coronavirus-research-ecohealth-nih-emails/ https://theintercept.com/2021/11/03/coronavirus-research-eco...). Note that the president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, is a listed author on gain of function publications from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. After years of trying to bury this, the Biden administration finally blocked funding to EcoHealth in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/health/us-government-suspends-fundingforvirus-research-group-at-center-of-covid-19-origin-controversy/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/health/us-government-suspends...). 5. China only allowed a WHO visit over a year after they knew of the COVID-19 outbreak, in early 2021. They only allowed specific people to participate in the investigation, and the only person allowed from the US, was the same Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance who participated in the research at Wuhan Institute of Virology (https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/03/asia/wuhan-coronavirus-who-bat-lab-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/03/asia/wuhan-coronavirus-who-ba...).

aussieguy1234 2y ago

> China obstructed and delayed the investigation. You can only assume from this that whatever was going to be found would have been unfavorable to them. Although that would be the case with both the market theory and the lab leak theory.

PoignardAzur 2y ago
You can, in fact, imagine other things. For example, maybe the people shutting down the investigation had no idea what it would find and just didn't want to take the chance.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
newsclues 2y ago
Or you understand that there is going to be a viral outbreak and you can choose: save the rest of the world from the pandemic or limit information and allow people to spread the virus globally to ensure that your nation doesn’t suffer disproportionately.

Leary 2y ago

Things that are true: The first large cluster of infections was associated with the Huanan Seafood Market, and retrospective analyses of influenza-like-illness patients and blood donations in Wuhan found no evidence of earlier circulation. Sampling of many individuals prior to December 2019 showed no positives for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, suggesting that the virus did not spread widely before the market outbreak. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not known to have possessed a sufficiently close backbone strain to engineer SARS-CoV-2, and there is no public data indicating they had undisclosed viruses that match it. Specific genomic features, like the furin cleavage site, appear suboptimal for an engineered virus (e.g. the PRRAR sequence and an out-of-frame insertion), which fits with a virus evolving naturally rather than through targeted gain-of-function work. Several closely related bat coronaviruses have partial insertions near the S1/S2 region, suggesting that such changes can occur naturally over time and need not be artificially inserted. A negative binomial pattern of SARS-CoV-2 transmission, with many zero-spreader events and a small number of superspreader events, is consistent with a spillover followed by rapid amplification in a crowded market setting. Evidence of multiple potential intermediate animal hosts (e.g. wildlife farmed animals) further increases the probability that a bat coronavirus evolved into SARS-CoV-2 through natural spillover events rather than intentional engineering. Early cases identified at the market and lack of widespread pre-epidemic infection clusters elsewhere in Wuhan align with the idea of a swift zoonotic jump to humans in late 2019.

scarab92 2y ago
Forgive the silly question, but does the lab leak theory entail the virus being engineered in the lab, or simply sampled from nature by researchers then not adequately contained? I’m not clear on what exactly is being alleged by these agencies?
- Fomite 2y ago
  One of the key parts of the lab leak hypothesis is that, depending on who is advancing it, it ranges from "poor biocontainment of a natural virus" to "engineered and released" with everything in between.

hnbad 2y ago

I'm not sure what the Department of Energy's qualifications are (I know they're in charges of nukes so maybe also bioweapons?) but I don't see what relevance the FBI's opinion has.

casefields 2y ago
DOE has its own massive farm of experts: https://www.energy.gov/intelligence/office-intelligence-and-counterintelligence https://www.energy.gov/intelligence/office-intelligence-and-... There’s 17 intelligence agencies that all staff knowledgeable experts on all sorts of topics. Our government is Leviathan.
Fomite 2y ago
The National Labs, where a tremendous amount of infectious disease work is done for national-scale questions. I've worked with them in the past, and considered taking a job with them - of the various agencies, they're the ones who have weighed in with probably the most expertise.

morepedantic 2y ago

>China covering it up is not necessarily evidence that it was a lab leak. Yes it is, but the evidence is non-specific. China will attempt to cover up 100% of lab leaks. China may attempt to cover up zoonosis. The cover up is consistent with either theory, but it is the only reaction consistent with a lab leak.

raziel2p 2y ago
"China will attempt to cover up 100% of lab leaks. China may attempt to cover up zoonosis." this is a blind assumption. they may just be covering up 100% of all things, especially when the international community (i.e. Trump) is trying to push/blame them.
petre 2y ago
Cover-ups are a cultural thing in East Asia because reputation is paramount. They'll attempt to cover up anything that makes them look bad as means to protect their reputation. So the second part of your statement is not necessarily true.
- morepedantic 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002%E2%80%932004_SARS_outbreak#November_2002 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002%E2%80%932004_SARS_outbrea... China attempted information control on SARS-1, but rolled most of it back by April. They still haven't done this for SARS-2. That's not proof, but is a difference. Enough small differences can add up to a large difference.
  - petre 2y ago
    That was during Hu's tenure which was quite different than what it is today. Still, their natural impulse is to cover up facts.

maxglute 2y ago

>If China concluded it was a lab leak internally and shared that, This insinuates the only reasonable conclusion is PRC lab leak. The only fact is we don't know where covid originated, only PRC was the first to detect and acknowledge it, and for doing so, US under PRC hawk admin tried to weaponize for propaganda war. PRC can still say covid come out of Fort Detrick, and until US opens up soveriegn US soil to WHO investigation (good luck now), then this is all a US coverup and it would be perfecty cromulant position and as "true" as anything CIA claims. >If China was more transparent and cooperative If US under Trump and Pompeo wasn't utterly antagonistic to PRC during time frame, there might have been more cooperation. This new CIA spin is continuation of the same geopolitical games.