The Lab Leak Theory, because we need several Covid threads when we run out of drama.

[gimmick]

So the non retarded Lab Leak Theory was mostly revitalized by a guy called Yuri Deigin. With a relatively small group they did some basic open source investigations related to this. They produced this paper...

https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-ma...h-f96dd7413748

...it was about 16k words before revisions. It's really not relevant to read it for anyone. I did months ago, but i don't expect anyone else does.

This video from 7:40 mark explains his stance about deliberate release...



...by his own words. An accidental release more or less.

The paper mostly covers the background of the major players and some history of genetic engineering. For this the relevant parts are creation of chimeric viruses, reproducing/mutating viruses in labs and the current possibilities/speeds that exists.

Other things that some people feel are relevant are the conflict of interest issues. The people that know most about this have most to lose if there was an overreaction towards the whole field of study.

The people that have nothing to lose and know very little about this have been refuted several times. The same people also tend to have something to gain from mere exposure and usually something to sell for their newly gained audience.

What the paper does not have is any evidence. There are no known forensic markers in cov2 that indicate it was engineered. For several reasons that also doesn't give heavy support for the natural creation theory.

It does to a degree refute some earlier "claims" that led Druff to believe someone was saying Lab Leak is impossible. The Nature paper that actually outlines several of Deigin's discoveries. The difference is that the Nature paper came out a year before. From their point of view with then current knowledge their conclusions were logical. Things that remain are complete lack of any evidence.

The differences come from better knowledge of the available strains to create chimeric viruses. Information that came from the earliest possible infections. And other stuff of that sort. There are also factual errors with Delgin's paper, some revised and some still in it.

In the next post i'll compile a few quotes from the paper that i believe to be true and/or describe the findings.

[gimmick]

This is the basic stuff...

"CoV2 is an obvious chimera (though not nesessarily a lab-made one), which is based on the ancestral bat strain RaTG13, in which the receptor binding motif (RBM) in its spike protein is replaced by the RBM from a pangolin strain, and in addition, a small but very special stretch of 4 amino acids is inserted, which creates a furin cleavage site that, as virologists have previously established, significantly expands the “repertoire” of the virus in terms of whose cells it can penetrate. Most likely, it was thanks to this new furin site that the new mutant managed to jump species from its original host to humans."

...for people not familiar with the jargon, inserted does not mean engineered.

Ze Gain-of-Function...

"Many people who first learn about the above research ask a very valid question: “But why?” Why do scientists create chimeric killer viruses? The politically correct answer is to develop preventive measures (drugs or vaccines) from possible natural chimeras and to understand the risks of their occurrence."

"At the end of 2014, the United States introduced a moratorium on state financing of such gain-of-function studies, but it was shortly canceled (in 2017). In China, no moratorium on such studies was introduced, on the contrary, they went full steam ahead with creating new “super labs” of the highest biosafety level (BSL-4), as in 2017 in Wuhan"

...random bit of info is that corona virus studies can be run in lvl3 labs, lvl4 is for Ebola and friends.

Ze hypothesis...

"It seems that the creation of temperature-sensitive viral mutants to develop potentially attenuated vaccines was widespread at the end of the twentieth century."

"Could something like this have caused the Covid-19 pandemic? Several options are possible — from a leak during development of a potential vaccine to fundamental research on laboratory recombination of the bat and pangolin viruses. Some particularly ambitious researcher could even decide to combine the two “fashionable research themes” — adding a furin site and transplanting RBM from a strain of one species (pangolin) to another (bats), so that later, confirming the increased virulence of the new chimeric virus, they can wax poetic about the dangers of the same recombination happening in Yunnan caves or wet markets. And if such a researcher could even pre-emptively develop a vaccine against this and other potential chimeras, all sorts of accolades could await."

...with the resounding PROOF...

"Am I then saying this is what happened? Of course not, I do not claim to know what happened. Today, there is no evidence of this. For now, there is just a series of strange coincidences "

"there are coincidences in the structural features of the CoV2 genome, which resemble manipulations that virologists have repeatedly carried out in the lab. But coincidence is not proof."

"Moreover, coincidences happen, and CoV2 could obviously have arisen naturally. It is not yet clear exactly how"

The greatest country on earth...

"On the opposite side of the balance, giving credence to the lab hypothesis, there are reports that in 2018, American experts were quite alarmed after their visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and conversation with Shi Zhengli"

"The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous."

"It is somewhat ironic the Wuhan lab received guidance from the Texas laboratory in Galveston, which at one time had itself lost a vial with a Guanarito virus: Wuhan specialists were trained at Galveston"

...not sure how much credit you want to take from this and under whose presidency all this occurred.

The Nature paper...

"But didn’t that Nature article refute the lab-made hypothesis? No, not really. There is no irrefutable evidence against it in the paper, just a loud “we don’t believe so” based on a shaky foundation"

"Some critics of the lab-made hypothesis claim that the observed ~4% genetic difference between RaTG13 and CoV2 is too high to have possibly occurred in a lab if RaTG13 itself was used as a backbone."

"But possibly, the biggest problem with the 4% difference argument is that it relies on RaTG13 being exactly what WIV says it is. If we are to seriously consider the lab leak hypothesis, we must concede that it does not make sense to blindly trust the data released by the very lab suspected of the leak."

"Again, I am not claiming with certainty that is what is happening here. All I am saying is that this is what could have happened, and we need a lot more evidence before we can reach a definitive conclusion."

...the 4% thingie is mostly pointless at this point. Yes you can mutate a virus reasonably fast to reach 4%. It's a different story if that end result does anything amazing. It's like saying can you flip a coin 1000 times and be off the mean by 4%. Obv, but to create cov2 you also need a very specific range in the order of flips.

Roughly his conclusion...

"Let me be clear: this does NOT prove that CoV2 was synthesized in the laboratory. Yes, as we have seen above, from a technical standpoint, it would not be difficult for a modern virologist to create such a strain. But there is no direct evidence that anyone did this, and strange coincidences cannot pass for circumstantial evidence. On balance, the current chances against this are still higher than for the natural origins of CoV2. Moreover, even if CoV2 was indeed an unfortunate lab leak, the scientists themselves are not to blame, as they were working within the established international laws and guidelines on such research. Now, those who might be trying to cover up that leak, that’s a different story."

"The opposite point is worth repeating too: the inverse hypothesis about the exclusively natural origin of the virus does not yet have strong evidence either. Until intermediate ancestors between RaTG13, pangolin-2019 and CoV2 are found, in whom we could trace the mosaic recombination that we observe in CoV2, the question of its origins remains open"

...i don't have a huge preference for either theory.

The ending words...

"I hope this post is not used to prematurely assign blame or propagate one-sided theories. What I do hope it highlights is the scale of dangerous gain-of-function research that has been and is going on in virology. The Covid-19 pandemic really exposed its huge risks in the face of few benefits: GOF research hasn’t protected us from this outbreak, hasn’t provided us with any effective treatments or vaccines in time to save hundreds of thousands of lives lost to CoV2, and if there is even a 0.1% chance GOF research caused the whole thing, that chance is too high."

...how much i agree with any of the above depends how we define GOF. There's a lot of grey area that is beneficial. There's also a good amount of black and white. I'm not too hopeful that there isn't an overreaction that either fucks us by banning most of the grey and some of the white. And i'm not that assured that most of it wont be outsourced to some environment with laxer control. That is also one of the possible origin stories to our current virus.

[Dan Druff]

So do you think the debate about this should have been shut down in 2020, due to concerns about "racism", or nah?

Do you think this should have been concluded to be false by "experts" in 2020, and deemed unworthy of discussion, or nah?

It seems like every time I bring up the 2020 shutdown of the lab leak theory debate to a leftist, I get an answer trying to show me that the lab leak theory may be incorrect. Which, of course, totally isn't my point.

[splitthis]

Stfu shill

[gimmick]

So do you think the debate about this should have been shut down in 2020, due to concerns about "racism", or nah?

Do you think this should have been concluded to be false by "experts" in 2020, and deemed unworthy of discussion, or nah?

It seems like every time I bring up the 2020 shutdown of the lab leak theory debate to a leftist, I get an answer trying to show me that the lab leak theory may be incorrect. Which, of course, totally isn't my point.

This wasn't shut down in 2020, due to concerns of "racism".

None of the above was concluded false by "experts" in 2020 or deemed unworthy of discussion.

Are my posts an answer showing you that it maybe incorrect? Is this too ambiguous, "i don't have a huge preference for either theory"?

Why am i including this bit, "the inverse hypothesis about the exclusively natural origin of the virus does not yet have strong evidence either", that i think is 100% true in the sphere of public knowledge?

Was i some how not clear when i said Plandemictards were the biggest reason for several conspiracy claims?

Ps. The false bit is mostly about, is it likely that RaTG13 was used as backbone in engineering cov2. The person that wrote the paper about likely Lab Leak doesn't even believe that. It's an unlikely backbone. It's very hard to get from RaTG13 to cov2 by using humanized mice for reproduction.

[gimmick]

Here's a nice beeline from a perfectly rational Lab Leak theory advocate to death.

One of several shitty articles about the horrors of censorship...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/31/o...ak-theory.html

...the usual groupthink headline and whatever buzzwords are in with tards and then this bit...

"Was it outrageous to think that the virus might have escaped the Wuhan Institute? Not if you listened to evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein’s patient, lucid, scientifically rich explanation of the lab-leak hypothesis — which he delivered almost a year ago on the decidedly non-mainstream Joe Rogan podcast."

...i wonder who this Bret Weinstein character is that brought us the Truth?

Well it appears he is the gentleman that is being talked about in the YouTube clip in the OP.

He used his 15 minutes of fame to peddle anti-vaxx bullshit because Ivermectin is awesome.

The end result was few more dead tards. It's not much of a slippery slope when you can see all of it happening in little over a year.

This post is obv brought to you by the excessive amounts of money I'm being payed by some nefarious organization (i assume it's the Jews, it usually is) to sway your opinion in favor of Big Pharma, Bill Gates, 5G network, CDC, personal check from Fauci, Soros, WHO, China, Big Tech, UN and several other factions that are in direct competition against each other while leaving no concrete evidence of this small conspiracy. This 8th tier poker forum is just that important.

[gimmick]

For posterity here is the Bret Weinstein bit from Joe Rogan's show...



...i have no knowledge how it survived the complete media blackout in June 2020.

[JACKDANIELS]

the lab leak was mentioned in the very first post in sonatines thread

anyone who has even glanced at what they get up to in the wuhan institute of virology could see a leak was most likely possibility

[limitles]

the lab leak was mentioned in the very first post in sonatines thread

anyone who has even glanced at what they get up to in the wuhan institute of virology could see a leak was most likely possibility

keep verifying that you know nothing

[JACKDANIELS]

funny coming from a man who spends 3k to take ketamine lol

[JACKDANIELS]

KIDS SO LIMITED

[gimmick]

the lab leak was mentioned in the very first post in sonatines thread

anyone who has even glanced at what they get up to in the wuhan institute of virology could see a leak was most likely possibility

Something like that. BCR also mentioned the OP about Covid.

I didn't include it because I've "debated" with Druff before. It clearly doesn't count as an obvious example because if would refute Druff's point about what the left believes and is forcing everyone else to think (preferably in a group).

This thread is just a separation of Khalwat's mask thread since there was some interest in discussing the Lab Leak Theory. There was apparently a huge media blackout and no one knew about this theory. Something about Big Media and Big Tech suppressing the Big Topic, probably because of Big Pharma and Big Science.

And then there was something about the Big President getting dethroned. So now we can all talk about. Though no one actually wants to talk about it. It's pretty boring and nothing relevant has happened in several months.

Oh and how Druff remembered the media blackout was perfectly rational individuals wanting to talk about an unintentional lab accident with "few idiots added conspiracies onto the lab leak theory" and this is how he felt about it in January...

"How is Wuhan Lab/Bioweapon a "conspiracy"?

That's pretty much what really happened."

[TheXFactor]

Where did China get the idea to make the coronavirus into a bio-weapon?

From the United States, of course.

It was suppose to be a DARPA program but the U.S. decided not to fund it.

Did China succeed in creating a more lethal version of the coronavirus or did they just find another version of it?

We will never know. All evidence of that has been destroyed.

We don't have to worry about some rich James Bond type super-villian trying to kill everyone.

The U.S. or China might do it by mistake.

The next pandemic may be even more deadly than this one.

Keep your fucking mask on.

[limitles]

funny coming from a man who spends 3k to take ketamine lol

Right, idiot, buying Ketamine on the dark market (illegal btw) and comparing that to a clinical infusion environment vs. insufflation of god knows what.

Dumb ass

[gimmick]

Considering that the 1st post of this thread mentions lab leak i'm not completely sold on the idea that team retard invented it.

Feel free to link to any reputable researchers that were shutdown because of lab leak theory.

Apparently i did mention the OP in June.

https://pokerfraudalert.com/forum/sh...l=1#post979865

Still waiting for that link though. Any day now.

[BCR]

I had followed the Weinstein brothers casually over the last few years. The guys dubbed the IDW. It’s a shame. I like contrarians in general. That first Joe Rogan interview saying it was a lab leak was interesting. I hadn’t seen it. It wasn’t insane or anything. I actually agreed with the super hard lockdown strategy. It was what I always advocated for. Now that we’ve seen it come in waves, it would have saved a lot of lives, but idk that it eliminates the problem. The really great testing he also advocates for to be used after it for contract tracing isn’t yet a reality. We are basically fifty different countries here on this issue. Hard to say how it ever works.

All his ideas though had absolutely zero receptive politicians. He was literally preaching to politicians who either weren’t open to lab leak theory and were entrenched in defeating a reeling President mismanaging the pandemic at the time or calling for a complete lockdown at a time most of the GOP was advocating the exact opposite and trying to wish it away. There was basically no audience for his ideas.

But it was interesting and I hadn’t seen it

I struggle to get into Joe Rogan despite him having the most successful podcast in the US. Strange part is he has a lot of the same interests as me, yet I struggle with him. I’m not a fan of stoners, I’m too intense to deal with them. They tend to annoy me.

I associate both Weinstein brothers with Thiel. Obviously the older one works for him. They actually remind me of libertarians on 2+2 a decade ago, many of whom were quite smart, but they tended to strike me as sociopaths often. Thiel often gave me that vibe. It’s really strange how much Weinstein has went from a little eccentric but smart likable guy to cozying up to loons. That’s a lucrative space to cozy up to.

You sent me down a rabbit hole today. Listened to Sam Harris sound legitimately disappointed with them, and almost hurt as he considered them friends, to see them become Alex Jones. Lot of questions if it was a natural evolution after having bad experiences in academia or just a money grab.

I had heard of drastic a few months ago, but couldn’t find anything. Not a YouTube channel or something accessible. I saw they were the data detectives that had broke China stuff, but never had a name attached to them until your first video. Very interesting guy. I really liked the interviewer also. It’s nice to get outside American partisanship where you can have a conversation not governed by it.

I laughed at him basically arriving where many of us have with vaccines. That it’s an IQ thing basically. Useful though as I know a few people who buy into the IDW guys. They have unique appeal to like libertarian guys. Dudes who don’t want associated with Trump people, but are anti-government skeptics. This guy will appeal to them and also pulls no punches. Will be sharing that with a few people.

Thanks for posting. I knew that group broke story, but couldn’t have named a single member. Nice to know who was behind that drastic data group.

[gimmick]

Let's consider this a random data dump thread now. Since i wasted time getting up to date with stuff it's only fair i waste someone else's time as well.

So this link is from April 2020...

https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsro...ns-of-covid-19

...standard press release from DNI. Here are the relevant parts...

"The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified."

"The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan."

...they appear to still have a Twitter account. I don't care enough to find out if they have Facebook.

Then about a month ago there was another assessment by the IC. Pick a random article that outlines what they found out. I chose this...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02366-0

...the relevant parts...

"The topline result is that the investigation was inconclusive. Intelligence agencies were divided on whether the pandemic most likely began because of a laboratory accident, or because of human contact with an infected animal."

"only strong conclusion is that the coronavirus was not developed as a biological weapon; most agencies thought, with low confidence, that it was unlikely to have been genetically engineered."

"National Intelligence Council and four intelligence groups leant towards COVID-19 stemming from a person naturally infected by an animal. One group leant towards a release from a lab accident, partly on the basis of the “inherently risky nature of work on coronaviruses”, and three other groups were undecided."

"The report, which did not disclose the identities of the groups, says that more information is required."

...and that leaves us with a resounding, we don't know where the fuck it came from.

From some other article...

"The intelligence community also assessed that Chinese officials did not have foreknowledge of the virus before the initial outbreak that triggered a global pandemic."

...from other random crap i gathered that China doesn't much care about investigating it anymore. It may or may not be true. It just means that their spooks don't care so we can't get anything from our spooks compromising them or stealing any of their internal communication.

The best bet from finding out anything new for the Lab Leak Theory relies on defectors, whistleblowers and/or foreigners working in the lab. And that's also reliant on the agency in question not having their own PR reasons to avoid releasing any info they have or get.

The American agencies are most likely to be compromised in the above manner. There's plenty of stuff that could incriminate US labs while exposing Chinese involvement in the leak/engineering. All that's fairly unlikely since anything condemning for China is something Trump really could have used last year. So far there hasn't been any significant leaks.

[BCR]

Ya, like I don’t have an opinion. It’s just so hard to get around the lab being there. When I looked up your first guy’s twitter, I see him seeking out information on that lab tech who disappeared from the face of the earth, or never worked there in the first place depending on who you listen to. She’s suspicious. They’ve been asking about her for 18 months now. You’d think they’d trot her out to show she’s alive, even if she never worked there, but China is a unique place that doesn’t always do shit as you’d expect.

You can’t trust what China says, so you kind of take it all in and just have to guess if she was truly a lab tech there at the time. I couldn’t form an opinion.

It seems a huge coincidence that lab was there and doing that type of research. As far as how it got out if it was created there, I still think some underpaid worker selling animals to the market is as good a theory as any considering it had already happened in the past. It seems hard to believe they could be that sloppy, but they had been in the past.

Still no clue. If I had to bet it blindly, I bet the lab was involved, but I should probably require odds to bet that way

[limitles]

Ya, like I don’t have an opinion. It’s just so hard to get around the lab being there. When I looked up your first guy’s twitter, I see him seeking out information on that lab tech who disappeared from the face of the earth, or never worked there in the first place depending on who you listen to. She’s suspicious. They’ve been asking about her for 18 months now. You’d think they’d trot her out to show she’s alive, even if she never worked there, but China is a unique place that doesn’t always do shit as you’d expect.

You can’t trust what China says, so you kind of take it all in and just have to guess if she was truly a lab tech there at the time. I couldn’t form an opinion.

It seems a huge coincidence that lab was there and doing that type of research. As far as how it got out if it was created there, I still think some underpaid worker selling animals to the market is as good a theory as any considering it had already happened in the past. It seems hard to believe they could be that sloppy, but they had been in the past.

Still no clue. If I had to bet it blindly, I bet the lab was involved, but I should probably require odds to bet that way

Even you? Conspiracy? Jesus H fucking Christ. The Chinese will eat anything that moves and that includes bats. Doesn't mean there was a bat sale on at the time but some hungry bat boy came into that market and the dominoes fell. Yes it's bizarre to us but so is the consumption of dogs.

Let's suppose that the Chinese government planned this out from a to z.
End result, a lot of people die but no where near to the point that the Chinese just
walk in and take over. It (world domination) has never worked nor will it ever.

[BCR]

One thing that interested me, and I assumed that dude is Russian? He spoke of Russian community in Toronto and eastern bloc. I assume he’s from Russia itself originally or a former republic. When he talked of how susceptible his own community was to misinformation, that he didn’t draw a straight line from them to our recent love of it. Seemed from here fairly obvious that our movement towards it was influenced by them. He kind of glazed over that. Made me wonder if he still has ties where he didn’t want to outright state it.