Could be that the WSJ has hired a bunch of sinophobic ….to do it’s editorial work.
Yeah, let’s let the MK Ultra people weigh in here. :this is a joke, not meant to be insulting:
Nobody cares about quaint oldey tyme concepts like facts and truth. Reality is whatever you feel deep down in your heart, and anyone that tells you different is a dangerous enemy.
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Thread of sanity on lab leak stuff
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Hey when you interview actual scientists about what they think they have a take that is different from what these anonymously-sourced reports are saying:
“While I believe the ‘lab leak’ theory a real possibility, I should point out that the DoE assessment has ‘low confidence’ in that assessment and their assessment did not change the minds of any of the other agencies.”
Lentzos added that according to guidance from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence: “A low confidence level generally indicates that the information used in the analysis is scant, questionable, fragmented, or that solid analytical conclusions cannot be inferred from the information, or that the IC has significant concerns or problems with the information sources.”
What do scientists make of it?
Tarik Jašarević, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization, said the agency had not received any information on this particular assessment.
“WHO and Sago [the Scientific Advisory Group for Origins of Novel Pathogens] will keep examining all available scientific evidence that would help us advance the knowledge on the origin of Sars-CoV-2 and we call on China and the scientific community to undertake necessary studies in that direction. Until we have more evidence all hypotheses are still on the table,” Jašarević said.
However, others have thrown cold water on the report.
“It is incorrect to frame this issue as scientifically undecided,” said Prof Angie Rasmussen of the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. “Two prior studies – one of which I co-authored – demonstrate clearly using multiple lines of evidence that the pandemic emerged into the human population at least twice over an approximately two-week period at or immediately upstream of Huanan market in association with the live animal trade,” she said.
“Any data suggesting a lab leak would have to be consistent with this evidence. So far, all competing hypotheses challenging our findings have failed to pass peer review. Since the DoE findings are described as ‘weak’ and ‘low confidence’, I’d be surprised if this new intelligence meets that bar.”
Prof David Robertson, who studies viral evolution at the University of Glasgow, raised concerns that “vague rumours of new information” were contributing to misinformation on the issue including how much was known about the origins of the virus. “It’s important to appreciate that we’ve lots of evidence for a natural origin for Sars-CoV-2, ie not just a single report but multiple lines of evidence which has steadily accumulated since 2020,” he said.
Dong-Yan Jin, a virology professor at Hong Kong University, agreed. “To me and other scientists who have common sense and who know well about the facts, the possibility of lab leak is extremely low. The story of lab leak in Wuhan is a fiction and it is as ridiculous as the counterclaim that Sars-CoV-2 comes from lab leaks in the US,” he said.
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My wife had a family member visiting in town who we had dinner with both Friday and last night. Today we got a text that they tested positive. I guess it’s time to see how well the bivalent booster works 3 months later 
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There may be others and they may be a little bit different, but this is a good summary. At this point I have an idea in my head of what the prevailing research says, ballpark, and mostly ignore the new changes that don’t change anything. So if something shows Long COVID is outside say a 10% to 40% bound, or that vaccination is not between like 40% and 60% effective at reducing long COVID risk in infections, then I’ll make note of it and consider whether to recalibrate.
Long COVID
Risk estimated at 10-30% non-hospitalized, 50-70% hospitalized, 10-12% vaccinated. (Peer reviewed and published in Nature.)
36% in a CDC-published survey of mostly young adults on a college campus. Obviously this isn’t a peer reviewed study with a control group, etc, etc. But it seems to fall roughly in line with the numbers we might otherwise expect.
You’ve got to dig into the supplementary tables, but at six months 32% of vaccinated people had at least one post-acute sequela and 2.15% had post-acute death in this study published in Nature. Those were up from 19.7% and 0.81% in contemporary control groups. So I guess this is really showing a 12.3% risk of long COVID in the vaccinated. Although the excess death seems pretty concerning, too.
Here’s one I had previously posted regarding multiple doses of vaccines being associated with lower risks: COVID-19: Year 4 - You down with XBB? - #184 by commonWealth.
Post-infection vaccination reduces long COVID risks by 42%, according to this study in JAMA.
There was either another one that showed somewhere in the 40% to 60% efficacy range for boosters against long COVID, or a tweet that misrepresented the JAMA one as being pre-infection vaccination that confused me. But right now that’s all I can find.
Here’s a study published in Nature that gets into re-infection outcomes, I ran out of time to break down the data: Acute and postacute sequelae associated with SARS-CoV-2 reinfection | Nature Medicine. If that doesn’t address it, let me know and I’ll look for another one.
I’ll look at things more but just as an aside that first paper isn’t published in actual “Nature” it’s actually a much smaller journal. Interestingly the lead author doesn’t seem to have any biological training and leads a patient lead research group.
Had to do a double take, looks like it’s in Nature Reviews Microbiology, which is owned/run by Nature Portfolio, whose flagship is Nature. I think the article I read or tweet I read made the same mistake I did, assuming it was originally in Nature by the website.
It looks like they were reviewing other findings and trying to put them together to draw conclusions? Not sure what area would be best suited to that. But Eric Topol worked on it, and he seems pretty reputable. He’s one of the people I follow on Twitter for COVID stuff.
He was a cardiologist who at 36 was named chair of the Dept of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, recruited by Scripps to found Scripps Research Translational, published 1,200+ peer-reviewed articles, and his research has primarily focused on genetics and the use of digital tools in medicine. On COVID, he was apparently one of the first to question the FDA’s speedy EUA for hydroxychloroquine, convalescent plasma, and remdesivir.
He also publicly shamed the FDA director to get him to wait until the Phase 3 trials were completed to give an EUA for the vaccines, which delayed their approval by about a month until after the elections. That probably improved public trust in the vaccines, although it’s still pretty bad. Also, neither here nor there, but I’ll always be annoyed by it… cost me a bunch of money because I had call options expiring like a week before the election because I correctly predicted Trump would try to rush the vaccine and his FDA director would be a toady. I failed to account for the scientific community successfully pressuring them into stopping that.
Anyway, back on point, he seems like a respected heavy hitter in the scientific and medical community.
From peer reviewed and published research and surveys to a not so scientific SPE poll… We’ve had 35 responses so I thought I’d share the results so far.
We have 35 vaxxed and boosted respondents, 63% have caught COVID.
We had 21 vaxxed/boosted/pozzed respondents, 1 has long COVID and it has not yet resolved.
Of those who caught COVID after being vaxxed and boosted, their time from booster when catching it was…
14% < 3 months
27% 3-6 months
55% 6-12 months
4% 1+ year
Thanks everyone for sharing and I hope things improve for you soon, @chupacabre_reprise. Really appreciate you opening up about your experience.
For now my fiancee and I continue to ride it out, but these polls, unscientific as they are, give me some hope that the next round of studies could be encouraging wrt long COVID rates in the vaxxed and boosted. Something on the order of 5%, with possible further reduction from metformin (hollllllld in those follow up studies!!! One time baby, hold!) would significantly change my calculus.
I’m hopeful in part because in one of the studies I just posted (the one I linked to upthread), the CDC noted that the more shots someone has had, the less chance they had of getting long COVID. The million dollar question is whether that’s because they were more likely to be in a window of immediate protection from their last shot, or also because the protective benefits stack. I’m hoping it’s the latter and we discover soon that like 6 or 7 jabs/infections = ok it’s actually like the flu for you now if you’ve dodged serious repercussions from those past infections.
I’ve had a hypothesis/hope for a long time that it was likely that X infections + Y jabs = it’s the flu, which would make sense to me from a (very basic layman’s) evolutionary perspective. I’m holding onto that hope for now and trying to get there via pure Y.
Yeah the patient lead groups tend to rope stuff back towards whatever their founding interest was which I’m completely guessing was things like ME/CFS/POTS based on the bent of that article.
It’s entirely possible the last author you mention didn’t even read the article but was funded through a grant he is involved with. I’ve published an article with someone similarly or more “famous” and their involvement was less than 30 minutes over a year.
ETA- also I’m not actually trying to discount the article just having seen the “sausage” get made in medical research leaves me with a lot of questions when I see that sort of publishing collaboration and I haven’t actually looked into what it actually was
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I’ll look into this. I know he tweeted out a thread on it, but I guess that doesn’t guarantee he did more than read it or read the conclusions. I’ll see if he tweeted/said anything about being involved in the process.
I’d love to be convinced that these numbers are off, the risks are low, and to feel safe resuming normalcy, in case that’s not clear. Like if someone knows of good studies showing that and can post them and convince me those are more reliable studies than these, they’d make my year.
Some combination of less prevalence and/or less severity in long COVID, and not a significantly increased risk of post-COVID stroke/heart attack, and I’m thrilled. Like even if the risk was 35% but it all resolved in 3-6 months and was almost all stuff like fatigue and headaches I’d roll those dice.
You probably know the numbers better than most but when making your own decision important to make sure for each specific issue/risk you being consistent on weighing absolute and relative risks for your self.
Like hypothetically making up numbers even if the risk of heart attack in 30 year olds was up by 100% for 6 months, many 30 year olds might not find that enough to change behavior because the absolute risk of a heart attack over a 6 month period in 30s is so low even if doubled. Others would find any increase in heart attack unacceptable.
ETA- also none this should distract from how messed up it is that you all getting grief for making decision to help protect yourself and others
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Yeah that’s a really important point and definitely something I’m weighing on those risks. I’m not factoring it into the long COVID numbers, maybe I should check more - but the data is much less granular on that. It’s mostly large age groupings. So I guess being 36, I need to keep an eye on the bounds and if it’s like 18-35 and 36-55 for example, I might want to consider that my numbers are probably worse than the 18-35 but below the 36-55 range.
That’s also why I’m not hugely concerned about the strokes/heart attacks personally. But I’ve always been more afraid of losing my mental acuity when I age than dying or having physical health issues.
Thanks. Yeah, it’s definitely messed up and we aren’t losing sight of that. Unfortunately it’s just kind of one more example of what American society is at this point, and I’m sure there are plenty of other places too and certainly far worse examples here. I think the end result is a closer connection to our true good friends and more appreciation of them, and a smaller overall circle.
In the day-to-day it just is what it is. Like I’m really not sure the right way to process it, or the healthy way to process it. It’s kind of like learning that most people we are around every day didn’t care at all about protecting others, or learning how many people were totally cool with Trumpism. We learned so much about everyone around us and society the last 7 or 8 years that was not good. I’m not sure burying it is healthy, I’m not sure ruminating on it is healthy, and I’m sure that being around it all the time isn’t healthy.
Feels like a situation where Don’t Look Up may actually be the right strategy, while keeping the circle tight.
I believe long covid is like 1-2 years max, because if it isn’t, we’re prettay prettay fucked. the human body (and brain)’s ability to adapt is pretty remarkable.
Now we have Wray talking out his ass about the Oranges of Covid. Lobbed a grenade over on UP. Let’s see what happens.
Now the FBI is weighing in on this? How is that even in their jurisdiction?
Very good thread explaining why the lab leak theory remains a longshot. It seems far more likely that even IF there were employees in the lab who had COVID very early on in the outbreak, they caught it from a trip to the market and brought it to the lab, not the other way around. I skipped some of the thread, so read it all if you want all the details.
Basically, the possible events that would connect lab employees to the market via covid are:
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Lab employees get infected with COVID, and two separate people with different strains of COVID both end up at the stall (so we need either two separate leaks, or some significant early mutations in someone they infected), where they give it to someone who then gets sick and gets the virus ALL OVER the stall, and seeds the broader outbreak.
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Outbreak starts at the stall, a lab employee goes to the market and catches it, shares it around the lab a bit. (Talk about ironic.)
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There was simply broader spread earlier than anyone realized, and the market is just the epicenter to the known outbreak.
There are also of course all of the scenarios where the US intel that these dudes in the lab were really sick is because they had something other than covid.
I remember being on team “lab leak is possible but unlikely” early on in the pandemic and arguing with some people on the forum about how high the likelihood was. I was kind of painted as the conspiracy theorist, but I’m pretty sure my likelihood % was till pretty low, like 10% or less. I wish I remembered how likely so I could judge whether I was an idiot or a savant. Like, in hindsight, what was the right percentage to assign to that likelihood? 1%? 5%? 10%?
Given everything we know now, I’d probably say 5% was a good early guesstimate of the likelihood, lots of uncertainty a decade ago back in 2020.
tldr; I’m not a lab leak guy, but I’ve been an “open to the small possibility of a lab leak” guy and now I’m a “yeah you’re going to need to show me proof positive in the form of like Chinese gov’t/lab communications or bloodwork that somehow proves it, otherwise fuck off,” guy. But I’d say there’s definitely a (very small) non-zero chance the CIA is sitting on some sort of Chinese gov’t communications, which also may or may not even be real. Russia would have plenty of interest in sowing doubt there to strain US/China relations, and for what they lack in the ability to do routine maintenance on military vehicles, they certainly have been pretty good at misinformation campaigns.
So, yeah, definitive proof or fuck off is my response to the lab leak people. And none of these Twitter clowns are going to get proof themselves through their own research.
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yeah this is the same info I reference, just put out better with the actual citations in the end.
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