311–320 of 1001 posts
Except that experts have visited Wuhan and never found evidence of the theory proposed in this article. I think it is time to stop spreading even more disinformation about this deadly disease. If the US government had taken the virus seriously as the Chinese did, we most certainly wouldn't be in this situation.
Like, so what? Should we care a lot about the safety and security of places where dangerous infectious diseases are studied? sure! I think we should care A LOT MORE about our [apparent total lack of] ability to quickly deploy effective public health responses to new infectious diseases (regardless of their source). Maybe it was an accident at a sloppy lab, ok, so labs on the other side of the planet in sovereign coun…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you explain why evidence that the virus evolved naturally contradicts the lab-leak theory? I'm all ears and waiting to hear the reasoning. As others have pointed out, lab-leak does not imply artificially developed. > I’m a bioscientist. And I'm a Bayesian analyst. Surely your position is that it is a coincidence that: - the virus appeared to originate in Wuhan - genome sequences from patients were 96% or 89% id…
Virus is absent in blood or urine.
And I am not ready to dismiss the theory but I am always open to hearing evidence to exclude the theory.
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"urgent law at lightning speed" is unnecessary and extreme bias. It might tell me something if you included a source. A rational actor would take the opportunity to do this regardless of whether or not the source was known at the time. If it were even a possibility, you would hope they would use the outbreak as a reminder to take containment practices as seriously as possible. Whether or not to allow foreign investig…
>A rational actor... Let’s remember this is China we’re talking about. Before you hand wave that away, consider the emphasis that China places on keeping-up-appearances at practically any cost
This has honestly been my unbiased opinion since essentially day 1. I believe that the release was almost certainly a complete accident, but there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus. The denialists, including the WHO and CDC and everyone else, need to get real and own up to what happened and figure ou…
I subscribe to this theory. I didn't subscribe to it originally because it seemed to dystopian. However on reading the recent politico article ( https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin... ) really changed my opinion about it. To be clear I think it would have been an accident at a Chinese government lab that was underfunded and overworked. Seems to me like the likeliest candidate. I don't think t…
It's not a crazy theory by any means, but, if it happened, then there's evidence. So, where is the evidence? Literally, where is there any actual evidence it happened?
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No, it is not a coincidence. There are a lot of bats in Wuhan. There are a lot of bats carrying coronaviruses. Coronaviruses have triggered past epidemics. Ergo, there’s an institute for virology in Wuhan. Listen starting at 6:30 in the podcast I posted from Nature. There is indeed strong correlation but no causal relationship established.
> There are a lot of bats in Wuhan. Except everything I've read indicates the bats carrying the most closely related virus are not in Wuhan, not even close: > The SARS-CoV-2 virus is most closely related to coronaviruses found in certain populations of horseshoe bats that live about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away in Yunnan province, China. [0] [0] https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-wuhan-lab-complicate... S…
For example, there were cases as early as December 2019 that did not come from Wuhan. Wuhan was no doubt a key early hotspot.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market...
There has been rigorous scholarship done on this question. I recommend reading it given your interest in the subject.
Regardless of what happened inside a lab, or how it got out, it's how we responded to it that ultimately matters. What did we learn from it? How are we prepared to deal with another outbreak in the future? ARE we prepared to deal with another outbreak in the future? If so, how long are we prepared to do so before we let our guards down?
The people who are most interested in where it came from instead of how we handled it are those who are politically motivated to disregard safety in general. They need a boogeyman to deflect blame onto for their ridiculous dereliction of duty.
I refuse to allow them to do so.
Like, so what? Should we care a lot about the safety and security of places where dangerous infectious diseases are studied? sure! I think we should care A LOT MORE about our [apparent total lack of] ability to quickly deploy effective public health responses to new infectious diseases (regardless of their source). Maybe it was an accident at a sloppy lab, ok, so labs on the other side of the planet in sovereign coun…
Compensation for damage inflicted, for one thing? If a country is inept at handling deadly viruses, tries to handle them anyway and in result causes millions of deaths and trillions of dollars worth of financial loss, they should be liable for the damage they've done?
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Why would it be more feasible this virus is leaked from the lab other than some wild animals from the market itself? Either can be equally believable yet impossible to prove.
There are cases in Wuhan which predate the wet market cluster. That appears to have been a super spreading event but not the origin. The bats this disease come from we’re not being sold in the market at this time. They’re out of season. So already the theory is assuming a multi-animal hop (some other wild animal got in contact with a bat and got infected, then captured and moved a thousand kilometers to the wet marke…
This has honestly been my unbiased opinion since essentially day 1. I believe that the release was almost certainly a complete accident, but there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus. The denialists, including the WHO and CDC and everyone else, need to get real and own up to what happened and figure ou…
I've done security audits and related consulting work upon research labs in my past and the biggest issue they had was - extremist animal activists. Now I was aware of some reports (nothing official or confirmed) that the Wuham lab was broken into in the summer of 2019. Interestingly enough their was a lot of political tension at that time involving Hong Kong. I'm also mindful how China has been rather good at sweepi…
Someone who broke into a Wuhan coronavirus research lab in summer 2019 and broke containment of our hypothetical SARS-CoV-2 precursor virus samples would have been infected too early for our timeline.