911–920 of 1001 posts
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That's not a cultural thing, it's a universal human/organizational thing.
It’s certainly widespread but the cultural component is important to how strong the reaction is. China certainly isn’t alone in having it but the political stakes are a powerful amplifier.
Regardless of its origin, what I cannot possibly figure out is why China didn't close its own borders while they were putting travel restrictions within.
Second of all, what country has ever prevented its own citizens from leaving the country because of an outbreak? The Hubei lockdown was already the most dramatic response by a government in modern history to an outbreak. A province with 60 million people was put strict lockdown. Almost nobody was let out of the province, and people were told to stay in their homes.
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> if it happened, then there's evidence Really? Why would there be evidence TODAY? Those bats have likely been destroyed, and all records of sequences taken from them have likely long since been shredded and burned. There's not that much evidence involved here.
Then, why wasn't evidence uncovered earlier? Surely the theory had just as much plausibility a year ago as today. Are you asking me to believe a theory for which all the evidence was either not uncovered or destroyed? Why is that more plausible than origin from outside the lab?
I agree that conclusions should not be drawn without evidence - but by the same token, you cannot rule this out as a possibility because no effort was put into investigating it.
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...but Wuhan is also 0km away from the wet markets that sell meat sourced x00km away near and around the bat caves.
I have seen estimates of thousands of wet markets in China and perhaps 10000 in all of Asia. Why the one wet market closest to a lab doing GOF research, and previously questioned on its containment rigor.
Wuhan is like Chicago in China. It's not some random small town. If an outbreak occurred in some rural area (which it might have previously), it's possible that it just fizzled out.
Wuhan is a great place for a virus to spread.
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Or conflated with that by people using it as a straw man to debunk more likely scenarios, your pick.
It happens in the comments here still, and not necessarily a malice. A kneejerk reaction to any claim amplified by the former administration, even if it's "the sky is blue". Same reason many otherwise sane folks mourned Soleimani.
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>We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak. But China knew about the virus in 2019 and kept it quiet. They silenced scientists. China is complicit in this pandemic and should pay reparations.
Exactly. Frankly, I'm tired of this tip-toed attitude - there hasn't been any sort of consequences suffered or imposed on the Chinese government for how they surreptitiously dealt with the virus, initially. I'm not condoning or advocating conspiracy theories, but where they are wrong, they should be penalised.
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Sure. We could also invoke Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. A coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan China miles away from a Virology Lab that studies coronavirus and has in the past exercised gain of function research on cornoviruses specifically with novel lung ACE2 bind may have had a lab accident and a live virus broke out if the lab. The problem is the media labeling common sense as con…
I invoked Occam's Razor when I wondered what was more likely: that it was spread via a wet market or escaped from a lab with biosecurity protocols staffed by professionals? Of course I still don't know and my ideas regarding the latter have changed because of this article but I'm now pretty sure that I don't have enough information to invoke Occam's Razor in any kind of insightful or effective way.
Undoubtedly after looking at the sequences of that paper, there were some alignments, but how they were structured doesn't point to being engineered, but rather of co-infection, which did not match the conclusions of the paper.
What they do actually indicate might even be more politically inflammatory. That the virus evolved out of a recombination event in an HIV infected person infected with a SARS-like virus, and repackaged as a new SARS-CoV-2 virus.
That we’re finally seeing some mainstream discussion around this hypothesis should not change the scary fact that months ago governments, scientists and media happily and immediately rejected it as a xenophobic conspiracy theory. The messaging and subsequent ease at which public opinion was influenced should make everyone pause and think hard about other ways they might be being manipulated.
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Please supply links on the research grants.
Sure. Part 1, from 2014-2019, for 3.7M: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8674931 Part 2, from 2019 until it was cancelled in April 2020: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9819304 Both led by Peter Daszak who is now also the lead WHO investigator. The same person who decided the WHO didn’t need to see the deleted virus databases, and the same person who co-ordinated the Lancet statement which minimised…