> It has taken 17 months since the new coronavirus supposedly erupted, but the lab leak hypothesis has finally come in from the cold.
"Supposedly erupted"?
What a Wuhan lab leak would mean
31–40 of 43 posts
Re: What a Wuhan lab leak would mean
#32I expect, nothing. reads article Yup, nothing. > The result would be uncomfortable not just for the Chinese Communist Party Outside of the ethnic cleansing that's already going on? Pfft. > It would shake science to its foundations for carrying out risky research despite clear warnings of the dangers, and then collaborating in an epic whitewash. The grand statement in the face of history rings hollow. > it would chall…
Yup. Beyond that, even.
While it might cause some trivial reputational discomfort for the CCP who is already engaged in ethnic cleansing, but they'd also realize (if they haven't already) that they have a direct path to winning a bio-war without even losing credibility, because their authoritarian control gives them a huge advantage. They showed that they can implement a hard lock-down to reduce R0 to One can hope that they aren't that unethical, but the fate of many tens of millions under the rule of that party says otherwise...
Re: What a Wuhan lab leak would mean
#33>Bear in mind researchers in Wuhan were combining snippets from strains of bat coronaviruses to increase virulence, injecting viruses into “humanised” mice, testing how diseases can jump the species barrier and creating chimeric diseases using cloning techniques that show no sign of human manipulation. Can someone explain to me in layperson's terms what the purpose of this is, and why the risk of a global pandemic wi…
1. There have been and will continue to be many pandemics in the course of human history. If we can understand viruses better, perhaps we can stop those pandemics for good one day, and the risk of one outbreak is worth the benefit of potentially stopping or slowing many more (which may also be more lethal). 2. Hindsight is 20/20. While there were prior lab leaks and those who thought this would happen, I think the fa…
Albeit as a test case it exposed all the political issues. We have failed to address it promptly in half of the western world and quite a chunk of global south.
In short, were this virus slower and deadlier, we would be screwed as humanity. (Even on order of Black Death.)
Re: What a Wuhan lab leak would mean
#34Nothing. Because we Americans funded the lab. So the combined propaganda power of both the CCP and the USA will make this a non-issue. Everybody is also going to think I'm nuts - but we should be very very thankful that the first airplane tranported pandemic was so mild. It's prepared us for something that could be vastly worse.
There are some other reasons several major countries might not want to press the issue.
It would be an interesting international law mess. Some thorny issues:
1. If it was due to Chinese negligence, how would damages be calculated?
In many (most?) national law systems the party harmed by negligence has some duty to mitigate the harm. For instance if you are out watering your garden with a garden hose, and you see an ember from my BBQ land on your garden shed and start a fire which you could trivially put out with your hose, but you just stand there and watch the fire spread and burn the shed to the ground, I'm probably not going to be liable for buying you a new shed. My liability will probably be limited to the small amount of damage from the first few seconds of the fire.
Is there any similar concept in international law? If so, I expect that a lot of countries would want to avoid trying to answer the question of how much of their deaths and economic loses were due to China's negligence and how much were due to their own poor handling of the pandemic.
2. If it was an accidental lab release but not due to negligence, are there damages?
In many national legal systems there is the concept of an "Act of God" or similar. As an example suppose one of the 30 m (100 ft) tall trees in my neighbor's yard about 18 m (60 ft) from my house were to fall over in a windstorm and smash my house. If the tree was unhealthy or its root system shallow or weak, the neighbor would probably be negligent for not having the tree safely removed, and so my neighbor would owe me a new house. If the tree was a healthy tree well rooted then we'd be looking at an "Act of God", and my neighbor is off the hook.
Is there anything similar in international law?
Re: What a Wuhan lab leak would mean
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
We need to do this research on the Moon/Mars/Underwater/Arctic/Desert. Not in a city with millions of people. You know, now that I just typed that out, I’m becoming more and more convinced common sense was lacking when it comes to that Wuhan Lab. Something simple most likely happened because the common sense just wasn’t there. Edit: Here are the articles related to lab leaks before 2015 (these articles were posted be…
Hindsight is 20/20. Whatever really happened, there never was a vial in that lab that said "potentially pandemic virus - handle with extreme care". Even if the virus came from (or rather through) a lab, there is no evidence what the researcher's actual intentions were. We don't even know which researchers were responsible.
I don't think that's quite true. The grants and papers talk about what the goals were and the biosafety labels being used.
Re: What a Wuhan lab leak would mean
#36Nothing. Because we Americans funded the lab. So the combined propaganda power of both the CCP and the USA will make this a non-issue. Everybody is also going to think I'm nuts - but we should be very very thankful that the first airplane tranported pandemic was so mild. It's prepared us for something that could be vastly worse.
> Because we Americans funded the lab
Not only that but also majority of the funding was during Obama's second term. Which means Biden administration has an even stronger incentive to sweep this under the rug.
Re: What a Wuhan lab leak would mean
#37There is not one "lab leak theory", there are quite a few distinct possibilities. The problem is that the nutcases ran with the one that said China was working on weaponizing this exact virus and then it leaked. But there are other explanations for lab workers getting sick. They could have been working on samples of this virus without knowing it, and not taken enough precautions. They could have infected themselves o…
> And still, any deliberate attempt to weaponize a Corona virus would be unlikely and require much more evidence. Certain other pathogens, maybe, but not something that has pandemic potential. It just doesn't make sense. I'll say first, I'm not a right-wing nut - I'm leftist/socialist and I'm not saying it was a lab leak, but I can see a BIG reason for china to release a pandemic. China is on the cusp of becoming the…
Even assuming they'd do such a thing it doesn't make any sense to do a deliberate release on their own citizens. Chinese intelligence is good enough to do a secret release on someone else's territory and even if scientists quite reasonably asked how the coronavirus in question had made it from China to say Brazil there'd be less political exposure. Doing it to themselves when they were manifestly not ready to handle the public health side would have been just plain dumb. I don't doubt that the morals and ethics of the ruling party could be that weak, I just don't think a China release of an COVID-like virus is an approach they'd see as worth it.
Re: What a Wuhan lab leak would mean
#38Yeah, blame Chinese lab like blame e-cigarette
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_vaping_lung_...
US lung illness outbreak 2019-9 Military World Games(Wuhan) 2019-10-18
Dig into these patient's therapeutic documents!
Re: What a Wuhan lab leak would mean
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other point is that such research usually targets non-human species. Say, they try to adapt a bat-virus to a ferret. The idea that such a virus is transmissible to Humans, escapes and causes a pandemic is something of a miracle in itself. If it actually happened that way, which I don't believe right now.
Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were engaged in gain-of-function and serial passage research, but it is also a matter of public record that they were targeting human hosts in collaboration with others, as well. > Early in 2016, Baric and Shi again collaborated. Shi sent Baric a fresh bat virus spike protein, and Baric inserted it into the backbone of a human SARS virus and then used that infectious clo…
In that particular case, I wouldn't say "the virus jumps directly to humans", because it is already a human-specific virus, just with a different spike protein. It may evade preexisting immunity (or maybe not, since the spike protein isn't the only point of attack), but that's about it.
SARS-CoV-2 is decidedly nothing of the sort, the entire thing is unknown, while it has some resemblance to bat corona viruses.
Viruses that pass through cell cultures are usually getting weaker, by the way. You'd have to "pass" them through actual human subjects to actively increase their pandemic potential. That would not only be unethical but also very difficult.
Re: What a Wuhan lab leak would mean
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hindsight is 20/20. Whatever really happened, there never was a vial in that lab that said "potentially pandemic virus - handle with extreme care". Even if the virus came from (or rather through) a lab, there is no evidence what the researcher's actual intentions were. We don't even know which researchers were responsible.
I don't think that's quite true. The grants and papers talk about what the goals were and the biosafety labels being used.
Yes, but SARS-CoV-2 can't have come from any of those papers or grant proposals directly. It has never been sequenced before.
If it evolved in a lab through any kind of "gain of function" research, this must have happened completely off the radar. The existing evidence just doesn't prove anything. On the contrary, the evidence that there was "gain of function research" going on with viruses that weren't nearly identical to Sars-Cov-2 makes it less likely that this virus originated from such research.