What a Wuhan lab leak would mean • Hacker News Board

Re: What a Wuhan lab leak would mean

#41

Post by bayesian_horse » Sun, May 30, 2021, 4:03 PM UTC

gremlinsinc wrote: post #27

bayesian_horse wrote: post #16

There 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…

Viruses that spread readily suck as biological warfare agents.

Even if you don't care all that much about your own people, the risk of Chaos is much too great. Nobody can contain such a virus, and China didn't come out ahead, nor did it expect to. Its export markets suffered a great deal, and at the beginning it was far from certain that China could contain the domestic damage as well as it did.

Re: What a Wuhan lab leak would mean

#42

Post by bayesian_horse » Sun, May 30, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

nieve wrote: post #37

gremlinsinc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Theoretically they might have intended to release it somewhere else but accidentally it escaped in Wuhan.

But no, I think no nation state would try to weaponize a virus of that sort for precisely those reasons: China has as much or more to lose than everybody else, both in the event of an accidental as well as an intentional release.

Re: What a Wuhan lab leak would mean

#43

Post by thu2111 » Sun, May 30, 2021, 8:02 PM UTC

bayesian_horse wrote: post #40

thu2111 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 identi…

Given the massive levels of evidence destruction involved, that seems like quite a stretch.