Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

What if it was Aliens? /s

One of the reasons i despise the Silicon Valley tone of conversation is how naive (read removed from the brutality that exists in the world outside the US' protected borders) the line is.

Like, are you kidding me? - Research Lab near outbreak - Connected to person that proposed a similar GoF research for a grant in the US and was turned down - History of loose ethical standards and evidence of published works connecting the CCP to military usage of viruses - Absolutely no evidence of natural origin circumstantial or otherwise in spite of over 18 months of looking

And we have people here closing their eyes, fingers in their ears going "la la la" with moronic arguments like : "Can you show me the evidence?"

I mean, can you constructively participate in the discussion with an attempt to push it forward and call out the clear risks of weaponizing infectious vectors instead of saying "Nothing to see here, show me more" in the face of all we've seen.

All that does is gives a pass to the people doing this in the dark. Accident or not, that work is ongoing and if a literal global mass casualty event doesn't help regulate it, what will ?

Scientists absolutely need to investigate themselves as well, to avoid biases and blind spots. Just because someone is smart, doesn't make them arbiter of truth. So we need to examine ourselves AND facts.

>Where is the covid source?

Probably in bats or other animals prone to corona viruses. Likely some animal that naturally does not interact with humans a lot, and has significant populations in remote habitats. Basically everything that can live in difficult terrain is rather likely. Less likely, but far from impossible: it mutated over extended periods of time in some animal meat factory farm on an accelerated schedule thanks to how these farms operate, with animals showing few if any symptoms thanks to the young ages of the entire population (no old animals in your factory farm ;), until it finally made the jump to humans.

>to aquire the necessary 1000 mutations

They compared strains we already now about because somebody sequenced them; the important word there is "known". The thing about that is that there is a ton of strains we do not know about because nobody sequenced that particular local cohort of animals. Hell, we do not even know every species of animals are on planet at all, if the still hight rate of discovering new species is any indication - and we do constantly discover species that we can see with our naked eyes without having to whip out lab equipment.

>And yet here we are, almost 2 years since the pandemic started, with no identified natural reservoir for covid.

There is a real good chance that this "natural reservoir" is just a place nobody looked at with a sequencer hunting for virus strains, i.e. most of the Earth.

Or it might have been created in a lab.

The thing is, we do not know. But there is some evidence apparently that it was a natural origin because a) it looks like a natural progression from previously known strains and b) because there are no hallmark indicators for direct manipulation. Not entirely conclusive evidence, but sound argumentation making a case for the possibility of natural occurrence. And the theories you recapped arguing it cannot be natural just do not use a sound argumentation in my opinion as even I myself - not a domain expert and thinking about it for a few minutes - can poke gigantic holes in it.

Frankly, the "no natural source" argument as you presented it immediately reminded me of the pro-Creationist "missing link" argument.

All the while the evidence you mentioned is that there probably was a lab in Wuhan which probably did stuff with Corona viruses... which is rather vague argumentative. Sure, it's a clue furthering the lab theory a little, but it's hardly conclusive. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

I don’t agree that the virus appearing near a lab is evidence that it was released from a lab, no. Just like I don’t believe being near a bank robbery at the time of a robbery is evidence I did it.

The comment mentioning Bayes Theorem has the right idea. Your priors are exceptionally different from my own, so we do not see this the same way and maybe never will.

There's one documentary from ARTE.tv, a french-german state-owned TV station that I watched in Spring 2020 but which was from around 5 years ago at that time. I cannot find it but I'd add a link here if I do eventually. (Not easy since so much similar content has popped up since then)

One particular reference (point) the documentary was revolving around was the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies which has been pointing out the problem with zoonotic epidemics/pandemics vs. populations and wild ecosystems intertwining too much. (AIDS, SARS, MERS)

Maybe that's interesting enough:

"Thus, it is highly likely that future SARS- or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China. Therefore, the investigation of bat coronaviruses becomes an urgent issue for the detection of early warning signs ..."

Bat Coronaviruses in China, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6466186/ from March 2019

That said, all this conspiracy discussion is giving the research a bad taste. I mean they cannot build up a lab in a bat cave or ignore the whole issue. And this is not the first epidemic/pandemic of this sort.