981–990 of 1001 posts
Accidents happen lots in laboratories. It not something we called the NYTs about. We cleaned it up, made sure safety protocols were in place. And went back to work the next day.
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This is definitely the most sensible explanation, since it's quite well known that Wuhan is the most important transportation hub in China since even before the lab was a distant dream in some postdoc's imagination. And China does have the world's largest annual human migration, in the Spring Festival. If I was in the planning department at whichever ministry that made the final decision on placement, putting the mos…
Wow, you did quite the somersault there.
So this seems like low-effort trolling.
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HKU4 contamination in agricultural samples in the Country that HKU4 was discovered in does not pose a particularly controversial question as to how it got there. While it is in the same group of beta coronaviruses that MERS is in, the HKU4 virus was first found in Kowloon and the "HK" stands for "Hong Kong" (although it would be a mistake to assume that says much more than where it was found and not what its range is…
Did you notice the bit where it's a cDNA clone of an RNA virus and do you understand the implications of that? This is an engineering product. As for politics, sure there is a lot of that going around but you can verify this finding yourself with freely available software using the published sequences.
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If China is engaged in a behavior that lead to a global pandemic, we have to know everything about what they were doing so that we can stop this from ever happening again. Who gives a crap about thawed relations after the extraordinary amount of damage this pandemic has done to the world
The genie is more or less out of the bottle on that one. If it is a lab leak there is no stopping it from happening again and China is not doing anything special. There are hundreds of these labs all over the world, they have containment breaches all the time [1], and given the way of international politics it is effectively impossible to shut them all down. Probably undesirable as well given that labs like those are…
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If China is engaged in a behavior that lead to a global pandemic, we have to know everything about what they were doing so that we can stop this from ever happening again. Who gives a crap about thawed relations after the extraordinary amount of damage this pandemic has done to the world
If USA is engaged in a behavior that lead to a global pandemic, we have to know everything about what they were doing so that we can stop this from ever happening again. Who gives a crap about thawed relations after the extraordinary amount of damage this pandemic has done to the world The money for WIV risky reasearch mostly came from the USA.
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These people who conducted the research in the article, the employees of the DoE, were not shunned or ridiculed. The only people getting shunned and ridiculed are the people who approached the issue unscientifically.
If only that were actually true.
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Of course there's a reservoir. That's why there was a lab in the first place. There are many more viruses in those caves. Many many. And tourists literally pay money to go into such caves, and look up to the ceiling to look at the bats. Bats that may at any time shit into their eye with one of these new viruses. And then on top of that people catch them and sell them live to slaughter them at home to eat. Again, this…
Evolutionary theory SUGGESTS it is a lab leak. When a virus "makes the jump" from animals to humans, it tends not to be very good at first. Then, over time, the virus would evolve to get better and better at spreading among humans. You'd have likely years of the virus spreading fairly slowly. You know how each progressive strain has become more capable of spreading but less deadly compared to the generation before it…
Sounds like you're vastly overstating the confidence of the 1977 flu being a coverup.
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Evolutionary theory SUGGESTS it is a lab leak. When a virus "makes the jump" from animals to humans, it tends not to be very good at first. Then, over time, the virus would evolve to get better and better at spreading among humans. You'd have likely years of the virus spreading fairly slowly. You know how each progressive strain has become more capable of spreading but less deadly compared to the generation before it…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu Sounds like you're vastly overstating the confidence of the 1977 flu being a coverup.
The 1977 flu pandemic was unique because it killed the young more than the old. This is because the old people had been through the 1950s H1N1 outbreak and had immunity.
This study from 1978 shows that the 1977 flu was genomically very similar to the H1N1 from the 1950s. This strain vanished off the face of the Earth for 20+ years and then re-emerged largely unchanged. The odds of that are basically zero. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/?page=1
This 2014 report from the center for arms control and non-proliferation reveals that relevant scientists in the late 70s knew it was a leak but hid it.
https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Esc...
As this paper reports, the academic community didn't begin to acknowledge the lab origin until around 2008 and didn't begin to do so in an official capacity (academic papers) until 2009. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/
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So you discredit an incredibly likely theory that a rapidly spreading epidemic from an origin city in a totalitarian state with a highly specific lab focusing on coronaviruses, based on lack of credit ? I don‘t know what to say.
It's called "lack of available evidence." You can't use the fact that there isn't evidence of a thing happening in order to give the theory weight. When the evidence comes out, if it exists, and if it ever does come out for general consumption, then my opinion is subject to change. Why not just say it came from North Korea? There's just about as much publicly available evidence for that as there is that it came from…
I can and I will, because of the fact that there is some evidence that the Chinese Government made efforts to hide evidence around Covid 19’s origins and their history regarding uncomfortable truths.
You can not argue in good faith on grounds of evidence or no evidence if not all parties are playing open and fair. A totalitarian Government with an overarching system of controlling it‘s population and information is certainly not supporting good scientific research and discovery.