731–740 of 1001 posts
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We will never know the truth to the extent that China would admit this. It’s obvious in hindsight that what you say is likely true, but there is no feasible political route for the CCP to take blame, as their lives would be at stake due to unrest.
WHO should sequence all the Virus DNAs from that lab in 2015-2019 compare that with all the Covid sequences.
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COVID hits the sweet spot of infectiousness, asymptomatic spread, incubation time, and low mortality. I would expect the R of Ebola to be pretty low in developed countries. People wash their hands more often when every place you go to has running water, and if you show Ebola symptoms, you're going to the hospital, and if it's a hospital with a city that has a BSL4 lab, there isn't going to be an outbreak - someone wi…
Not disagreeing with your general point that SARS-CoV-2 is an interesting mix of infectiousness and low mortality. From what I've read Ebola has killed many healthcare professionals because they infected themselves when disposing off PPE. As a result a disproportionally large portion of deaths were healthcare workers. > With COVID, a worker could get infected, hide the exposure out of fear/shame, never show any sympt…
It's not exceptional in many of the ways viruses can be. It's not as deadly as Ebola. Or as durable as Norovirus. Or as transmissible as Measles. It's just...really good at its job.
The lack of fomite transmission for SARS-CoV-2 has saved a lot of healthcare workers.
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Why is Malaria in the list?
Malaria can be (very rarely) transmitted through blood transfusions. https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/us_transmission.html
My conspiracy theory is that, if the virus intentionally or unintentionally escaped from that lab, and the CDC,CIA, whatever, etc already know this, probably everyone prefers to shut up and deny it, because otherwise it might lead to a war with china and it would be a lot worse for everyone.
I think that people can easily develop a misplaced sense of humanitarian responsibility where they are under the impression that they are called to serve a higher purpose and that they feel as though they are beholden to use their power and influence to prioritise (for instance) pacifism and internationalism above the public search for knowledge, where these have the potential to conflict. There can also be a sense in which the scientific establishment pursues its own independent, technocratic public policy. We have seen the huge amount of political power and influence wielded by high-ranking members of the scientific establishment, and no doubt the stakes were raised for this by the fact that it was an election year.
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I get what you're saying, but it seems slightly more nuanced. From my understanding WIV did do gain of function research. e.g. purposefully make virus' more deadly or infectious to study them. Definitely not a super villain at least I hope/highly doubt the intention was a weapon (you could surely create a better weapon?). I'm not judging the value of that research, it does sound valuable but maybe not more so than th…
Every BSL-certified lab should be doing gain of function research. If leaks are a problem, then certifications should be better enforced. Burying our head in the sand and waiting for nature to kill us is a losing move.
The article of this post talks a lot about how we do have inspections in the US, and that the inspectors are often the same department as the lab!
To be better it seems like we need some damn strong consequences & a regulatory power that can't be overruled.
Science, like journalism, is supposed to be about facts and about getting to the truth. No source of covid-19 has been found. Similar lab leaks happen frequently. BUT.. you're not allowed to discuss it with the undertones that you're a bad person. If you say china virus you could be accused of being a racist. But if you say South African or British variant it's okay. The mental acrobats are insane. If you suggest peo…
I’m baffled at what branch of science involves being able to call it the “China virus” rather than COVID. When was Science about prescribing blame?
This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1] This article points out that a lab outbreak could…
>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.
None of the people most qualified to speak on this issue want their funding cut or the research to stop.
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My impression was that "lab escape" was conflated with "deliberate release" by conspiracy types early on, and once that took hold it became impossible to talk rationally about the accidental escape hypothesis.
That's been my impression too fwiw. There's now a large segment of people who are primed to immediately accept the conspiracy theory over the Hanlon's Razor principle: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity (or accident)".
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 conspiracy and conflating the two.
This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1] This article points out that a lab outbreak could…
There is no requirement that bats be transported to Wuhan. It's close to a known bat virus, and that's all we know. There are local bats in Wuhan, needless to say. Other species can easily be involved. The truth is that there is nothing particularly surprising about the way this virus evolved. Fundamentally this is a pandemic like any other. They happen in some species or another every year. And that, more than anyth…
I beg to differ. How many pandemic causing viruses have their ground zero right outside an instition that for the last decade has been cranking out study after study derived from GoF research? A place that also was receiving information from American university researchers on how to develop chimeric mutations? Which just happened to share genetic material with strains known to have been researched for bioweapon applications? All at the same time as an uptick in censorship of academic papers.
There's coincidence, and then there's coincidence. I don't think anyone was out to make the darn thing, or intentionally release it. When I see a bunch of virology going on, and a pandemic starts up next door, I'm not looking 1000 miles away for the source.