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I don't buy the escaped/released from a lab theories espoused here and on Facebook and the like. Apparently the mutations within the SARS-COV-2 found in humans

I don't buy the escaped/released from a lab theories espoused here and on Facebook and the like. Apparently the mutations within the SARS-COV-2 found in humans compared to the bat virus are purely random and hence the thing is not or very unlikely genetically engineered. My source is a recent New Scientist article. So the bloody thing is simply a virus that affects all people, everywhere, without fear or favour. Simply ... Pretty much all stats I've seen relating to this thing are painfully awful. Here in the UK (in England), care home deaths are not reported in the main death stat etc etc ad nauseam. Scotland reports in its own way as does NI (or not bother) compared to England and Wales. We have minimal testing anyway so who knows what is actually going on? Anyway, one thing I am absolutely certain of is that whilst the stats in Europe and the US, CA etc are a bit wonky at best they are at least a decent attempt to have a go at reporting the situation. I think that the CN and other results that are so way off the curve that other nations and territories are reporting are complete fiction and dangerous fiction at that.

meowface 7y ago
Agreed, there's basically no current evidence to suggest it was engineered, and plenty of evidence to suggest it was zoonotic and evolved naturally. One possibility that can't be totally ruled out is that maybe this was one of many viruses collected from local animals which their virology lab had stored for current or future study, and some kind of mistake led to it escaping, perhaps through an employee unknowingly getting infected or taking home something with a contaminated surface. edit: Rewrote everything below here to make my probability beliefs more clear. I think it's extremely likely to be zoonotic and not spread by anyone intentionally. As for the chance it was an unintentional lab escape, it's difficult to assess what the probability of that may be. I don't think you can just simply assume "virology lab in proximity = likely source of outbreak" without looking at a lot of other factors. Wuhan is a massive city and economic hub, a lot bigger than NYC and the surrounding area. From what I've heard, there's basically every kind of facility and institute one could imagine there. It could be a coincidence that the lab was there due to the size, density, and economic importance of the area. Or maybe the lab could've been established there because they knew the area was biologically diverse and close to many species of animals carrying viruses which could jump to humans, and that such animals were commonly hunted and sold for food there. If that's true, then it would be a confounding variable, and one would expect outbreaks to be more likely to occur near the lab regardless of whether they originated in the lab. There appear to be other potentially credible pieces of evidence which may support the lab escape hypothesis, but I think the whole case needs to be analyzed very robustly and carefully, with all of the possible priors and evidence taken into account.
- StandardFuture 7y ago
  > I think it is overwhelmingly likely Why are you so sure it is overwhelmingly likely? > I think it's probably just a coincidence that there's a virology lab there Only because you believe it to be purely coincidental of a virology lab being next to the outbreak source location? I am entirely up for accepting this viewpoint. But, the lack of evidence to suggest an actual source location coupled with the (CCP sourced and pushed narrative of) "overwhelming evidence" that raw bat consumption at the market started it leads me to lean towards a more logical conclusion of a simple lab escape. Am I being illogical in thinking that a pathogen escape from a virology lab (built in 2017, btw) in the same locale is more likely than a random zoonotic transfer of raw bat consumption (a practice likely being done at the same market for a considerable more amount of time)? EDIT: change "less likely" to "more likely"
  - CreRecombinase 7y ago
    I don't know about illogical, but I think your intuition that zoonotic transfer is unlikely because it hasn't happened in the recent past is not a good one.
    - StandardFuture 7y ago
      But here is the crux of the matter. Is it possible that zoonotic transfer through consumption of bats caused this? Yes. Is it possible that zoonotic transfer via handling of bats inside the virology lab caused this? Yes. I am not sure why it is so necessary to be so adamant about vigorously dismissing the latter as a possibility.
    - andromeduck 7y ago
      Most bat consumption in China happens in the South, along with the population in general. The odds of a zoonotic event occuring in Wuhan of all places and within a block of one of the few labs known to have been activity hunting for a virus just like this is too much of a coincidence.
- leetcrew 7y ago
codekilla 7y ago
This idea of the mutations being 'random' is pretty meaningless. A real question is whether or not something is intentionally engineered to pass these kinds of 'randomness' tests. Just to give you an example, this is an active area of research that Raytheon is engaged in: https://www.raytheonintelligenceandspace.com/news/feature/rise-double-felix https://www.raytheonintelligenceandspace.com/news/feature/ri...
tomohawk 7y ago
Both things can be true at the same time. Whether or not the virus is human engineered or not is orthogonal to whether or not it escaped from the nearby lab. It is known that the lab was studying these sorts of viruses. The same lab was responsible for a SARS outbreak in the year following the big SARS outbreak. Mistakes happen. EDIT. I was mistaken about the specific lab that was the source of the 2004 SARS outbreak. The lab responsible for that outbreak was in Beijing.
amvalo 7y ago
Just because it's not engineered doesn't mean it didn't come from a lab. It could be a natural virus that was collected and escaped. The original SARS escaped no less than 3 times from chinese labs following the outbreak.
- abecedarius 7y ago
  Furthermore, gain-of-function research doesn't have to be by genetic engineering. The controversial experiment of a few years back which I vaguely remember was more like natural selection.
- throwanem 7y ago
  It could be lots of things. The focus on a possible escape from containment as the source seems odd given that - among other more likely causes - bat guano is also widely used as fertilizer, and bats, like humans, shed coronaviruses in their feces. Except that where we do so only occasionally and only when actively infected, bats' generally higher viral load and the high intraspecific transmissibility of a lot of these viruses means they do it much more frequently.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - andromeduck 7y ago
    Except this started in the heart of a city the size of New York, near a market not known to have sold bats, within half a kilometer of a lab known to have been doing research collecting bats from neighboring provinces near villages with people confirmed contracted SARS like viruses from bats per their own state media documentary. And then there's the behavior of the CCP.
    - throwanem 7y ago
      No one knows where this started. We know where the first confirmed case was reported, but that's not the same thing. I carry no brief for the CCP. But I do find it difficult to say nothing in the face of what looks like a struggle among a variety of factions, none openly declared, to establish a narrative of responsibility for a world-altering catastrophe, with no closer or more consistent reference to facts of any kind than is judged useful in support of whatever claim is being pushed at the moment - and, most notably, with the only reference to potentially contradictory facts being to claim either that they're unfounded, or presented with ulterior intent, or both. Last time I saw something play out that looked like this, it followed the World Trade Center attack and resulted in the Iraq war. That was a catastrophe from both a humanitarian perspective and one concerned with enhancing the geopolitical power of the US - but it was, at least, relatively minor in both respects. This one, if it plays out similarly, seems likely to be much worse. And aside from all of that, what the hell, is your time of no value? If you're going to peddle what may very well prove to be war propaganda, at least you should have the self-respect to refuse to do it for free.
gottebp 7y ago
Why would genetic engineering (or lack there of) be a necessary sign here? The Wuhan lab regularly collected and studied various naturally occurring coronaviruses from all over China. It is perfectly possible that a collected sample from nature might have been leaked by accident.
rpiguy 7y ago
Dr Shi Zhengli was working on bat Coronavirus research in the US and we closed the program down in the US in 2014 for being too dangerous. She returned to China to continue her research in Wuhan. It is neither fiction, nor dangerous to speculate that this outbreak started at the Wuhan lab. It may not have been engineered. However, the bats are brought to Wuhan lab from hundreds of miles away to be studied. It is also very possible that a bat carrying the natural virus being studied at the lab escapes or infected a person.
andromeduck 7y ago
Natrualy occuring viruses escape from labs all the time, particularly in China. Infact SARS is known to have escaped twice in Beijing. That the virus originated zoonotically does not precude a lab accident + leak theory of origin in fact we know that one of the labs actively experimenting on bats there was within half a kilometer of the market. You combine that with a significant fraction of the first known hospitalized cases having no direct connection to the market it should be obvious that the source is unlikely to have been the market itself but rather something close to it with the market just acting as a regional landmark or amplifier. It's like you walk past a bunch of kids playing with fireworks by the trail and an hour later the forest is on fire having started in the same area as you saw the kids. You obviously can't know for sure it was them without more evidence, it could have been a cigarette butt from a carless smoker, but you be a fool to think it that just because there was no accelleant involved that it couldn't have been the kids. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18224451-700-chinas-sars-cases-sound-alarm-over-lab-security/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18224451-700-chinas-s...
- ueudrjjj 7y ago
  One of the researchers at that lab was also effectively dissapeared. I don't believe the conspiracy crowd saying this was some kind of weapon, but there's reasonable evidence to suggest that this is a case of embarrassing government incompetence (which the CCP loaths) followed by attempts to cover up said incompetence while a solution was persued.
  - ausjke 7y ago
    a few weeks ago CCP issued a new law to manage virology labs, and yes historically virus escaped its labs multiple times.
    - ausjke 7y ago
      I simply stated a fact which is easily verifiable by checking news from its government, so why the downvotes, I hope it's not that we have CCP watchers here at HN.
stevespang 7y ago
Well over 680,000 views in just 4 days: THE documentary movie on the origin of CCP virus(Coronavirus, an investigative report with scientists interviewed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMJ0EmMfb3U&t= https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMJ0EmMfb3U&t=
downerending 7y ago
The theory of lab involvement doesn't seem particularly likely, no. But government censorship makes it appear much more likely, in my mind. It's unlikely that we'll ever really know. RNA sequences don't come with the signatures of their authors. But, every time you see someone saying that the lab theory has been "debunked", you should immediately think fake news. There is no way to rule this theory out--rather, it's balance of probabilities.
gerdesj 7y ago
Bloody hell. The responses to my post are not the best and this is an example from the first one: "That the virus originated zoonotically does not precude a lab accident + leak theory of origin" Really? A lab spends some time analysing whether a virus is a natural progression from another virus via natural selection instead of deliberate manipulation. They write it up etc. At least spell "preclude" correctly in a rebuttal.
dan-robertson 7y ago
Certainly China would not be the only place misreporting results. For example note the strange Japanese effect where confirmed cases suddenly started increasing after the olympics were cancelled (another reason could be that everyone who tested positive had to go to hospital and so there were incentives not to test people to save hospital space). Alternatively they could be accurately reporting results but just systematically not testing infected people for one reason or another. It’s not clear to me that they are totally wrong though they seem quite unbelievable. I think I don’t want to think about that question as I’m not sure the answer would be much use to me. One thing that is certain is that we can expect to see a lot of different people trying to set/change the narrative of how this outbreak happened. Any state that instituted a large lockdown will want people to believe that it was worth it and that it was necessary. One might ask why there isn’t much talk of Taiwan and Hong Kong where the outbreak was controlled without oppressive lockdowns (before cases from external arrivals became a big problem). One reason could be Chinese politics about those places. In the US it seems plausible that being able to rewrite the history of the outbreak in the first few months of the year will be very important to Trump’s re-election. It also seems plausible that it won’t matter that much; his approval ratings are basically their highest ever. I think some leaders will also want to move the blame away from themselves. A lab-escape story would be very useful to those people as it gives some people to directly blame (whoever let it out of the lab), rather than blaming the failures of leadership during a natural disaster.
MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
> I don't buy the escaped/released from a lab theories espoused here and on Facebook and the like. Apparently the mutations within the SARS-COV-2 found in humans compared to the bat virus are purely random and hence the thing is not or very unlikely genetically engineered. Only the conspiracy theorists claim it was an "engineered bio-weapon". The most likely explanation is that it just escaped involuntarily from the lab. Why from the lab, and not the wet market? - that lab was specifically researching coronavirii in bats - there are reports researchers there got splashed with blood and fecies of bats [0] - the researcher in question (Huang Yan Lin), the likely patient zero, disappeared without a trace, both physically and online [0] - the horseshoe bats that most likely hosted the virus weren't even sold on the wuhan wet market, according to several eye witnesses - there are no known horseshoe bat colonies in a 900km diameter around wuhan - the lab is just 280 meters away from the wet market, so the market was a very convenient scape goat And why was COVID-19 not engineered? Simple, it is not necessary to explain the pandemic potential. All of this is not new and there were warnings about exactly this happening: - it was long known that horseshoe bats were a dangerous reservoir of SARS-CoV like virii [1] - there were US simulations held on how to respond to a respiratory virus with chinese origin in 2019 [2] - there were WHO warnings on how respiratory RNA virii are prime candidates for the next pandemic [3] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU (starts at ~3:00) [1] https://twitter.com/_benoux_/status/1245381552672059392?s=20 https://twitter.com/_benoux_/status/1245381552672059392?s=20 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Contagion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Contagion [3] https://twitter.com/bmiloy/status/1238541860542377984/photo/1 https://twitter.com/bmiloy/status/1238541860542377984/photo/...
- jhanschoo 7y ago
  - the horseshoe bats that most likely hosted the virus weren't even sold on the wuhan wet market, according to several eye witnesses - there are no known horseshoe bat colonies in a 900km diameter around wuhan If you have sources for these, you will have convinced me that it's more likely that it originated from the lab than the market.
  - MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
econcon 7y ago
I've not been able to find that if we've technology to edit RNA. I see that DNA changes are possible through CRISPR. But it seems changing RNA could be possible if you've extracted similar virus from some animal then you replicated virus in a culture, after that you wait for the virus to mutate on its own or create condition to increase mutation rate for example radiation etc... So the biological footprint being similar to the one which exists in nature doesn't really remove the possibility that the virus might be man made.

meowface 7y ago

Agreed, there's basically no current evidence to suggest it was engineered, and plenty of evidence to suggest it was zoonotic and evolved naturally. One possibility that can't be totally ruled out is that maybe this was one of many viruses collected from local animals which their virology lab had stored for current or future study, and some kind of mistake led to it escaping, perhaps through an employee unknowingly getting infected or taking home something with a contaminated surface. edit: Rewrote everything below here to make my probability beliefs more clear. I think it's extremely likely to be zoonotic and not spread by anyone intentionally. As for the chance it was an unintentional lab escape, it's difficult to assess what the probability of that may be. I don't think you can just simply assume "virology lab in proximity = likely source of outbreak" without looking at a lot of other factors. Wuhan is a massive city and economic hub, a lot bigger than NYC and the surrounding area. From what I've heard, there's basically every kind of facility and institute one could imagine there. It could be a coincidence that the lab was there due to the size, density, and economic importance of the area. Or maybe the lab could've been established there because they knew the area was biologically diverse and close to many species of animals carrying viruses which could jump to humans, and that such animals were commonly hunted and sold for food there. If that's true, then it would be a confounding variable, and one would expect outbreaks to be more likely to occur near the lab regardless of whether they originated in the lab. There appear to be other potentially credible pieces of evidence which may support the lab escape hypothesis, but I think the whole case needs to be analyzed very robustly and carefully, with all of the possible priors and evidence taken into account.

StandardFuture 7y ago
> I think it is overwhelmingly likely Why are you so sure it is overwhelmingly likely? > I think it's probably just a coincidence that there's a virology lab there Only because you believe it to be purely coincidental of a virology lab being next to the outbreak source location? I am entirely up for accepting this viewpoint. But, the lack of evidence to suggest an actual source location coupled with the (CCP sourced and pushed narrative of) "overwhelming evidence" that raw bat consumption at the market started it leads me to lean towards a more logical conclusion of a simple lab escape. Am I being illogical in thinking that a pathogen escape from a virology lab (built in 2017, btw) in the same locale is more likely than a random zoonotic transfer of raw bat consumption (a practice likely being done at the same market for a considerable more amount of time)? EDIT: change "less likely" to "more likely"
- CreRecombinase 7y ago
  I don't know about illogical, but I think your intuition that zoonotic transfer is unlikely because it hasn't happened in the recent past is not a good one.
  - StandardFuture 7y ago
    But here is the crux of the matter. Is it possible that zoonotic transfer through consumption of bats caused this? Yes. Is it possible that zoonotic transfer via handling of bats inside the virology lab caused this? Yes. I am not sure why it is so necessary to be so adamant about vigorously dismissing the latter as a possibility.
  - andromeduck 7y ago
    Most bat consumption in China happens in the South, along with the population in general. The odds of a zoonotic event occuring in Wuhan of all places and within a block of one of the few labs known to have been activity hunting for a virus just like this is too much of a coincidence.
leetcrew 7y ago

codekilla 7y ago

This idea of the mutations being 'random' is pretty meaningless. A real question is whether or not something is intentionally engineered to pass these kinds of 'randomness' tests. Just to give you an example, this is an active area of research that Raytheon is engaged in: https://www.raytheonintelligenceandspace.com/news/feature/rise-double-felix https://www.raytheonintelligenceandspace.com/news/feature/ri...

tomohawk 7y ago

Both things can be true at the same time. Whether or not the virus is human engineered or not is orthogonal to whether or not it escaped from the nearby lab. It is known that the lab was studying these sorts of viruses. The same lab was responsible for a SARS outbreak in the year following the big SARS outbreak. Mistakes happen. EDIT. I was mistaken about the specific lab that was the source of the 2004 SARS outbreak. The lab responsible for that outbreak was in Beijing.

amvalo 7y ago

Just because it's not engineered doesn't mean it didn't come from a lab. It could be a natural virus that was collected and escaped. The original SARS escaped no less than 3 times from chinese labs following the outbreak.

abecedarius 7y ago
Furthermore, gain-of-function research doesn't have to be by genetic engineering. The controversial experiment of a few years back which I vaguely remember was more like natural selection.
throwanem 7y ago
It could be lots of things. The focus on a possible escape from containment as the source seems odd given that - among other more likely causes - bat guano is also widely used as fertilizer, and bats, like humans, shed coronaviruses in their feces. Except that where we do so only occasionally and only when actively infected, bats' generally higher viral load and the high intraspecific transmissibility of a lot of these viruses means they do it much more frequently.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- andromeduck 7y ago
  Except this started in the heart of a city the size of New York, near a market not known to have sold bats, within half a kilometer of a lab known to have been doing research collecting bats from neighboring provinces near villages with people confirmed contracted SARS like viruses from bats per their own state media documentary. And then there's the behavior of the CCP.
  - throwanem 7y ago
    No one knows where this started. We know where the first confirmed case was reported, but that's not the same thing. I carry no brief for the CCP. But I do find it difficult to say nothing in the face of what looks like a struggle among a variety of factions, none openly declared, to establish a narrative of responsibility for a world-altering catastrophe, with no closer or more consistent reference to facts of any kind than is judged useful in support of whatever claim is being pushed at the moment - and, most notably, with the only reference to potentially contradictory facts being to claim either that they're unfounded, or presented with ulterior intent, or both. Last time I saw something play out that looked like this, it followed the World Trade Center attack and resulted in the Iraq war. That was a catastrophe from both a humanitarian perspective and one concerned with enhancing the geopolitical power of the US - but it was, at least, relatively minor in both respects. This one, if it plays out similarly, seems likely to be much worse. And aside from all of that, what the hell, is your time of no value? If you're going to peddle what may very well prove to be war propaganda, at least you should have the self-respect to refuse to do it for free.

gottebp 7y ago

Why would genetic engineering (or lack there of) be a necessary sign here? The Wuhan lab regularly collected and studied various naturally occurring coronaviruses from all over China. It is perfectly possible that a collected sample from nature might have been leaked by accident.

rpiguy 7y ago

Dr Shi Zhengli was working on bat Coronavirus research in the US and we closed the program down in the US in 2014 for being too dangerous. She returned to China to continue her research in Wuhan. It is neither fiction, nor dangerous to speculate that this outbreak started at the Wuhan lab. It may not have been engineered. However, the bats are brought to Wuhan lab from hundreds of miles away to be studied. It is also very possible that a bat carrying the natural virus being studied at the lab escapes or infected a person.

andromeduck 7y ago

Natrualy occuring viruses escape from labs all the time, particularly in China. Infact SARS is known to have escaped twice in Beijing. That the virus originated zoonotically does not precude a lab accident + leak theory of origin in fact we know that one of the labs actively experimenting on bats there was within half a kilometer of the market. You combine that with a significant fraction of the first known hospitalized cases having no direct connection to the market it should be obvious that the source is unlikely to have been the market itself but rather something close to it with the market just acting as a regional landmark or amplifier. It's like you walk past a bunch of kids playing with fireworks by the trail and an hour later the forest is on fire having started in the same area as you saw the kids. You obviously can't know for sure it was them without more evidence, it could have been a cigarette butt from a carless smoker, but you be a fool to think it that just because there was no accelleant involved that it couldn't have been the kids. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18224451-700-chinas-sars-cases-sound-alarm-over-lab-security/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18224451-700-chinas-s...

ueudrjjj 7y ago
One of the researchers at that lab was also effectively dissapeared. I don't believe the conspiracy crowd saying this was some kind of weapon, but there's reasonable evidence to suggest that this is a case of embarrassing government incompetence (which the CCP loaths) followed by attempts to cover up said incompetence while a solution was persued.
- ausjke 7y ago
  a few weeks ago CCP issued a new law to manage virology labs, and yes historically virus escaped its labs multiple times.
  - ausjke 7y ago
    I simply stated a fact which is easily verifiable by checking news from its government, so why the downvotes, I hope it's not that we have CCP watchers here at HN.

stevespang 7y ago

Well over 680,000 views in just 4 days: THE documentary movie on the origin of CCP virus(Coronavirus, an investigative report with scientists interviewed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMJ0EmMfb3U&t= https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMJ0EmMfb3U&t=

downerending 7y ago

The theory of lab involvement doesn't seem particularly likely, no. But government censorship makes it appear much more likely, in my mind. It's unlikely that we'll ever really know. RNA sequences don't come with the signatures of their authors. But, every time you see someone saying that the lab theory has been "debunked", you should immediately think fake news. There is no way to rule this theory out--rather, it's balance of probabilities.

gerdesj 7y ago

Bloody hell. The responses to my post are not the best and this is an example from the first one: "That the virus originated zoonotically does not precude a lab accident + leak theory of origin" Really? A lab spends some time analysing whether a virus is a natural progression from another virus via natural selection instead of deliberate manipulation. They write it up etc. At least spell "preclude" correctly in a rebuttal.

dan-robertson 7y ago

Certainly China would not be the only place misreporting results. For example note the strange Japanese effect where confirmed cases suddenly started increasing after the olympics were cancelled (another reason could be that everyone who tested positive had to go to hospital and so there were incentives not to test people to save hospital space). Alternatively they could be accurately reporting results but just systematically not testing infected people for one reason or another. It’s not clear to me that they are totally wrong though they seem quite unbelievable. I think I don’t want to think about that question as I’m not sure the answer would be much use to me. One thing that is certain is that we can expect to see a lot of different people trying to set/change the narrative of how this outbreak happened. Any state that instituted a large lockdown will want people to believe that it was worth it and that it was necessary. One might ask why there isn’t much talk of Taiwan and Hong Kong where the outbreak was controlled without oppressive lockdowns (before cases from external arrivals became a big problem). One reason could be Chinese politics about those places. In the US it seems plausible that being able to rewrite the history of the outbreak in the first few months of the year will be very important to Trump’s re-election. It also seems plausible that it won’t matter that much; his approval ratings are basically their highest ever. I think some leaders will also want to move the blame away from themselves. A lab-escape story would be very useful to those people as it gives some people to directly blame (whoever let it out of the lab), rather than blaming the failures of leadership during a natural disaster.

MrBuddyCasino 7y ago

> I don't buy the escaped/released from a lab theories espoused here and on Facebook and the like. Apparently the mutations within the SARS-COV-2 found in humans compared to the bat virus are purely random and hence the thing is not or very unlikely genetically engineered. Only the conspiracy theorists claim it was an "engineered bio-weapon". The most likely explanation is that it just escaped involuntarily from the lab. Why from the lab, and not the wet market? - that lab was specifically researching coronavirii in bats - there are reports researchers there got splashed with blood and fecies of bats [0] - the researcher in question (Huang Yan Lin), the likely patient zero, disappeared without a trace, both physically and online [0] - the horseshoe bats that most likely hosted the virus weren't even sold on the wuhan wet market, according to several eye witnesses - there are no known horseshoe bat colonies in a 900km diameter around wuhan - the lab is just 280 meters away from the wet market, so the market was a very convenient scape goat And why was COVID-19 not engineered? Simple, it is not necessary to explain the pandemic potential. All of this is not new and there were warnings about exactly this happening: - it was long known that horseshoe bats were a dangerous reservoir of SARS-CoV like virii [1] - there were US simulations held on how to respond to a respiratory virus with chinese origin in 2019 [2] - there were WHO warnings on how respiratory RNA virii are prime candidates for the next pandemic [3] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU (starts at ~3:00) [1] https://twitter.com/_benoux_/status/1245381552672059392?s=20 https://twitter.com/_benoux_/status/1245381552672059392?s=20 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Contagion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Contagion [3] https://twitter.com/bmiloy/status/1238541860542377984/photo/1 https://twitter.com/bmiloy/status/1238541860542377984/photo/...

jhanschoo 7y ago
- the horseshoe bats that most likely hosted the virus weren't even sold on the wuhan wet market, according to several eye witnesses - there are no known horseshoe bat colonies in a 900km diameter around wuhan If you have sources for these, you will have convinced me that it's more likely that it originated from the lab than the market.
- MrBuddyCasino 7y ago

econcon 7y ago

I've not been able to find that if we've technology to edit RNA. I see that DNA changes are possible through CRISPR. But it seems changing RNA could be possible if you've extracted similar virus from some animal then you replicated virus in a culture, after that you wait for the virus to mutate on its own or create condition to increase mutation rate for example radiation etc... So the biological footprint being similar to the one which exists in nature doesn't really remove the possibility that the virus might be man made.