3 ms·
That's correct: researchers have found a lot of similar coronaviruses in southern China. > “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she s
by eindiran 6y ago
That's correct: researchers have found a lot of similar coronaviruses in southern China.
> “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?” [0]
Given that a leading virologist who specifically studies bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology considers this a possibility, I think it's safe to say that it's not some wild conspiracy theory. I obviously don't know what happened, and it seems very plausible that the virus came from standard zoonotic transfer, but it's a bit unfair to characterize this as a conspiracy theory.
[EDIT] The article was actually changed since I read it:
"She is distressed because stories from the Internet and major media have repeated a tenuous suggestion that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally leaked from her lab—despite the fact that its genetic sequence does not match any her lab had previously studied."
So it sounds like she came to the conclusion that it wasn't an accidental release in April.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...
- scarmig 6y agoThe tricky thing is that it's impossible to distinguish between "accidental release" and "standard zoonotic transfer," unless you're able to track the transmission chain to patient zero. China could possibly do that (though it's not guaranteed), but if they did and it was clearly something that was accidentally released, obviously that's not something they'd ever announce, so it'd look exactly the same as the current "we don't know anything" state. And all the ambiguity means any stance on accidental release vs standard zoonotic transfer is going to be driven more by politics ("China is evil!" "No it's not!") than by any empirical evidence.
- eindiran 6y agoI agree that it's effectively impossible to distinguish between the two and that any stance on the issue is going to be driven by politics; my comment was just an objection to the claim that it is a "wildly implausible conspiracy theory" that the virus was accidentally released.
- nradov 6y agoThere is no proof that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab, however it remains a plausible hypothesis. Yuri Deigin wrote a good argument for that possibility. https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748 https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throu... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug
- FuckButtons 6y agoNot only does it not match what they have studied, but what is more likely: that a bio containment facility that is purpose built to seal off pathogens from escaping leaks and that one patient successfully infects many others with a virus that has a good chance of not even infecting them severely. Or, that multiple of the hundreds of thousands of bats that are in the region that have the virus spread it to humans because of their repeated and ongoing interaction. The latter has exponentially more chance of occurring because of the almost infinitely larger resivoir of virus and also has vastly more chance of occurring because of the number of interactions. The former is so unlikely as to be essentially an exercise in magical thinking and the only reason people give it any credence as far as I’m concerned is because it’s easier to blame something simple and politically convenient than a complex system of human behavior.