3 ms·

See sister reply, it’s all basically FUD.

• gojomo 6y ago
  Sister reply only seems to address the Yan report & malicious/military engineering - nothing about more generic lab escape. In particular, your NatGeo link's description of constant natural discoveries, and continuing searches for natural origins, is totally consistent with the most trivial & non-malicious lab escape scenario: (1) lab interested in this topic collects hundreds of novel natural strains that wouldn't normally cross from bats to human; (2) lab accident infects researcher; (3) researcher infects community. Isn't Peter Daszak, author of the tweet I quoted, a domain expert? We now know, from the pandemic, that a bat-related SARS-CoV2 virus that's highly transmissible in humans actually exists, somehow. There are human-staffed error-prone labs that specifically search for those kinds of viruses in bulk – for example, sending people deep into rarely-visited bat caves, collecting strains, then replicating (& remixing!) those strains to test them against human (and 'humanized') tissue for pathogenecity & treatment-resistance. Given those plain facts, what makes you think some other bat-human (pangolin-human?, something-else-human?) contact should be presumed a more likely route into humans than something involving a lab researcher? Until there's more evidence, why aren't they all live hypotheses?