2 ms·
Sister reply only seems to address the Yan report & malicious/military engineering - nothing about more generic lab escape. In particular, your NatGeo link's d
by 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?