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Other viruses do escape the lab sometimes. The first SARS virus escaped the lab more than once. https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-spo

• Enginerrrd 6y ago
  Both in China no less.
• woodruffw 6y ago
  I'm not claiming that they don't! The article has multiple examples of viruses escaping either individual containment or the lab outright. What I'm claiming is that the volume of attributed escapes indicates that the average escape has relatively local consequences. In other words: historically, when everything goes wrong, it hasn't resulted in a global pandemic. What, then, made or makes COVID special? Maybe the answer is raw numbers, and that it was bound to happen eventually. But "one of these incidents was bound to cause a global pandemic" is the exact same reasoning as the (original, still mainstream?) "wet market" theory. What I'd personally like to know is why I should believe one over the other, apart from human propensity to believe conspiratorial claims.
  • koheripbal 6y ago
    COVID-19 is special because it doesn't cause severe illness in most people. SARS killed a far far higher percentage of people it came in contact with, and made 100% of them sick, so it was much more easily detected, and therefore contained.
    • rcpt 6y ago
      Right. The last case of smallpox was from a lab leak but people knew better than to fuck around with that. Covid is asymptomatic and mild enough in enough people that masks get political
  • reuben_scratton 6y ago
    SARS-CoV-2 is spectacularly well-adapted for infecting humans, the original SARS and other animal-origin viruses are not. The idea that this thing sprang out of the wild, in Wuhan of all places, perfectly adapted to infect human beings, is fucking laughable.