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So if the lab leak theory turns out to be true, how will people deal with the fact that they've been vehemently disregarding it as a "Q-anon conspiracy theory"?

• newacct583 5y ago
  > So if the lab leak theory turns out to be true, how will people deal with the fact that they've been vehemently disregarding it as a "Q-anon conspiracy theory"? If the lab leak theory turns out to be true, I'll admit I was wrong about my intuition. It's not impossible, but it's extremely unlikely. We've had literally thousands of new virus strains evolve in the past century of viral research and like three known "lab leaks". As has been repeated ad nausum, there is absolutely nothing surprising about SARS-CoV-2's structure or relatives or evolution and no reason to doubt that like every other pandemic this is a naturally evolved pathogen. Now tell me why people keep INSISTING that this must be true absent evidence[1], and explain what you'll do when (as with basically every conspiracy theory) it turns out that there never really was any real evidence. [1] Or don't. We all know why. The lab leak theory casts a convenient boogieman in the part of the villain, and distracts from fingerpointing aimed at parties closer to home who could have reacted well to the pandemic but chose not to. It "makes it all someone else's fault", so there's no surprise why it's so popular.
  • handmodel 5y ago
    I would believe that Covid started elsewhere in China before believing in started in a wet market in Wuhan. It is extremely unlikely to start there given that isn't where the bats in China are or where new corona viruses are. In fact, if you read any research that had been published by the WIV on coronoaviruses pre-2020 they all start by talking about expeditions to collect bat droppings 1500 miles away.
    • hungryforcodes 5y ago
      So one bad flew 2400 kilometers, bit some people in Wuhan, then died? It started in Wuhan spontaneously. There are no intermediary COVID19 infections in a migration trail of any kind from those bat reservoirs in Yunnan to Hubei.
      • newacct583 5y ago
        > There are no intermediary COVID19 infections in a migration trail of any kind from those bat reservoirs in Yunnan to Hubei. Can you cite a few other diseases where the evolution was traced back in multiple species across that kind of distance? Where did ebola come from? MERS? At best you get the immediate host, or as with covid a somewhat close relative. You're demanding proof that simply doesn't exist for any other disease and then citing the absence of that impossible proof as evidence for your conspiracy theory that has even less evidence in support. I mean, fine, we only have that one bat in Yunaan. OK. Fair point. You have zero samples from that lab.
        • handmodel 5y ago
          https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29669833/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29669833/ This is a paper from 2018 where they went into caves in southern China and took 1000+ samples of droppings from bats back to Wuhan and found new strains of coronaviruses. If they did this in late 2019 of course they wouldn't have published that after a (theoretical) leak...an absence of a sample means nothing. In fact, if anything the fact they didn't publish a similar report is more telling. If you look at pre Covid-19 reports on bat coronoaviruses in China you'll see the large majority of such bats are in Southern China - very far away from Wuhan. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6466186/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6466186/
          • newacct583 5y ago
            > of course they wouldn't have published that after a (theoretical) leak Twisting "absence of evidence" into "evidence" by alleging a coverup is a classic conspiracy theory tactic. You're literally arguing for a conspiracy by asserting the conspiracy as a prior.
  • jb775 5y ago
    Why are people insisting this came from a guy eating a bat-burger and bat-fries meal with absolutely no evidence? My common sense info is that a super-virus popped up right down the street from a lab designed to create super-viruses(funding signed off by Fauci, and much historic public info/discussion exists about what type of work was being done at the Wuhan lab), China disappeared the lab people, and biggest red-flag of all is that the corrupt propaganda media (CNN, MSNBC, Business Insider, etc) is trying to rub it in everyone's face that the lab story isn't true. Next line of discussion is how much jail time Fauci should get for enabling blatant malpractice while setting himself up to make a fortune.
    • kelnos 5y ago
      > Why are people insisting this came from a guy eating a bat-burger and bat-fries meal with absolutely no evidence? The answer is right in the article, at the very end: the virus was found in 6% of samples taken from the market, with most of the virus-positive samples found in areas that had wildlife in it. That's not "no evidence" at all. I would rate it as slightly -- but only slightly -- more compelling than the circumstantial evidence pointing to a lab leak.
    • Paradigma11 5y ago
      So there is evidence that Fauci signed off on funding of gain of function research in the Wuhan lab?
      • newacct583 5y ago
        There is not. People get so offended when accused of being conspiracists, but then they rattle off this kind of fever swamp nonsense. That there was a genuine debate within the research community on GoF work is true enough, but this bit is just a ridiculous smear by the right against someone who (amazingly, when you think about it) has become a "political enemy".
  • salawat 5y ago
    The furin cleavage site is not present in known coronaviruses for any of the suspected progenitor viruses to recombine with to gain that feature, and utilizes an extremely unlikely codon for Arginine when you take coronaviruses as a whole into account, but an extremely prolific codon in human-centric gene editing tool supply chains. The fact it appears to be an insertion if it came from a mutation is also highly unlikely. These are, in fact, remarkable characteristics taking into account the proximity to an institute where this type of work took place, staffed by researchers who have done it multiple times in the decades leading up to the pandemic, who had funding for doing similar work at the time, who started acting oddly at the time, which caused such a stir that all related research was tightly perception managed by the state. I cannot say as in my life it has been the case that with such smoke as that, there has not been a vigorous exothermic reaction to be near.
  • thu2111 5y ago
    Three leaks? Where did you get that number? Lab leaks are extremely common, far more common than 3 in the last century! Quoting the Wade article this article starts by referencing: The smallpox virus escaped three times from labs in England in the 1960’s and 1970’s, causing 80 cases and 3 deaths. Dangerous viruses have leaked out of labs almost every year since. Coming to more recent times, the SARS1 virus has proved a true escape artist, leaking from laboratories in Singapore, Taiwan, and no less than four times from the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing. As another example, the most recent outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK was traced quickly to a lab that had kept samples of the first one. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12615-faulty-pipe-blamed-for-uk-foot-and-mouth-outbreak/#:~:text=A%20faulty%20drainage%20pipe%20was,August%2C%20official%20investigators%20concluded%20today.&text=The%20second%2C%20the%20Institute%20of,outbreaks%20of%20foot%20and%20mouth https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12615-faulty-pipe-bla....
    • newacct583 5y ago
      Lab leaks of novel diseases. I mean, duh, if you culture stuff that's already endemic it's going to get out. I'm saying that if you take any strain of any human disease anywhere, and ask the question "is this a naturally evolved pathogen or was it cultured in a lab?", Darwin wins by a factor of like ten thousand. Yet... somehow no one thinks that's a relevant fact?
      • thu2111 5y ago
        That makes no sense. You're claiming that natural viruses will of course leak all the time, but GOF enhanced viruses are "novel" and thus won't? That's implausible, the GOF enhanced viruses are bred to be more virulent, not less. Moreover, the ways lab leaks happen don't depend on where the virus came from originally.
• unanswered 5y ago
  This article is already taken care of that hasn't it? 80% of it is spent smearing anyone who knew from the beginning that logically this was overwhelmingly likely to be a lab leak.