11 ms·

I'm not skilled enough in the biomedical background to evaluate the various genetics-based articles written for or against natural-origin and lab-origin hypothe

by causi 5y ago

I'm not skilled enough in the biomedical background to evaluate the various genetics-based articles written for or against natural-origin and lab-origin hypotheses. As a layman, however, I find the degree to which the Chinese government has stomped all over foreign-led investigations into the origin of SARS-Cov-2 to be highly, highly suspicious.

newacct583 5y ago
I guess, but that imparts a level of uniform direction that isn't really known. It could very well be that the PRC government does not know themselves whether or not covid was a lab leak, because who the fuck knows what those beaker heads were doing. They just want to be sure that if it was a lab leak, that no one ever knows. Basically: totalitarian governments suppress everything. It's what they do. It's not like the west had clear access inside facilities like WIV before the pandemic, so why do we expect different behavior now? I remain really dubious, personally. Imagine it was a leak. Dozens or hundreds of people -- researchers with PhDs and international cred and travel ability -- would have had to be knowledgeable about the research and in on the coverup. Someone would have swung themselves an appointment at UCSF or Johns Hopkins or wherever in exchange for blabbing. It's an attractive conspiracy, but really that's all there is. The existing circumstantial evidence is a big nothingburger (Chinese Institute of Virology studies known Chinese Viruses; News at 11!). The ONLY significant evidence, itself still just a single source, is that the Journal reported that it was known to western intelligence agencies at the time that there was an outbreak of something flu-like among WIV employees in October 2020. That's I guess a little suspicious, but still unconfirmed and... really not enough to move the needle. Add to that the fact that covid is a close cousin of already-known endemic viruses and that nothing about it looks engineered at all, and... this is still just a natural virus, sorry.
- z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
  Yeah, that's a lot of mental gymnastics to avoid the obvious reality.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  >Imagine it was a leak. Dozens or hundreds of people -- researchers with PhDs and international cred and travel ability -- would have had to be knowledgeable about the research and in on the coverup. I don't see why this would be the case. It could be a lab leak with nobody at the being aware or having evidence. Why must people be in on a secret coverup? Many activities that make evaluating the lab leak hypothesis difficult were done in the open: Destruction of early virus samples and deletion of Gene sequencing from public databases. >Add to that the fact that covid is a close cousin of already-known endemic viruses and that nothing about it looks engineered at all, and... this is still just a natural virus, sorry. The virus does not need to have been engineered to have leaked from a lab. Natural viruses can and do leak from labs as well.
  - newacct583 5y ago
    You're doing the conspiracist thing where you respond to my examples of plausible explanations with more hypotheses that could alternately explain my guesses. But who cares? That's not how proof works. This is just a gish gallop. I told you why I find existing evidence unconvincing. You need to convince me with evidence, not hypotheses.
  - nickff 5y ago
    >"Why must people be in on a secret coverup?" I hadn't considered this before, but you're right that most of the people dismissing the 'lab leak' theory seem to believe that their intellectual opponents are proposing that a 'premeditated conspiracy' took place. In any case, if I were a PRoC official, I would try to reduce the chance of any (direct or circumstantial) evidence of a lab leak came to light. That said, even suppression of circumstantial evidence is not necessarily evidence of either a lab leak or pre-meditated conspiracy.
    - newacct583 5y ago
      To be fair, a lot of you nuts are absolutely alleging "premeditated conspiracy", or even loopier notions like bioweapon engineering. It's extremely hard to figure out who we're talking to. If you want to argue for some weak form of the conspiracy, then maybe give it another name or something. But note that the weak form you seem to be thinking about (that it was benign research on natural viruses and just a routine mistake that caused the leak) seems to be even more susceptible to my suspicion. If you're a researcher who was doing this benign work, why keep silent? You could literally write a book fingering all your superiors as the villains and sell it for tens of millions of dollars and retire in Taipei or San Francisco.
- hammock 5y ago
  >Imagine it was a leak. Dozens or hundreds of people -- researchers with PhDs and international cred and travel ability -- would have had to be knowledgeable about the research and in on the coverup Maybe. And? Dozens or hundreds of internationally-relevant people would have been knowledgeable about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's specific involvement in 9/11, but that didn't stop it from being covered up for almost a decade.
  - SantalBlush 5y ago
    The Saudi Government's involvement in 9/11 was public knowledge shortly after it happened. I read about it around 2002. It just didn't get media coverage.
tehjoker 5y ago
Not really, the Chinese government knows the western powers want to use this to create an anti-China hysteria and so want to deny them the ability to do so. The NATO alliance is trying to create a confrontation over Taiwan and a lab leak hysteria is a great way to get the population onboard with a war.
- trynumber9 5y ago
  of course, NATO is the one threatening to invade Taiwan if they legally change their name... such absurdity
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- barnesto 5y ago
  Xi thanks you
- ransom1538 5y ago
  I wish we could get the country of origin for comments like these.
tootie 5y ago
The best writeup I've seen is actually this twitter thread from the WNYC science reporter, Nsikan Akpan (himself a phd in biology). The gist being that while lab leak is still possible, it's very unlikely and it's also likely we'll never find a smoking gun for any hypothesis. https://twitter.com/MoNscience/status/1396240581651742724 https://twitter.com/MoNscience/status/1396240581651742724
- siva7 5y ago
  Again, this writeup is more about the bioengineering hypothesis while embarak states another theory. in it‘s current state the term lab leak has almost become meaningless
  - derbOac 5y ago
    I think equating the lab leak hypothesis with climate change denial also caused me to tune out. It's just not acting in good faith. I also feel like if he's serious about it, he would produce something other than a tweet thread, at least a real blog post with links to papers he refers to. Otherwise it's hard for me to take them any more seriously than anyone else who handwaves about papers. It would be nice to see something like that with good faith opportunities for people to respond and counterrespond but I'm skeptical about it happening. There's also a sense that I have from reading stuff like that and others that we should treat the peer-reviewed academic paper trail as somehow the state of things, rather than looking at the evidence on its own terms. I don't mean anything conspiratorial about that, just that it's almost like they expect there to be some peer-reviewed paper out there from China that shows how they would have engineered it if they had, as if that's realistic at all. That's not even getting into what you mention, which is the possibility nothing was engineered and there was a leak.
    - refenestrator 5y ago
      You're asking people to prove a negative and then you're upset when they can't? It's impossible to disprove but both SARS and Bird Flu crossed over from animals in Southern China so there's no reason it must have come from the lab, either. Right now we have zero evidence either way, just people speculating mostly based on their pre-existing opinions of the Chinese state.
cm2187 5y ago
To be honest the only way we will ever know is if the chinese would share the genomes of the viruses they stored in their lab, but who would trust them to do that? The express drive-by the WHO did in china served absolutely no purpose. I am ready to bet that all samples have been destroyed and the staff briefed (warned). I would even suspect the samples have not even been analysed by the Chinese themselves as it is better to not know than running the risk of some technician leaking such damaging information (and who would trust the Chinese authorities whatever they say anyway). So my money is on “we will never know”. But like others, I have strong suspicions. It starts by an improbable coincidence (pandemic starting at the doorstep of a lab). The Chinese have acted guilty from the outset, by lying about the virus, arresting doctors, not allowing any investigation, and pushing crazy alternative theories.
- vanattab 5y ago
  >The express drive-by the WHO did in china served absolutely no purpose. I served it's purpose perfectly! It allowed China to pretend that an investigation was done.
- JPKab 5y ago
  To add to your point, it was a chain of improbable coincidences: Pandemic starting at the doorstep of a lab (that is not located in remotely close proximity to the Yunnan caves where the previous SARS viruses were originating from) Previous SARS virus outbreaks (SARS1 and MERS) had zoonotic reservoirs identified in months with dramatically fewer resources, but coincidentally, with vast resources and global efforts, no zoonotic reservoir identified for this virus. Previous SARS virus outbreaks showed a gradual evolution of a virus to progressively becoming more infectious to humans, and equivalent genetic changes in the virus that can be traced. This one started out as highly infectious, and until several months in, mutations weren't very significant. The Chinese Communist Party (not China, not the Chinese people, but the CCP) has expended far more energy suppressing research and scientific access than any form of investigation into the origins of the virus. The CCP deliberately suppressed and arrested doctors publicly talking about the virus early on. Edit: Forgot to add that there is a direct paper trail (publicly available on data.gov) of grant documents which specify that the funding will be used in WIV for research of bat coronaviruses with (and I quote from the paper) "humanized mice". Humanized mice, in this context, are mice genetically engineered to have human ACE2 receptors lining their respiratory tissue. In what was the most infuriating moment of public testimony I have ever seen, Dr. Fauci argues that infecting humanized mice with animal viruses (resulting in animal viruses that can more easily infect humans) is NOT gain of function research. He was playing an obvious semantic game, where his definition of GOF is the far narrower concept of making an existing human infecting virus more infectious..... Seriously, I was a big fan of the guy until that single bit of testimony. Now i know he's a lying bureaucrat more than he is a scientist. https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/project-details/9491676 https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
rflrob 5y ago
> I find the degree to which the Chinese government has stomped all over foreign-led investigations into the origin of SARS-Cov-2 to be highly, highly suspicious. I don't find it suspicious at all, precisely because I don't trust the Chinese government. In my estimation of the CPC, the following probabilities are all roughly equal (and close to 1): * P(suppress investigation | natural origin) * P(suppress investigation | lab leak of benign research) * P(suppress investigation | lab leak of gain of function) From a Bayesian point of view, then, P(lab leak | suppress investigation) is going to be almost equal to P(lab leak).
- shakezula 5y ago
  This is exactly what's so frustrating about the media treating the gain-of-function research they were doing as the "smoking gun" is so disingenuous. We were doing all of the same types of research, even cooperating with their government on some of it in our own labs IN CHINA, and then all of a sudden we turn around and blame them? Come on, people, you're playing right into what the propaganda says happened. They're not doing anything the U.S. government wouldn't do if the likely point of origin had been somewhere in Atlanta.
  - abakker 5y ago
    Right, but the purpose of the narrative is not to compare whether we are doing the same thing. It is to blame China for the pandemic. TBH, if we did the same thing, I expect the rest of the world would blame us. That said, it seems pretty unproductive at this point to blame anyone, but it does seem productive to avoid it happening again.
    - shakezula 5y ago
      That's exactly my point. It doesn't help anyone to blame anyone else, and the fact that Americans are so fast to blame China is very telling. Years of propaganda has worked its magic in far more sinister ways than any of us want to admit, especially to ourselves.
      - 5y ago
dkersten 5y ago
My problem with the non-lab-leak story is that CCP went to great lengths to cover up and downplay the virus in the early months, largely contributing to its global spread and a bunch of coincidences would have had to line up just right for the wet market hypothesis to be true (just happened to be in the same city as the lab where they just happened to be studying the exact same thing, where the CCP just happened to threaten and arrest any doctors or scientists talking about it?). CCP has also in recent months tried to shift the blame to other countries and they wouldn't let the WHO investigate for over a year, plenty of time to dispose of any evidence if it was a lab leak. While non of that proves anything, it certainly makes CCP look incredibly suspicious. Of course, if it was a lab leak, its pretty unlikely we will ever know. All I know is that the CCP acted extremely shady and that alone makes me doubt their official story. Again, this doesn't mean it wasn't the wet market hypothesis, but its clear that the CCP's word cannot be trusted. We also know that viruses have leaked form high security labs in the past (including smallpox!) so its not exactly unheard of. Some footnotes: Its important to separate China/Chinese people from the CCP. Its also important to separate "bioengineered" from "lab accident", I think the former is extremely unlikely and the latter is very possible.
- shapefrog 5y ago
  My problem with the non-lab-leak story is that USA went to great lengths to cover up and downplay the virus in the early months, largely contributing to its global spread
  - dkersten 5y ago
    I'm unsure what your point is. Care to explain? Is that meant to be a counterargument? (just because the USA downplayed it doesn't make CCP's doing so better, especially since they had advance knowledge and could have potentially completely prevented the global pandemic, while when it was in the USA, it was already global, even if lesser) Are you agreeing with me but adding that the USA isn't faultless? (Its true, but I don't know how its relevant to what I said) I really have no idea what you're trying to say.
    - 5y ago
refenestrator 5y ago
How would the US react to a foreign-led investigation of us?
- athenot 5y ago
  Probably very similarly. If the EU Commission tried to lead an investigation of some major disaster potentially originating in the US, cooperative is not the word I'd use to describe how it would go. Sadly.
  - refenestrator 5y ago
    And that's an org with like 80% NATO members. Picture one being led by a rival power.

by causi 5y ago

newacct583 5y ago

I guess, but that imparts a level of uniform direction that isn't really known. It could very well be that the PRC government does not know themselves whether or not covid was a lab leak, because who the fuck knows what those beaker heads were doing. They just want to be sure that if it was a lab leak, that no one ever knows. Basically: totalitarian governments suppress everything. It's what they do. It's not like the west had clear access inside facilities like WIV before the pandemic, so why do we expect different behavior now? I remain really dubious, personally. Imagine it was a leak. Dozens or hundreds of people -- researchers with PhDs and international cred and travel ability -- would have had to be knowledgeable about the research and in on the coverup. Someone would have swung themselves an appointment at UCSF or Johns Hopkins or wherever in exchange for blabbing. It's an attractive conspiracy, but really that's all there is. The existing circumstantial evidence is a big nothingburger (Chinese Institute of Virology studies known Chinese Viruses; News at 11!). The ONLY significant evidence, itself still just a single source, is that the Journal reported that it was known to western intelligence agencies at the time that there was an outbreak of something flu-like among WIV employees in October 2020. That's I guess a little suspicious, but still unconfirmed and... really not enough to move the needle. Add to that the fact that covid is a close cousin of already-known endemic viruses and that nothing about it looks engineered at all, and... this is still just a natural virus, sorry.

z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
Yeah, that's a lot of mental gymnastics to avoid the obvious reality.
s1artibartfast 5y ago
>Imagine it was a leak. Dozens or hundreds of people -- researchers with PhDs and international cred and travel ability -- would have had to be knowledgeable about the research and in on the coverup. I don't see why this would be the case. It could be a lab leak with nobody at the being aware or having evidence. Why must people be in on a secret coverup? Many activities that make evaluating the lab leak hypothesis difficult were done in the open: Destruction of early virus samples and deletion of Gene sequencing from public databases. >Add to that the fact that covid is a close cousin of already-known endemic viruses and that nothing about it looks engineered at all, and... this is still just a natural virus, sorry. The virus does not need to have been engineered to have leaked from a lab. Natural viruses can and do leak from labs as well.
- newacct583 5y ago
  You're doing the conspiracist thing where you respond to my examples of plausible explanations with more hypotheses that could alternately explain my guesses. But who cares? That's not how proof works. This is just a gish gallop. I told you why I find existing evidence unconvincing. You need to convince me with evidence, not hypotheses.
- nickff 5y ago
  >"Why must people be in on a secret coverup?" I hadn't considered this before, but you're right that most of the people dismissing the 'lab leak' theory seem to believe that their intellectual opponents are proposing that a 'premeditated conspiracy' took place. In any case, if I were a PRoC official, I would try to reduce the chance of any (direct or circumstantial) evidence of a lab leak came to light. That said, even suppression of circumstantial evidence is not necessarily evidence of either a lab leak or pre-meditated conspiracy.
  - newacct583 5y ago
    To be fair, a lot of you nuts are absolutely alleging "premeditated conspiracy", or even loopier notions like bioweapon engineering. It's extremely hard to figure out who we're talking to. If you want to argue for some weak form of the conspiracy, then maybe give it another name or something. But note that the weak form you seem to be thinking about (that it was benign research on natural viruses and just a routine mistake that caused the leak) seems to be even more susceptible to my suspicion. If you're a researcher who was doing this benign work, why keep silent? You could literally write a book fingering all your superiors as the villains and sell it for tens of millions of dollars and retire in Taipei or San Francisco.
hammock 5y ago
>Imagine it was a leak. Dozens or hundreds of people -- researchers with PhDs and international cred and travel ability -- would have had to be knowledgeable about the research and in on the coverup Maybe. And? Dozens or hundreds of internationally-relevant people would have been knowledgeable about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's specific involvement in 9/11, but that didn't stop it from being covered up for almost a decade.
- SantalBlush 5y ago
  The Saudi Government's involvement in 9/11 was public knowledge shortly after it happened. I read about it around 2002. It just didn't get media coverage.

tehjoker 5y ago

Not really, the Chinese government knows the western powers want to use this to create an anti-China hysteria and so want to deny them the ability to do so. The NATO alliance is trying to create a confrontation over Taiwan and a lab leak hysteria is a great way to get the population onboard with a war.

trynumber9 5y ago
of course, NATO is the one threatening to invade Taiwan if they legally change their name... such absurdity
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
barnesto 5y ago
Xi thanks you
ransom1538 5y ago
I wish we could get the country of origin for comments like these.

tootie 5y ago

The best writeup I've seen is actually this twitter thread from the WNYC science reporter, Nsikan Akpan (himself a phd in biology). The gist being that while lab leak is still possible, it's very unlikely and it's also likely we'll never find a smoking gun for any hypothesis. https://twitter.com/MoNscience/status/1396240581651742724 https://twitter.com/MoNscience/status/1396240581651742724

siva7 5y ago
Again, this writeup is more about the bioengineering hypothesis while embarak states another theory. in it‘s current state the term lab leak has almost become meaningless
- derbOac 5y ago
  I think equating the lab leak hypothesis with climate change denial also caused me to tune out. It's just not acting in good faith. I also feel like if he's serious about it, he would produce something other than a tweet thread, at least a real blog post with links to papers he refers to. Otherwise it's hard for me to take them any more seriously than anyone else who handwaves about papers. It would be nice to see something like that with good faith opportunities for people to respond and counterrespond but I'm skeptical about it happening. There's also a sense that I have from reading stuff like that and others that we should treat the peer-reviewed academic paper trail as somehow the state of things, rather than looking at the evidence on its own terms. I don't mean anything conspiratorial about that, just that it's almost like they expect there to be some peer-reviewed paper out there from China that shows how they would have engineered it if they had, as if that's realistic at all. That's not even getting into what you mention, which is the possibility nothing was engineered and there was a leak.
  - refenestrator 5y ago
    You're asking people to prove a negative and then you're upset when they can't? It's impossible to disprove but both SARS and Bird Flu crossed over from animals in Southern China so there's no reason it must have come from the lab, either. Right now we have zero evidence either way, just people speculating mostly based on their pre-existing opinions of the Chinese state.

cm2187 5y ago

To be honest the only way we will ever know is if the chinese would share the genomes of the viruses they stored in their lab, but who would trust them to do that? The express drive-by the WHO did in china served absolutely no purpose. I am ready to bet that all samples have been destroyed and the staff briefed (warned). I would even suspect the samples have not even been analysed by the Chinese themselves as it is better to not know than running the risk of some technician leaking such damaging information (and who would trust the Chinese authorities whatever they say anyway). So my money is on “we will never know”. But like others, I have strong suspicions. It starts by an improbable coincidence (pandemic starting at the doorstep of a lab). The Chinese have acted guilty from the outset, by lying about the virus, arresting doctors, not allowing any investigation, and pushing crazy alternative theories.

vanattab 5y ago
>The express drive-by the WHO did in china served absolutely no purpose. I served it's purpose perfectly! It allowed China to pretend that an investigation was done.
JPKab 5y ago
To add to your point, it was a chain of improbable coincidences: Pandemic starting at the doorstep of a lab (that is not located in remotely close proximity to the Yunnan caves where the previous SARS viruses were originating from) Previous SARS virus outbreaks (SARS1 and MERS) had zoonotic reservoirs identified in months with dramatically fewer resources, but coincidentally, with vast resources and global efforts, no zoonotic reservoir identified for this virus. Previous SARS virus outbreaks showed a gradual evolution of a virus to progressively becoming more infectious to humans, and equivalent genetic changes in the virus that can be traced. This one started out as highly infectious, and until several months in, mutations weren't very significant. The Chinese Communist Party (not China, not the Chinese people, but the CCP) has expended far more energy suppressing research and scientific access than any form of investigation into the origins of the virus. The CCP deliberately suppressed and arrested doctors publicly talking about the virus early on. Edit: Forgot to add that there is a direct paper trail (publicly available on data.gov) of grant documents which specify that the funding will be used in WIV for research of bat coronaviruses with (and I quote from the paper) "humanized mice". Humanized mice, in this context, are mice genetically engineered to have human ACE2 receptors lining their respiratory tissue. In what was the most infuriating moment of public testimony I have ever seen, Dr. Fauci argues that infecting humanized mice with animal viruses (resulting in animal viruses that can more easily infect humans) is NOT gain of function research. He was playing an obvious semantic game, where his definition of GOF is the far narrower concept of making an existing human infecting virus more infectious..... Seriously, I was a big fan of the guy until that single bit of testimony. Now i know he's a lying bureaucrat more than he is a scientist. https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/project-details/9491676 https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...

rflrob 5y ago

> I find the degree to which the Chinese government has stomped all over foreign-led investigations into the origin of SARS-Cov-2 to be highly, highly suspicious. I don't find it suspicious at all, precisely because I don't trust the Chinese government. In my estimation of the CPC, the following probabilities are all roughly equal (and close to 1): * P(suppress investigation | natural origin) * P(suppress investigation | lab leak of benign research) * P(suppress investigation | lab leak of gain of function) From a Bayesian point of view, then, P(lab leak | suppress investigation) is going to be almost equal to P(lab leak).

shakezula 5y ago
This is exactly what's so frustrating about the media treating the gain-of-function research they were doing as the "smoking gun" is so disingenuous. We were doing all of the same types of research, even cooperating with their government on some of it in our own labs IN CHINA, and then all of a sudden we turn around and blame them? Come on, people, you're playing right into what the propaganda says happened. They're not doing anything the U.S. government wouldn't do if the likely point of origin had been somewhere in Atlanta.
- abakker 5y ago
  Right, but the purpose of the narrative is not to compare whether we are doing the same thing. It is to blame China for the pandemic. TBH, if we did the same thing, I expect the rest of the world would blame us. That said, it seems pretty unproductive at this point to blame anyone, but it does seem productive to avoid it happening again.
  - shakezula 5y ago
    That's exactly my point. It doesn't help anyone to blame anyone else, and the fact that Americans are so fast to blame China is very telling. Years of propaganda has worked its magic in far more sinister ways than any of us want to admit, especially to ourselves.
    - 5y ago

dkersten 5y ago

My problem with the non-lab-leak story is that CCP went to great lengths to cover up and downplay the virus in the early months, largely contributing to its global spread and a bunch of coincidences would have had to line up just right for the wet market hypothesis to be true (just happened to be in the same city as the lab where they just happened to be studying the exact same thing, where the CCP just happened to threaten and arrest any doctors or scientists talking about it?). CCP has also in recent months tried to shift the blame to other countries and they wouldn't let the WHO investigate for over a year, plenty of time to dispose of any evidence if it was a lab leak. While non of that proves anything, it certainly makes CCP look incredibly suspicious. Of course, if it was a lab leak, its pretty unlikely we will ever know. All I know is that the CCP acted extremely shady and that alone makes me doubt their official story. Again, this doesn't mean it wasn't the wet market hypothesis, but its clear that the CCP's word cannot be trusted. We also know that viruses have leaked form high security labs in the past (including smallpox!) so its not exactly unheard of. Some footnotes: Its important to separate China/Chinese people from the CCP. Its also important to separate "bioengineered" from "lab accident", I think the former is extremely unlikely and the latter is very possible.

shapefrog 5y ago
My problem with the non-lab-leak story is that USA went to great lengths to cover up and downplay the virus in the early months, largely contributing to its global spread
- dkersten 5y ago
  I'm unsure what your point is. Care to explain? Is that meant to be a counterargument? (just because the USA downplayed it doesn't make CCP's doing so better, especially since they had advance knowledge and could have potentially completely prevented the global pandemic, while when it was in the USA, it was already global, even if lesser) Are you agreeing with me but adding that the USA isn't faultless? (Its true, but I don't know how its relevant to what I said) I really have no idea what you're trying to say.
  - 5y ago

refenestrator 5y ago

How would the US react to a foreign-led investigation of us?

athenot 5y ago
Probably very similarly. If the EU Commission tried to lead an investigation of some major disaster potentially originating in the US, cooperative is not the word I'd use to describe how it would go. Sadly.
- refenestrator 5y ago
  And that's an org with like 80% NATO members. Picture one being led by a rival power.