6 ms·

I think this is very wishful thinking, or deliberately choosing how to interpret "lab-made" to be "sliced and diced and recombined". "Lab-made" still encompass

• 8note 5y ago
  It sounds like you'd consider the state of Florida being a lab to produce covid variants? The wet market theory is also then a lab made one, since putting sick Bata and pangolins and whatever together can promote viruses jumping species. Flu is mostly a lab made virus by this definition too. Put people close to chickens, and you help people catch new flu variants
  • asdkjjjthrow 5y ago
    This is a really dishonest form of argument and I don't think you actually read my post for context. There's a very large difference between the relatively small gaps in genomes between related virus species and the grand canyon sized gap between COVID and it's nearest neighbor. The difference between omicron and delta is very small, delta and alpha also very small. These would be "expected" differences much like influenza changing to be a little different every single year. If we are to believe that a cave of bats cooked up a super infectious, lethal, extremely novel variant of CoV-SARS-1 then shouldn't other animal born diseases be the same? H1N1? Swine flu? Shouldn't they all have had extremely novel pathways given just how many animals it infected? With the exception of certain hemorrhagic fevers I can't think of another virus that emerged from the wild with such extremely novel infection methods and I've been on this earth for a long time. Even H1N1, a big scare, wasn't THAT much different than it's neighbors. Yet here we have a virus with basically never before seen infection pathways and virulence. Something that might have been created through scientifically tested and studied evolutionary pressure in a petri dish. It's not that hard to imagine. Get some lung cells, get some starter culture of a virus, and start beating it up with various methods until it evolves. Take those, and keep the survivors, and repeat ad nauseum. In fact, this is exactly how GoF research works. If you view it altruistically this allows us to create novel vaccines for novel infection methods. Unfortunately, it also means a leak will create a pandemic. All of this could be cleared up in a month if China would allow regulators from the UN to investigate their lab and pull all the data associated with it. This is common procedure, and yet China appears to be railroading any attempt to do so going so far as to destroy related documents. Occam's razor, this isn't the action someone would take if it was a simple batch of bad bat soup. Logic would dictate you'd want to give up all the evidence of bad bat soup as fast as possible...yet 3 years later we have seen absolutely no evidence pointing to an animal borne infection pathway...
    • dirtyid 5y ago
      > Logic would dictate you'd want to give up all the evidence of bad bat soup as fast as possible. No logical narrative for PRC is this: Covid19 never originated in PRC in the first place - Wuhan was merely the first identified cluster, being a large transit hub in the world's most populous country that just happens to have some labs which contributed to PRC's flu monitoring system picking up the novel disease in the first place. The most likely origin is some cave down south, likely (hopefully for PRC) across the border in Laos/Vietnam/Cambodia. And PRC should be praised for identifying and reporting novel virus relatively promptly, even more so for unprecedented locking down and buying the world time, which most countries squandered. That geopolitical adversaries of PRC who failed to contain convid are looking for an escape goat, and there is zero reason for PRC to cooperate by entertaining their conspiracy theories, let alone open up sensitive PRC facilities to inspection because frankly sovereignty violations like that are not "common" for large countries - it's the kind of weapons inspection tier treatment enforced upon losers of wars. PRC already entertained WHO investigation. That's enough. Now go validate PRC conspiracy theory that it was a leak from Fort Detrick, which is just as valid, knowing full well there's about zero chance US would open Fort Detrick to international scrutiny (though it would certainly shut PRC up if US did). Ultimately PRC would never submit to that kind of sovereignty violation doubters deem necessary even if she's innocent due to history and basic geopolitics. It's not going to change enough minds to matter. Of course I'm being somewhat hyperbolic, but not by much. Official PRC position is to let science work it out, which will take time, which is to say spend decades years sampling all the bat caves in South Asia and best case find something to clear PRC or worst case implicate PRC through process of elimination. But by then so much time has passed that it would barely be consequential and in all likelihood there's going to be an entire universe of conspiracy theories to cloud any findings. Or the fact that PRC's superior covid response could vindicate it's claim that it was simply best prepared to identify novel virus that did not originate in PRC because in retrospect, the idea that west was best prepared to deal with pandemic is a meme. Or that time will bring clarity to all the covid geopolitics, and conclude lab-leak is just one of many propaganda campaigns in nascent Sino-US cold war. And frankly it'll probably work, because none of this is even wrong and history has tendency to be rewritten.
  • eurasiantiger 5y ago
    Remember when there was an Ebola outbreak from CDC facilities in Reston, VA? There is currently one in Washington, too
• vintermann 5y ago
  > That is, a virus can appear to have naturally evolved but have been evolved in lab under conditions by which it develops quicker, more efficiently, etc. And as I understand it, that's the "serial passage" possibility they discuss in the recently publicized papers.
• YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  >> It is so unlikely such a novel, effective, and dangerous virus was created through bats sharing the same cave that it's not even worth considering. I'm not old enough to remember first-hand but I have a friend (and mentor) who does, and this is the kind of thing that people used to say about AIDS, that it's not possible that such a horrible and lethal disease could arise spontaneously in nature. So in the early days of the AIDS epidemic many people invented all sorts of stories about how HIV was created by humans. It was a bioweapon that escaped the lab, it was created specifically to target gays, it was created to remind people that sex is only for reproduction... Back then also, the conspiracy theories circulated in the press because the media figured they'd have a field day kicking up a shit storm and then sitting back and pretending they're only doing their job objectively presenting both sides of the "debate". Then, as now, people also denied the existence of HIV completely, or denied that it was lethal, or denied that taking the few early treatments that could prolongue life was beneficial, or thought that the treatments caused AIDS. It's déja-vu all over again. So not only there is a very strong prior for zoonotic origin of lethal pandemics, there is also a very strong prior for people coming up with all sorts of fanciful stories to explain the appearance of new diseases. Anyone who understands anything about how the human mind works and how it tends to tangle up itself in its own unconscious biases should proceed very carefully, if what one wants is to know the truth (rather than role-play an interesting fantasy of human-caused pandemic). Btw, it's no joke: the norm throughout history was to ascribe disease to conscious agency, for example, the spirits of the dead, or evil sorcerers. See for example what people made of kuru: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)#History