4 ms·

Some of the scariest viruses of the 20th/21st century emerged in large-scale farming operations (1918 influenza, SARS-CoV-1, most likely SARS-CoV-2). It seems l

by fsh 2y ago

Some of the scariest viruses of the 20th/21st century emerged in large-scale farming operations (1918 influenza, SARS-CoV-1, most likely SARS-CoV-2). It seems like these farms are massive accidents waiting to happen.

dist-epoch 2y ago
[flagged]
- fsh 2y ago
  There is zero evidence for this theory. On the other hand, we know that dangeous viruses emerge from farms every couple of decades (see above). I find it prudent to focus on the known risk, rather than speculate on a hypothetical one.
  - dist-epoch 2y ago
    What is the non-zero evidence that SARS-COV-2 originated from a farm? What is that farm? What were they farming?
    - fsh 2y ago
      There is no direct evidence. Due to the experience with SARS-CoV-1 and fear of repercussions, farmers in China mass-culled susceptible animals before any testing could take place. However, SARS-CoV-1 was traced to palm civets, and both -1 and -2 seem to be very well adapted to small carnivores. So a fur/meat farm with civets, raccoon dogs, minks, or something like that is probably a good guess for the origin.
      - aodonnell2536 2y ago
        But not the laboratories doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in the exact vicinity of the virus’s origin? Even considering that several workers of this laboratory got sick with COVID in 2019, right before the outbreak? C’mon, it’s been 4 years already, this is becoming ridiculous.
        fsh 2y ago
        I don't find this convincing at all. Pandemics need high population densities to start, so it is very likely to have the origin in a large city. Even if a virus did emerge in a smaller city, it would probably fizzle out without raising alarm and being detected. At the same time, large cities in industrialized countries usually have at least one virology lab. I could easily find one in each of the top-10 most populous Chinese cities (which includes Wuhan). SARS is relatively new and hit China pretty hard, so it is also not surprising to have a lot of research in the country. Overall, it would probably be more surprising not to have a SARS research group close to the origin of a pandemic. The lab worker story is bunk. According to the institute itself, no COVID antibodies were found in a serology study of the workers (see page 119 in https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/final-joint-report_origins-studies-6-april-201.pdf https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/final-j...).
        aodonnell2536 2y ago
        You’re linking a study from early 2021, which is before the admissions began to start. The WHO was dishonest throughout the COVID-19 outbreak, at this point in time this is well-known. The Wuhan Virology Institute is in the heart of the city, and a quick Google search shows a population of 11 million in 2018. Is this not a large city? I find it seriously troubling that people still believe the nonsense spewed about COVID-19 and it’s origins in 2020-21.
        ahazred8ta 2y ago
        The WIV is 17 miles away from the wet market outbreak and they are on opposite sides of the river. The WIV did not do any gain of function experiments during 2019. Within a 15 mile radius of the WIV there were no covid cases during 2019. If lab workers had been the origin, the outbreak would have started near the lab, but it did not start near the lab.
      - dist-epoch 2y ago
        So you accuse me of presenting a theory with zero hard evidence (lab leak), only to immediately admit that your theory (zoonotic origin) also has zero hard evidence. And then you shift the discussion to SARS-CoV-1. I like how you operate.
    - goldenboy420 2y ago
      [dead]
  - aodonnell2536 2y ago
    I find it difficult to understand how you’re still propagating the “Wet Market Theory”. Please further explain why you don’t believe that COVID-19 did not emerge from a laboratory.
    - ahazred8ta 2y ago
      During the first month of the covid-19 outbreak, there were no cases within a 15 mile radius of the WIV lab south of the river. Zero. All the people infected had been within 200 meters of the wet market north of the river. We know that farm-raised animals in China pick up coronavirus infections from wild animals such as rodents. The 2002 SARS epidemic started from natural animal-to-human transmission, in an animal-handling complex, with a naturally occurring coronavirus. If there had been a second outbreak of the same SARS virus in Wuhan in 2019, at the Wuhan wet market, would you decide that the sars-cov-1 came from natural transmission from animals? When a milkmaid picks up a cowpox infection, do we run around screaming that there's no proof the cows had cowpox? When a person who works with animals develops rabies, do we assume that he was not bitten?
  - Mizza 2y ago
    There is quite a lot of evidence, it's a lie to say otherwise. I don't think there's a smoking gun, but there is a tremendous amount of circumstantial evidence. Some of it was outlined nicely here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid... (Although you're not wrong about the disease risks of factory farming.)
    - fsh 2y ago
      I can't find a single piece of evidence in the article. These Gish gallops of utter bullshit have really poisoned the public debate.
      - Mizza 2y ago
        Okay, now you're just being disingenuous. There is plenty of actual evidence and a timeline of events in the linked article, and that's not what "Gish gallop" means.
    - southernplaces7 2y ago
      Amusing to see the NY Times, which hysterically screamed about misinformation and its dangers for several years during a certain pandemic and a certain presidency, now doing a neat 180-degree turn on the lab leak theory from its previous and blatantly political stance. The same paper, by the way, that also lovingly supported the WMD claims against Iraq during the Bush administration. I personally believe the lab leak theory extremely plausible, but the general and persistent mendacity and hypocrisy of this particular newspaper are staggeringly massive enough to form their own gravitational field.. The narrative grifters posing as reporters and editors at the NY Times robustly deserve every ounce of scorn that can be dumped upon them.
      - JKCalhoun 2y ago
        I'm still on the fence about the origins of COVID, but I generally disregard an opinion when a comment attacks a publication rather than facts, uses phrases like "hysterically screamed".
  - endgame 2y ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid... https://archive.is/pyJaF https://archive.is/pyJaF
    - defrost 2y ago
      The comment was about evidence, you've linked one opinion of Dr. Alina Chan who has also written about how it was not a lab leak origin - she literally made cases early on for either side of a possibilty. To this day the lab leak theory is plausible (literally "low confidence" probability in the DoE report) with no real evidence and the weight of opinion on the wet market origin side. Consider that if there was any actual solid irrefutable evidence that COVID did come from a lab leak then Saar Wilf would not have lost $100,000. He was convinced it was true, put money in escrow, organised a debate, set the rules, and then .. lost. https://protagonist-science.medium.com/lableak-truther-loses-100-000-in-his-own-debate-0c3930ccd443 https://protagonist-science.medium.com/lableak-truther-loses...
  - gwervc 2y ago
    It's 2024, you obviously missed the Ministry of Truth updating the status of the lab leak hypothese from "conspiracy theory" to "that's what happened (PS: China bad)".
  - blindriver 2y ago
    This is a lie. There is plenty of evidence. What has no evidence is that it transferred from an animal. There is zero evidence for that. It’s been over 4 years and they haven’t found the source yet which has never happened before. It’s weird you are religiously and piously pushing a line of thinking that is essentially dead among not only scientists except Fauci and Dasak but every class of political belief as well.
- dghughes 2y ago
  Two researchers working in Canada stole data from a CL4 rated virology lab under pressure from China it seems. One of the researchers (husband and wife) helped with the invention of the Ebola vaccine but you have to wonder what the hell's going on otherwise. Lies and scandal: How two rogue scientists at a high-security lab triggered a national security calamity https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/winnipeg-lab-firing-documents-released-china-1.7130284 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/winnipeg-lab-firing-documen...
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Some of the scariest viruses of the 20th/21st century emerged in large-scale farming operations Before that they emerged from small-scale farming. “Whooping cough comes from pigs as does flu as well as from birds; our friend the cow alone is responsible for measles, tuberculosis and smallpox” [1]. Proximity, to humans and animals, drives disease. [1] https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk
- salty_biscuits 2y ago
  Whooping cough does not come from pigs. Pertussis is a bacterium that is a human only thing.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Pertussis is a bacterium that is a human only thing B. pertussis “evolved from Bordetella bronchiseptica or a B. bronchiseptica-like ancestor… B. bronchiseptica infects a broad range of mammals, including humans, and although it can cause overt disease such as kennel cough in dogs and atrophic rhinitis in pig” [1]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro3235#Sec2 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro3235#Sec2
  - eth0up 2y ago
    In some instances, it comes from feisty bureaucracies: The San Francisco Chronicle, December 17, 1979, p. 5 reported a claim by the Church of Scientology that the CIA conducted an open-air biological warfare experiment in 1955 near Tampa, Florida, and elsewhere in Florida with whooping cough bacteria. It was alleged that the experiment tripled the whooping cough infections in Florida to over one-thousand cases and caused whooping cough deaths in the state to increase from one to 12 over the previous year. This claim has been cited in a number of later sources, although these added no further supporting evidence.[52][53] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentat...
cma 2y ago
Wasn't SARS-CoV-1 from a wildlife market, not a farming operation? Factory farming wasn't the issue there if it was from trapping in the wild, but maybe cramped conditions before sale made it spread more amongst the confined animals in a similar way?
- fsh 2y ago
  "Wildlife" markets usually sell farmed animals, otherwise the produce would be prohibitively expensive.
  - darby_nine 2y ago
    I don't like the name, but "bush meat" is also a common vector for past infections. I believe HIV was thought to have transferred to humans via non-farmed simian blood.
- adammarples 2y ago
  It's fairly likely that covid was from the large coronavirus research lab just down the road that was experimenting on making coronaviruses more transmissible to humans
  - cma 2y ago
    Talking about cov1 not cov2
  - ahazred8ta 2y ago
    During the first month of the covid-19 outbreak, there were no cases within a 15 mile radius of the WIV lab south of the river. Zero. All the people infected had been within 200 meters of the wet market north of the river. Wuhan imports food animals from all over southeast asia and animals from Laos are known to carry the BANAL coronavirus which looks like it's an ancestor of sars-cov-2. Also, the WIV did not perform any gain-of-function experiments during 2019/2020; the people who would have done that were working on other projects.
- ahazred8ta 2y ago
TruffleLabs 2y ago
"Some of the scariest viruses of the 20th/21st century emerged in large-scale farming operations (1918 influenza, SARS-CoV-1, most likely SARS-CoV-2). It seems like these farms are massive accidents waiting to happen." What source says 1918 came from large scale farms? Large scale farming in 1918 would not have existed as we think of it today, as average farm size was about 150 acres with approximately 6 million farms. For reference, 2022 average farm size was 464 with approximately 1.89 million farms. Sources: Changes in agriculture 1900 to 1950 https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/41667073v5p6ch4.pdf https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/41667073v5... Farming and Farm Income https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/farming-and-farm-income/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

by fsh 2y ago

dist-epoch 2y ago

[flagged]

fsh 2y ago
There is zero evidence for this theory. On the other hand, we know that dangeous viruses emerge from farms every couple of decades (see above). I find it prudent to focus on the known risk, rather than speculate on a hypothetical one.
- dist-epoch 2y ago
  What is the non-zero evidence that SARS-COV-2 originated from a farm? What is that farm? What were they farming?
  - fsh 2y ago
    There is no direct evidence. Due to the experience with SARS-CoV-1 and fear of repercussions, farmers in China mass-culled susceptible animals before any testing could take place. However, SARS-CoV-1 was traced to palm civets, and both -1 and -2 seem to be very well adapted to small carnivores. So a fur/meat farm with civets, raccoon dogs, minks, or something like that is probably a good guess for the origin.
    - aodonnell2536 2y ago
      But not the laboratories doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in the exact vicinity of the virus’s origin? Even considering that several workers of this laboratory got sick with COVID in 2019, right before the outbreak? C’mon, it’s been 4 years already, this is becoming ridiculous.
      - fsh 2y ago
        I don't find this convincing at all. Pandemics need high population densities to start, so it is very likely to have the origin in a large city. Even if a virus did emerge in a smaller city, it would probably fizzle out without raising alarm and being detected. At the same time, large cities in industrialized countries usually have at least one virology lab. I could easily find one in each of the top-10 most populous Chinese cities (which includes Wuhan). SARS is relatively new and hit China pretty hard, so it is also not surprising to have a lot of research in the country. Overall, it would probably be more surprising not to have a SARS research group close to the origin of a pandemic. The lab worker story is bunk. According to the institute itself, no COVID antibodies were found in a serology study of the workers (see page 119 in https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/final-joint-report_origins-studies-6-april-201.pdf https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/final-j...).
        aodonnell2536 2y ago
        You’re linking a study from early 2021, which is before the admissions began to start. The WHO was dishonest throughout the COVID-19 outbreak, at this point in time this is well-known. The Wuhan Virology Institute is in the heart of the city, and a quick Google search shows a population of 11 million in 2018. Is this not a large city? I find it seriously troubling that people still believe the nonsense spewed about COVID-19 and it’s origins in 2020-21.
      - ahazred8ta 2y ago
        The WIV is 17 miles away from the wet market outbreak and they are on opposite sides of the river. The WIV did not do any gain of function experiments during 2019. Within a 15 mile radius of the WIV there were no covid cases during 2019. If lab workers had been the origin, the outbreak would have started near the lab, but it did not start near the lab.
    - dist-epoch 2y ago
      So you accuse me of presenting a theory with zero hard evidence (lab leak), only to immediately admit that your theory (zoonotic origin) also has zero hard evidence. And then you shift the discussion to SARS-CoV-1. I like how you operate.
  - goldenboy420 2y ago
    [dead]
- aodonnell2536 2y ago
  I find it difficult to understand how you’re still propagating the “Wet Market Theory”. Please further explain why you don’t believe that COVID-19 did not emerge from a laboratory.
  - ahazred8ta 2y ago
    During the first month of the covid-19 outbreak, there were no cases within a 15 mile radius of the WIV lab south of the river. Zero. All the people infected had been within 200 meters of the wet market north of the river. We know that farm-raised animals in China pick up coronavirus infections from wild animals such as rodents. The 2002 SARS epidemic started from natural animal-to-human transmission, in an animal-handling complex, with a naturally occurring coronavirus. If there had been a second outbreak of the same SARS virus in Wuhan in 2019, at the Wuhan wet market, would you decide that the sars-cov-1 came from natural transmission from animals? When a milkmaid picks up a cowpox infection, do we run around screaming that there's no proof the cows had cowpox? When a person who works with animals develops rabies, do we assume that he was not bitten?
- Mizza 2y ago
  There is quite a lot of evidence, it's a lie to say otherwise. I don't think there's a smoking gun, but there is a tremendous amount of circumstantial evidence. Some of it was outlined nicely here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid... (Although you're not wrong about the disease risks of factory farming.)
  - fsh 2y ago
    I can't find a single piece of evidence in the article. These Gish gallops of utter bullshit have really poisoned the public debate.
    - Mizza 2y ago
      Okay, now you're just being disingenuous. There is plenty of actual evidence and a timeline of events in the linked article, and that's not what "Gish gallop" means.
  - southernplaces7 2y ago
    Amusing to see the NY Times, which hysterically screamed about misinformation and its dangers for several years during a certain pandemic and a certain presidency, now doing a neat 180-degree turn on the lab leak theory from its previous and blatantly political stance. The same paper, by the way, that also lovingly supported the WMD claims against Iraq during the Bush administration. I personally believe the lab leak theory extremely plausible, but the general and persistent mendacity and hypocrisy of this particular newspaper are staggeringly massive enough to form their own gravitational field.. The narrative grifters posing as reporters and editors at the NY Times robustly deserve every ounce of scorn that can be dumped upon them.
    - JKCalhoun 2y ago
      I'm still on the fence about the origins of COVID, but I generally disregard an opinion when a comment attacks a publication rather than facts, uses phrases like "hysterically screamed".
- endgame 2y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid... https://archive.is/pyJaF https://archive.is/pyJaF
  - defrost 2y ago
    The comment was about evidence, you've linked one opinion of Dr. Alina Chan who has also written about how it was not a lab leak origin - she literally made cases early on for either side of a possibilty. To this day the lab leak theory is plausible (literally "low confidence" probability in the DoE report) with no real evidence and the weight of opinion on the wet market origin side. Consider that if there was any actual solid irrefutable evidence that COVID did come from a lab leak then Saar Wilf would not have lost $100,000. He was convinced it was true, put money in escrow, organised a debate, set the rules, and then .. lost. https://protagonist-science.medium.com/lableak-truther-loses-100-000-in-his-own-debate-0c3930ccd443 https://protagonist-science.medium.com/lableak-truther-loses...
- gwervc 2y ago
  It's 2024, you obviously missed the Ministry of Truth updating the status of the lab leak hypothese from "conspiracy theory" to "that's what happened (PS: China bad)".
- blindriver 2y ago
  This is a lie. There is plenty of evidence. What has no evidence is that it transferred from an animal. There is zero evidence for that. It’s been over 4 years and they haven’t found the source yet which has never happened before. It’s weird you are religiously and piously pushing a line of thinking that is essentially dead among not only scientists except Fauci and Dasak but every class of political belief as well.
dghughes 2y ago
Two researchers working in Canada stole data from a CL4 rated virology lab under pressure from China it seems. One of the researchers (husband and wife) helped with the invention of the Ebola vaccine but you have to wonder what the hell's going on otherwise. Lies and scandal: How two rogue scientists at a high-security lab triggered a national security calamity https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/winnipeg-lab-firing-documents-released-china-1.7130284 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/winnipeg-lab-firing-documen...

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> Some of the scariest viruses of the 20th/21st century emerged in large-scale farming operations Before that they emerged from small-scale farming. “Whooping cough comes from pigs as does flu as well as from birds; our friend the cow alone is responsible for measles, tuberculosis and smallpox” [1]. Proximity, to humans and animals, drives disease. [1] https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk

salty_biscuits 2y ago
Whooping cough does not come from pigs. Pertussis is a bacterium that is a human only thing.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Pertussis is a bacterium that is a human only thing B. pertussis “evolved from Bordetella bronchiseptica or a B. bronchiseptica-like ancestor… B. bronchiseptica infects a broad range of mammals, including humans, and although it can cause overt disease such as kennel cough in dogs and atrophic rhinitis in pig” [1]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro3235#Sec2 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro3235#Sec2
- eth0up 2y ago
  In some instances, it comes from feisty bureaucracies: The San Francisco Chronicle, December 17, 1979, p. 5 reported a claim by the Church of Scientology that the CIA conducted an open-air biological warfare experiment in 1955 near Tampa, Florida, and elsewhere in Florida with whooping cough bacteria. It was alleged that the experiment tripled the whooping cough infections in Florida to over one-thousand cases and caused whooping cough deaths in the state to increase from one to 12 over the previous year. This claim has been cited in a number of later sources, although these added no further supporting evidence.[52][53] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentat...

cma 2y ago

Wasn't SARS-CoV-1 from a wildlife market, not a farming operation? Factory farming wasn't the issue there if it was from trapping in the wild, but maybe cramped conditions before sale made it spread more amongst the confined animals in a similar way?

fsh 2y ago
"Wildlife" markets usually sell farmed animals, otherwise the produce would be prohibitively expensive.
- darby_nine 2y ago
  I don't like the name, but "bush meat" is also a common vector for past infections. I believe HIV was thought to have transferred to humans via non-farmed simian blood.
adammarples 2y ago
It's fairly likely that covid was from the large coronavirus research lab just down the road that was experimenting on making coronaviruses more transmissible to humans
- cma 2y ago
  Talking about cov1 not cov2
- ahazred8ta 2y ago
  During the first month of the covid-19 outbreak, there were no cases within a 15 mile radius of the WIV lab south of the river. Zero. All the people infected had been within 200 meters of the wet market north of the river. Wuhan imports food animals from all over southeast asia and animals from Laos are known to carry the BANAL coronavirus which looks like it's an ancestor of sars-cov-2. Also, the WIV did not perform any gain-of-function experiments during 2019/2020; the people who would have done that were working on other projects.
ahazred8ta 2y ago

TruffleLabs 2y ago

"Some of the scariest viruses of the 20th/21st century emerged in large-scale farming operations (1918 influenza, SARS-CoV-1, most likely SARS-CoV-2). It seems like these farms are massive accidents waiting to happen." What source says 1918 came from large scale farms? Large scale farming in 1918 would not have existed as we think of it today, as average farm size was about 150 acres with approximately 6 million farms. For reference, 2022 average farm size was 464 with approximately 1.89 million farms. Sources: Changes in agriculture 1900 to 1950 https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/41667073v5p6ch4.pdf https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/41667073v5... Farming and Farm Income https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/farming-and-farm-income/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...