What offended me is that Keed didn’t get his due in that thread. Dude’s an all American, and Jman’s pathetic attempt to ‘disguise’ his n’th out of the blue dig at jalfrezi implied he might have been a European!
9 Likes
Why is saying that covid arose because of a disgusting, unsanitary wet market, which is similarly supported with no direct evidence, less racist against Chinese? Seems vastly more racist.
Because it has already happened once with SARS-Covid-1 and markets like that have been a source of pandemics since humans started living in larger settlements. See: flu, smallpox and more.
They almost immediately found the animal that was responsible with SARS.
But anyway, what exactly is the racist trope that is being advanced with the lab leak? Chinese do cutting edge virology research?
This is simply untrue. If you want to take up this discussion in the covid thread, feel free
lol
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2003/09/animals-chinese-markets-carried-sars-virus
They’ve tested huge numbers of animals for covid in and around Wuhan and come up empty.
Anyway, for the relevant topic for this thread, jman said it was racist to say the lab leak was a credible hypothesis, that it advance racist tropes. What tropes? The wet market hypothesis obviously advances racist tropes about Chinese animal husbandry and eating habits, but I don’t quite understand what racist tropes the lab leak hypothesis advances.
You don’t even have the animal right. Can you at least peruse the wiki page on sars?
The famous, highly cited Science paper has the animals wrong? Good to know.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/302/5643/276
In any case, it’s obvious you don’t want to defend jman’s actual assertions that are relevant to this thread, that the lab leak advances racist tropes against Chinese that the wet market hypothesis does not. I don’t blame you, obviously the opposite is true.
3 Likes
The discussion of origins of COVID doesn’t really belong in the moderation thread. However, I hope that they can be conducted with sensitivity to the very real rise in anti-Asian sentiment and violence in the United States and elsewhere. There seems to be some misunderstanding that racist narratives have to follow logic to be successful. In fact, any narrative about the origins of the virus will be (and likely already has been) coopted to stoke xenophobia.
2 Likes
Jman smeared another poster for alleged racism. I pointed out that smear is totally unfounded and ridiculous. If Jman’s false smear belongs in the moderation thread then a rebuttal also belongs here.
Naked racism???
(Seriously, please read the wiki)
In late May 2003, studies were conducted using samples of wild animals sold as food in the local market in Guangdong, China. The results found that the SARS coronavirus could be isolated from masked palm civets ( Paguma sp.), even if the animals did not show clinical signs of the virus. The preliminary conclusion was the SARS virus crossed the xenographic barrier from Asian palm civets to humans, and more than 10,000 masked palm civets were killed in Guangdong Province. The virus was also later found in raccoon dogs ( Nyctereuteus sp.), ferret badgers ( Melogale spp.), and domestic cats. In 2005, two studies identified a number of SARS-like coronaviruses in Chinese bats.[60][61]
Phylogenetic analysis of these viruses indicated a high probability that SARS coronavirus originated in bats and spread to humans either directly or through animals held in Chinese markets. The bats did not show any visible signs of disease but are the likely natural reservoirs of SARS-like coronaviruses. In late 2006, scientists from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention of Hong Kong University and the Guangzhou Centre for Disease Control and Prevention established a genetic link between the SARS coronavirus appearing in civets and humans, bearing out claims that the disease had jumped across species.[62]
In December 2017, “after years of searching across China, where the disease first emerged, researchers reported … that they had found a remote cave in Xiyang Yi Ethnic Township, Yunnan province, which is home to horseshoe bats that carry a strain of a particular virus known as a coronavirus. This strain has all the genetic building blocks of the type that triggered the global outbreak of SARS in 2002.”[3] The research was performed by Shi Zhengli, Cui Jie, and co-workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China, and published in PLOS Pathogens . The authors are quoted as stating that “another deadly outbreak of SARS could emerge at any time. The cave where they discovered their strain is only a kilometre from the nearest village.”[3][63] The virus was ephemeral and seasonal in bats.[64] In 2019, a similar virus to SARS caused a cluster of infections in Wuhan, eventually leading to a global pandemic.
Of note, your article specifically states:
The detection of SCoV-like viruses in small, live wild mammals in a retail market indicates a route of interspecies transmission, although the natural reservoir is not known.
Which notably is different than your assertion. I don’t think Science is wrong, I think you are.
Below is the coverage of the paper in Nature.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9
If you dig in deeper to the literature, it’s unclear if civets where the vector through which in was transmitted to humans. Regardless, the animal responsible is the horseshoe bat.
1 Like
jesus christ the Science paper says that they don’t know what the actual natural reservoir for Sars is, just that they detected sars in animals and the human animal traders. You don’t even have to read the whole paper, just the abstract. Which is like eighty words long.
But the fact that you’re telling me to read wikipedia rather than a peer reviewed article is pretty funny.
Jesus Christ sorry for the shit posting guys. Got roped in. Not the right place.
The ban until next week of Jal is absolute bullshit.
9 Likes
Yeah what was the post?
What was he banned for? I presumed it was for something already deleted.
I think it was something like “if there’s any racist trope against the Chinese it’s that they are good scientists, not bad”.
Seriously? That’s what he was banned for? A farce if true.
2 Likes
Apparently that’s it, it was deleted. I read the post, it was totally innocuous. Pointing out a racist trope exists is not engaging in racism. In fact, I did the exact same thing moments before, pointing out that the wet market hypothesis advanced racist tropes about Chinese animal husbandry and dietary habits. We were making the point that there doesn’t seem to be a prominent racist trope in Western culture that would fit with the lab leak hypothesis. The “racist trope” about Chinese scientists is that they are very diligent and capable, which, as jal pointed out, doesn’t seem to be promulgated by the lab leak hypothesis.