Yeah, exactly.
It’s not as if the scientific community isn’t just as protective of itself and its reputation as any other where large amounts of money are at stake.
This dishonest nonsense makes discussion bad and clearly is not in good faith.
So much this.
The difference between open air fish markets in the states and China is night and day. I came across the wet market while waiting for a train to take me from Hankou (one of the three smaller cities merged into the current Wuhan) to Beijing. I had to power through it as partway through the place the overpowering scent caused me to get nauseous. I smelled like the market as I got on the train too. Felt bad for the people sitting around me because my excessive body spray use wasn’t able to completely conceal the scent from the market. So I ended up smelling gross in two different ways.
Keeed raised perfectly valid and uncontroversial questions about how the effect of money on science could distort scientific opinions, and your response is to try to shut down debate. Why?
2 Likes
WHO Report as per CNN:
Covid-19 probably came to people through an animal, and likely started spreading no more than a month or two before it was noticed in December of 2019, a World Health Organization draft report finds.
The least likely source: a laboratory leak, the WHO’s joint international team concluded.
This discussion should be over.
I confess to not being a biologist and to also thinking that the lab theory is certainly possible.
However, if we’re ruling out (or at least making very very very unlikely) that it was engineered to be human infecting in the lab, then what happened is that, in a chance encounter between a human and a non-human infecting coronavirus, the virus mutated and was then able to infect a human.
Given that there have to be some safety protocols in the lab and not that many people there, whereas outside there are lots of animals, people and not many safety protocols, isn’t it a pretty conservative conclusion that there are indeed hundreds of times (at least) more interactions between humans and non-human coronaviruses outside the lab than in?
“Likely” = discussion still relevant.
According to experts in the field it’s “likely” that Torn And Frayed will win the 14:15 this afternoon, but the book is still very much open.
Please read the thread thanks.
lol come on this report is a joke.
“There is no record of viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 in any laboratory before December 2019, or genomes that in combination could provide a SARS-CoV-2 genome,” it reads. “In view of the above, a laboratory origin of the pandemic was considered to be extremely unlikely.”
This is the purest question-begging imaginable. The lab-origin theory requires China to be engaging in covert study of coronaviruses and this paragraph requires that they not be in order to make sense.
This isn’t how it works. Read zikzak’s link and in particular the theory about it being a recombinant virus.
Edit, meaning this:
Petrovsky leans towards another potential scenario, namely that SARS-CoV-2 might be evolved from coronaviruses that snuck into lab cultures. Related viruses in the same culture, he explains, such as one optimized for human ACE2 binding and another not, can swap genetic material to create new strains. “We’ve had this sort of thing happen in our own lab,” he says. “One day, you’re culturing flu, and then one day you sequence it, and you go, ‘Holy shit, where did this other virus come from in our culture?’ Viruses are evolving the whole time, and it’s easy for a virus to get into your culture without you knowing it.”
1 Like
No it doesn’t.
What is happening on this thread? It’s devolved into utter nonsense from people utterly uninformed calling whole reports nonsense despite never reading the report and people seriously positing scientists are covering up a source of covid for grant money.
It’s fucking pathetic honestly. Or maybe I’m grumpy from working late, but good god the past 24 hours were bad here.
1 Like
Dude China are the ones with a fucking library of bat coronaviruses in their backyard. The prevailing theory is that the virus was brought into urban China via wet market or similar. The lab theory is that it was instead brought into a lab and accidentally released. Either way there are a giant number of novel coronaviruses out there. What the WHO report says is “well if Chinese labs had seen this one before they would definitely tell us”. Why?
For the record I still think it was likely not a lab accident, but it’s not a crazy theory. And the WHO report sheds no light whatsoever on it.
3 Likes
Yeah, I posted too quickly, most of the discussion was pretty silly but I did then go back and find the good links.
I think the relative probability hinges on what research they were carrying out and if a ‘missing link’ shows up somewhere. I agree that we’re not likely to know the former ever. In the absence of both, though, I do think the difference in interactions still carries some weight.
This is what I tried to say last night.
It’s possible but not likely. Not likely is a subjective term. Apparently it means 49.9% to some. I personally put more like 1%.
And if it was simply an infection of a lab worker, that means the virus arose naturally. Through mutation and recombination.
This is a hypothetical argument on a likely unprovable point. What a freaking waste of brain and typing energy.
1 Like
The number of miles away that the lab was is a more relevant factor than most people realize. Ten vs thirty results in significantly different probabilities.
What’s the equation?
Yeah, I mean, both the wet market theory and the lab theory involve people going out and bringing the virus to Wuhan, but the lab theory involves fewer animals and storing them in a facility specifically designed to keep dangerous viruses from getting out. ofc people find the lab theory compelling for some doofy reason.
2 Likes
this is a good point, but on the other hand, china has also blocked the investigators who wrote the report that just came out from most of the WIV lab.
I don’t want to come off like a conspiracy goober here, I don’t think there is any reason to believe this was engineered and even less reason to think that it was intentionally released, and I’m not convinced that “it was in a lab at some point” is a favorite, but it doesn’t seem ridiculously unlikely.
Probably cause the virus first surfaced ten miles from a lab known to be studying said viruses.