Well your biggest score point here is that “the nearest bat that could have this is 1000” miles away. First, @CaffeineNeeded just demonstrated why that is wrong. And second, who cares? If there was an intermidate animal, then it doesn’t matter in the least even if you are right that the nearest bat was 1k miles away. I mean the simplest explanation is usually correct. All the original clusters came from the Wuhan meat market. That market had animals from all over the place including like standard farm animals. And finally, like 99 percent of plagues throighout history can be traced right to animal husbandry.
Right but they’ve shown a lot of evidence of the animal testing. If they just wanted everything to come up negative, maybe they could rig that, but I don’t understand why they would. Them not being able to pin down the source of the virus makes them look worse than if they are able to.
The flip side of that is why don’t they do a fake positive if they want to close the case on this thing. Maybe the story would fall apart under scrutiny? I don’t know. If they say, hey, this pangolin ranch over here is to blame for the outbreak, I’m sure a lot of scientists around the world would be all hey can we come see this pangolin ranch and take some samples. And they’d be all uhhh no sorry we nuked the pangolin ranch.
Which is why I consider it most likely that they didn’t find evidence of either purposeful or accidental exposure in the lab, and also didn’t find animals that tested positive.
It raises the question of what was that animal and how did it get to Wuhan. If that animal is identified, great, case closed. In SARS they identified animals that were carrying SARS right away at the market, showed animal traders infected and vegetable traders not infected. Compelling evidence. Maybe they got lucky and this sort of event with no answers is actually more common than the enormous amount of evidence with SARS, who knows.
They didn’t, actually. About half the initial cases visited the Huanan seafood market and about half visited other markets. And weirdly the highest positive rate among vendors was among vegetable stalls.
I mean, that’s fine. It’s entirely possible.
I already know this because I did it for the last thread but don’t think I ever posted the map. Here it is measured to both Foshan and Wuhan.
Here’s the graphic from the actual paper:
Lead author is Shi Zheng-Li, aka “Bat Woman.”
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Let’s do a sum-up then of @anon10396289 wildly made up bullshit in the past 24-48 hours:
- Horseshoe bats don’t live around Wuhan. They do.
- The animal responsible for SARS-CoV-1 was found immediately. It was ~15 years later.
- The source of the outbreak for SARS-CoV-1 was so far away from Wuhan that it couldn’t be from an animal in Guangdong. The source of SARS was about 1000 km away from Guangdong, which is about the driving distance between Guangdong and Wuhan.
- None of this really matters, as coronaviruses are ubiquitous in bats, including areas well outside of China even.
- Scientists opinion about the source of the outbreak can’t be trusted due to their inherent bias against the lab source theory.
None of his arguments make sense to anyone informed at the most basic level. He’s essentially Trumping it now and making us disprove ever random piece of bullshit he makes up.
Apologies to everyone else for feeding fuel to this troll. It’s done. Maybe he’ll find a bottom and stop? Doubt it.
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Wuhan is a city of 11 million people. If half of the original cases were traced to one meat market in a city of 11 million, that’s pretty fucking significant.
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All willful lies. I said the bats that harbor the closest known relative of covid-19 live a thousand miles away. That’s true. That other related bats live near Wuhan doesn’t contradict that.
Animals infected with SARS in markets were found immediately, which is what I said. The reservoir was found much later. Caffeine knows this is what I said and is explicitly lying about it. We have the reverse situation here: we know the probable reservoir but have no idea how it got to Wuhan. With Sars we knew what animals it was infecting in the market but didn’t know the original reservoir.
I never said that it couldn’t plausibly travel 1000 miles to Wuhan. But it is a step that has to be explained, and that simply hasn’t been demonstrated.
I’ve never said scientists can’t be trusted. I said that conflicts of interests matter a lot and powerful biases can easily set in depending on how much a scientist’s career prospects and prestige depends on a certain thing being true or not true. Scientists are human just like everyone else.
Sure. But the first case was traced to someone who never visited that market but visited another one like 15 miles away.
Also turns out that they were nowhere near Guangdong either. The most similar virus to covid-19 popped up 1000km from the first major outbreak, and you’re using distance from the source as evidence that it came from a lab.
It is disingenuous to use this as evidence in favor of lab escape. Simply that there are bats known to have a close relative of covid does not mean that those are the only, or merely only likely source of the virus. Bats are rife with coronaviruses, and bats live around Wuhan. There could be a still closer relative found in still closer bats, not that you apparently support scientists doing this study.
But you are implying that because it hasn’t been demonstrated, that makes it much less likely to have happened. But the fact that it has happened before in living memory is evidence in favor of that having happened again.
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I’m all for trapping animals around Wuhan and testing them for covid-19, which is what they’ve been doing. That they haven’t found any animals with covid-19 or viruses close to it around Wuhan is relevant. You’re right that I don’t think we should go around hunting for exciting new coronaviruses. Assuming this outbreak happened naturally, how did gathering and studying that close relative help fight covid-19 at all?
Again, when it happened before, SARS-infected animal traders and their SARS-infected animals were immediately identified. So that precedent cuts both ways, right?
COV-1 was a very different disease. There wasn’t any known asymptotic spread, there wasn’t wildly different presentations in patients. When COV-2 came out epidemiologists were looking for sick people with a fairly limited range of symptoms. They didn’t have the resources to randomly check asymptotic people for covid, or people with GI symptoms, or all the other random shit this virus does to people. It is completely reasonable that they couldn’t track this down to the source.
Look back to the original deaths in the nursing home outside Seattle, covid was spreading in the community for at least a month before someone died. COV-2 has changed the way we will look at novel respiratory viruses forever.
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All the cases were traced to meat markets you say? It must have been a lab escape and resulting conspiracy!
That time when all the medical professionals on the board are on one side of an issue, and a some posters are on the other Chinese conspiracy side, because reasons that have nothing to do with implicit bias.
Right, which is why it seems so crucial that China test the blood samples of people in Wuhan from the last half of 2019. They haven’t done this, which…why? Seems important.
What? Non-lab escape is totally plausible and should be investigated more.
You have multiple times in this thread, without evidence, posited that lab escape is the most likely explanation.
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Do you think those two statements are somehow at odds with each other?
No, but you seemed to be backing off the most problematic of your claims for a moment there. But I guess you’re not. Given that you basically never back off of any claims no matter how many times they’ve been shown to be ridiculous (ie: Trump is not attempting to seize power), I can’t say I’m shocked.