Did we get this kind of silliness during the Bird Flu outbreak? I honestly don’t remember.
You didn’t read the article. They talk about both possibilities.
I’m still baffled about how the Swedish swine flu vaccine caused narcolepsy somehow.
Seems like they definitely talked about artificial creation then.
And?
What smoking gun? The market everybody was pointing fingers at isn’t believed to be where the jump was made.
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Is there a safer alternative to studying coronaviruses than lab research of coronaviruses?
The idea that Chinese wet markets are wildly unsanitary in comparison to the places we get our food from is rooted far more in bigotry than science.
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I have no idea, I’m just a guy. But it seems like that’s why this question is important. If everyone pretends that it couldn’t have come from a lab then no one is asking the proper questions about the safety of different types of research.
You’re ignoring the fact that Chinese wet markets already have caused one coronavirus pandemic. While bigotry is definitely behind some people, declaring it ‘more in bigotry than science’ is an argument from ignorance.
Why isn’t it possible (or even likely) that it escaped from the lab in an asymptomatic lab worker who then infected others at the market?
Wouldn’t even have to have been asymptomatic. People who work in BSL 4 labs catch colds just as much as anyone else. You probably wouldn’t think anything of it.
Yeah but if the lab worker carrying it was symptomatic it messes with the first infections being from the market.
You’ve obviously never been to Sweden.
except:
The intermediate animal that passed the virus from bats to people has not been identified, but researchers think it might be a wild species that is sold as food in ‘wet markets’, which typically sell live animals. Early in the pandemic, investigators homed in on the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, because it sold fresh and frozen animals and many of the earliest infections were in people who had visited it. But the lead went cold when other early cases were found that were not associated with the market. Viral material was identified in drains and sewage at the market, but none was found on any animal carcasses.
That could be coincidence. The other trait that food markets have in large cities like Wuhan in a food-crazy country like China is density of shoppers.
This is a thing people keep saying but I can’t find one single reputable source for the claim.
The wet market theory might be fueled by bigotry to a greater extent than the lab theory, but right wingers cheer on the lab theory much more because it rationalizes forward-looking anti-Chinese xenophobia (and potentially policy). Especially because it gives a mental image of the most sinister possibility (a lab-crated plague deliberately released for some reason) instead of the more likely but more boring possibility (an outbreak at a facility studying respiratory diseases).
That’s why we need to be extra cautious of the lab theory.
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Epidemiological evidence suggested a zoonotic origin of the virus: more than 33% of the first detected cases of SARS in Guangdong corresponded to animal or food handlers.[16] Seroprevalence studies reinforced this zoonotic link (a high proportion of asymptomatic animal handlers at markets in Guangdong Province had antibodies against SARS-CoV).[16]
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This expands on the civets a bit more. Probable amplifier, probably not a reservoir, origin still unknown.
Obviously that still implicates the markets. Just posting for additional info.