Speculating about the origin of the coronavirus

I can see taking this line if the idea is that it was made in a lab, as opposed to just being studied in one. The latter is absolutely possible.

If it was being studied in the lab then it was already out there tho. And I haven’t read any evidence that it was being studied there before the outbreak

It appears to have evolved, not been engineered, so idk why it would have escaped from a lab

I don’t know all that much about labs that study viruses, but is it common for them to only study engineered versions of them? Being out there in bats doesn’t mean anything much; we’re already talking about it getting from bats to humans. I’m just saying it’s not outside the realm of possibility that the poorly-rated coronavirus-studying lab located in the region it first broke out was a link in the chain instead of like, a pangolin or whatever.

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It didn’t come from bats. The nearest they’ve found was in bats, but it appears to have decades worth of evolution from the version identified in bats and therefore a different host for that.

If we’re using a virus in a lab it’s gonna be a modified version.

when you’re working with shit that can escape, from viruses to flies, you mutate it so it needs a special kind of rare ass chemical to do basic metabolism. If a fly with like scary shit in its DNA escapes the lab it won’t survive or reproduce in the wild.

We’d see evidence of that kind of funny business in the genomic sequence and we don’t. We’re seeing it related to sars and mers in an expected fashion. I mean, was mers released from a lab?

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If it could just be a matter of the people who refuse to be vaccinated dying and everybody else surviving, that would be great. But there are people who would like to be vaccinated who can’t, so this fucks them as well. And as cuse stated, vaccines aren’t 100% effective.

RE: masks, I know I wasn’t the only person here to whom it was obvious from the get-go that masks help prevent infection.

RE: whether the virus come from a lab, let’s have a little poll.

What do you think is the likelihood that this virus came from a laboratory (which can mean it was simply a virus they were studying that got out)?

  • 0%
  • 1% - 25%
  • 26% - 50%
  • 51% - 75%
  • 76% - 100%
0 voters

Fair enough. I suppose an exception would be bioweapon research and it would be a bit odd for a place like that to be subject to international safety ratings etc, so presumably not the case here.

I assume MERS didn’t escape from a lab, but to my knowledge the MERS outbreak didn’t originate down the road from a lab studying MERS-like viruses secured by a rusty screen-door and a Gone Fishin’ sign. What you’re saying does lower the likelihood a fair bit, granted, but even to mutate the virus towards something that can’t survive outside the lab, you have to mutate it from something that can - right?

So yeah, not impossible but seemingly unlikely enough to not really be worth discussing.

Yeah from the wild type. The thing that’s already out there

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Not a great poll, honestly. I don’t want to say 0%, but 1 - 25 doesn’t really capture my actual opinion (let’s say 0.05%).

I don’t see what ‘already out there’ has to do with it. Again, we’re talking about transmission of the virus to humans, about how that happened. If I suggest it was from someone eating a pangolin, its being ‘already out there’ isn’t a relevant consideration, and it’s not relevant if it was from someone dropping a test tube or whatever.

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In that situation, it would already be in pangolins, mutate slightly in the one pangolin that got ate, and then live in the human wot ate it

But it can mutate in a Petri dish or whatever too, right?

  • Evolution caused black plague to jump from fleas to humans
  • Time traveling scientists caused black plague to jump from fleas to humans
  • Time traveling scientists designed black plague to infect humans to kill an alternate timeline proto-Hitler
  • Time traveling nazi scientists designed black plague to kill non-aryans but it escaped unfinished because they didn’t respect proper safety procedures

0 voters

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Well I didn’t know this. And it would seem to suggest that if it did come from a lab, it would have almost certainly had to have been released on purpose. And that seems exceedingly unlikely to me at this time.

The labs must still maintain the original “root stock” virus though, correct? Like in a deep freeze or something?

Sure yeah. But simultaneously every bat and/or pangolin are also sources of mutation. And if it’s in the lab it’s way more contained than those animals are. Like, way way more

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Poll needs 0-1%

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I need a 0 but not impossible category with respect to escape.

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Getting ready to head out.

Should say different receptor or very stronger binding to the same receptor. Idk without doing some lit searching.

I think this is very reasonable. This virus definitely has characteristics that would suggest it was created.

What characteristics?

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I just did a quick search and it appears to me that as I suspected different cold viruses use a wide variety of different receptors to gain entry into cells. (Disclaimer: it’s easy for me to misunderstand some of this stuff since I have no formal education in this field, but it seems to be the case.)