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Narrator?
I think you’re completely missing the point of what Lawnmower Man is doing.
Apparently.
Ok I guess I am dumb. Can someone explain the joke to us idiots?
Lawnmower Man’s skepticism of expert opinion regarding Mike Postle is intended to mirror cuserounder’s skepticism of expert opinion regarding covid escaping from a lab.
I pulled an example from his profession that is obvious to him but not obvious to a layman. It’s because he’s familiar with the concepts, procedures, and esoterica of his own field which outsiders don’t even realize exist. If you ask laymen to reason why Postle may (or may not) be cheating, they won’t say things like the metrics suggest perfect river play. They’ll simply tell you they saw this in a Bond film once. Similarly, if you ask laymen to opine on the odds of a BSL-4 “leaking” a novel functional virus, they won’t outline any reasonable theory as to how that extraordinary process actually occurred. That’s because they have no idea how any of it works.
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On the other hand, as Jbro pointed out, SARS has apparently leaked out on three occasions. So if someone would like to explain to me why that happened and this couldn’t, feel free to do so while mocking me like I’m an idiotic child because I’m really enjoying the whole LOL cuserounders a Trumpy moron routine you all are carrying on with about something that already happened THREE TIMES with SARS.
This is what I’m talking about. That piece of information sounds very compelling to you because you’re a layman. Of course it’s possible to leak a highly-contagious virus from a lab. No one is disputing that. What you’re missing is that it’s a lot more difficult to leak something you don’t have.
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Something like Novel?
Isn’t one of the projects in that lab trying to get coronaviruses from the wild that haven’t infected people yet and study them?
Yes, and…
So that seems like a plausible mechanism to me. How do we know covid wasn’t one of the novel viruses they gathered from the wild?
Did you enjoy Africa?
I am not an expert but it sounds like those are pretty hard to come by.
The sequence did not match any identified viruses in their database. It also did not match anything it could have mutated from in any reasonable amount of time afaik. So they would either have to be lying about that or have leaked a novel virus they weren’t aware of somehow. And even if you decide that’s possible, it it still dwarfed by the total exposure risk of the surrounding population which is what SA has articulated repeatedly. If you think about it as an odds ratio of total exposure risk of scientists vs. surrounding population it’s not even close.
“If you do the math on this, it’s very straightforward. … We have hundreds of millions of bats in Southeast Asia and about 10 percent of bats in some colonies have viruses at any one time. So that’s hundreds of thousands of bats every night with viruses,” Daszak says. “We also find tens of thousands of people in the wildlife trade, hunting and killing wildlife in China and Southeast Asia, and millions of people living in rural populations in Southeast Asia near bat caves.”
Next, he says, consider the data he’s collected on people near bat caves getting exposed to viruses: “We went out and surveyed a population in Yunnan, China — we’d been to bat caves and found viruses that we thought could be high risk. So we sample people nearby, and 3 percent had antibodies to those viruses,” he says. “So between the last two and three years, those people were exposed to bat coronaviruses. If you extrapolate that population across the whole of Southeast Asia, it’s 1 million to 7 million people a year getting infected by bat viruses.”
Compare that, he says, to what we know about the labs: “If you look at the labs in Southeast Asia that have any coronaviruses in culture, there are probably two or three and they’re in high security. The Wuhan Institute of Virology does have a small number of bat coronaviruses in culture. But they’re not [the new coronavirus], SARS-CoV-2. There are probably half a dozen people that do work in those labs. So let’s compare 1 million to 7 million people a year to half a dozen people; it’s just not logical.”
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Again, seems…plausible? I don’t trust Pompeo that the intelligence community has evidence it came from the lab but I also don’t trust the Chinese government saying it couldn’t have come from the lab.
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You haven’t finished filling out your madlib card. The Chinese are lying and, actually, the Wuhan team had extracted COVID-19 and banked the culture at WIV. Therefore, the foreign independent scientists who collaborated with and vouched for the Chinese team are ____________.
dunno man, I agree with at least one of these scientist guys you’re relying on here
a virologist at Columbia University, also sees the lab-leak theory as very unlikely. “This virus came from bats under unknown circumstances,” she told me. “While I cannot rule out the lab-accident theory, there are so many other possibilities for how it could have happened. It could have been someone collecting bat guano for fertilizer, somebody cleaning out a barn, somebody exploring a cave. It could be any situation like that of someone in contact with animals who then spread it to other humans. There are so many other options than a lab leak.”
Of course.
And the lab might not have had covid in culture and still be the focal point for the outbreak. They were bringing bat shit to the lab to search for coronaviruses, could have infected someone at the lab without the virus actually have been discovered by the lab.
That is not plausible.
the obvious solution is a complete and total shutdown of virology research until we figure out what the hell is going on
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