if it’s not an on-purpose engineered mutation, which we would see evidence of that in the genome sequence (flox sequences, crispr repeats), there are like millions or tens of millions of more points of contact outside of the lab than inside of the lab.
my beefarino is there is no evidence that this pandemic started because of virology research, AND it’s highly unlikely considering all the circumstantial evidence pointing elsewhere, so it’s really dumb to consider blaming the scientists at all. what good is that conversation? what good can come of it?
I don’t know why beetlejuice insists upon pangolin fucking being the only way this could have spread to humans. The scientific community seems to think that’s an unlikely way for it to spread, some say impossible, but he insists on the transmission via pangolin-human orgy argument.
I basically agree with all of this except I don’t have any basis to compare the relative likelihoods of a terrible accident happening at the lab vs a natural occurrence outside the lab. It sounded like you were saying it definitely could not have come from the lab, but what you’re really saying is that it’s extremely extremely unlikely, to the point that it’s dumb to speculate about it, especially when the speculation can do harm.
yeah. like if all of a sudden your nephew was born with angel wings, i’d say like, “something funny’s going on there. nobody in keed’s family remembers a family remember with wings”. but if your nephew was born with a big nose, i’d be like “meh it happens. keed’s family doesn’t have big noses but strange minor stuff happens on occasion, and it appears to be a human nose.”
but like the possibilities for genetic engineering are wild, you’ve seen the mouse with the ear on it, if i wanted to build a deadly pandemic virus it would be way scarier than this one, i could load it up with weapons like arnold in commando taking over that island base.
who do you know better, richard ebright or me? i’m not giving new york times quotes, i’m giving you the straight dope. it didn’t happen. spend your time thinking about anything else
Ebright is not convinced of the need for more than one BSL-4 lab in mainland China. He suspects that the expansion there is a reaction to the networks in the United States and Europe, which he says are also unwarranted. He adds that governments will assume that such excess capacity is for the potential development of bioweapons. “These facilities are inherently dual use,” he says. The prospect of ramping up opportunities to inject monkeys with pathogens also worries, rather than excites, him: “They can run, they can scratch, they can bite.”
he’s not giving an honest analysis of this situation, he’s repeating the same anti-chinese anti-communist propaganda he’s been making for years. btw with no evidence. first bioweapons, now negligence, it’s china’s fault somehow, and stopping china from doing research is his solution
That’s not how I read that. At least not the part you quoted. He’s just as critical of the same kinds of facilities in the US/EU. And I agree with him.
I’m still not sold on the opportunity cost of this thread. It seems like we’re just channeling the collective intelligence of this forum into a divisive, Trump-inspired goose-chase instead of something that matters.
Regarding JT getting a kick out of you telling people to ignore experts in the NYT? Weren’t you in the big pile on mocking him for not just trusting all the experts?
Regarding putting a small, but non-negligible probability on it? I don’t need to understand the exact way this could it could not happen, unless you want to explain to me how it could happen three times with SARS and is impossible with this.
Clearly it’s not impossible. Of that I’m extremely confident. It’s happened 3 times with SARS in, what, a decade? Now if you had started by saying it’s maybe 1% but not 5-10%, maybe I would have just said ok and moved along. But to say it’s effectively zero is absurd.
Then when you mischaracterize my position repeatedly, well now we’ve got a problem. When I get accused of furthering Trump’s position, we’ve got a problem.
