I think Chinese bioterrorists engineered this in a lab, then one accidentally infected himself. He went into isolation, so it was going to be fine, but he’s into beastiality and he couldn’t go two weeks without fucking his pangolin sex slave.
So then he orders delivery food and the other scientists are like, “Bro, what the fuck, that’s not safe!!!” So they’re arguing on Zoom, and he forgets that he left the door open.
The good news is the pangolin is no longer enslaved, the bad news is that it’s about to meet its demise, because the wet market butcher down the street happens to be walking down the street at the perfect moment, and he’s not passing on the chance to capture and butcher an oddly urban pangolin.
Meanwhile, some poor chump got stung by a murder hornet, and after the ordeal he decided, “You know what? I’ve been through a lot, I deserve some yummy pangolin!”
So he walked down to the wet market, and the rest is history.
Yes of course, I believe I said something to that effect when I pulled them out of the air. What I often say in those situations is something like “There’s a non-zero chance, I don’t know exactly but perhaps X.”
I’ve been pretty careful about repeatedly mentioning that I’m not an expert, and the basis of my take is that all of the “there is no evidence” takes are useless because there could be no evidence, and the location to a lab there were warnings about is enough of a coincidence to assign it a non-zero low probability.
Maybe it’s 1-5%, maybe it’s 5-10%, maybe info will come to light eventually that makes it move in one direction or the other.
bro i love you i don’t want you to feel any friction between you and me, you’re one of my personal heroes, you took the banner and created the greatest website ever made, exiledpolitics.blogspot.geocities.org or whatever it was. this place is ok, but your website was great and it was the best possible idea at the best time and you rule forever in my book i don’t really care what you believe about this story, it’s very minor compared to my overwhelming respect and admiration for you personally
Alright, thanks, that’s kind of you to say. Man, Exiled seems like a decade ago. I get particularly annoyed when people I like and respect on here are going at it with me, so I tend to get heated. That and 10 hours of sleep total in 3 nights, not a good combination.
With this administration that’s impossible to say. If there were issues there would be some cables or intel. If there weren’t, there would also probably be some cables or intel (or they’d make it up).
Nobody said that there were more issues at this lab than at others, only that there were issues at this lab. If the virus had originated in a different city with a BSL-4 lab that was studying similar viruses, that lab’s deficiencies would be getting exactly the same attention.
Virus researchers say there is virtually no chance that the new coronavirus was released as result of a laboratory accident in China or anywhere else.
The assessment, made by more than half-a-dozen scientists familiar with lab accidents and how research on coronaviruses is conducted, casts doubt on recent claims that a mistake may have unleashed the coronavirus on the world.
But after corresponding with 10 leading scientists who collect samples of viruses from animals in the wild, study virus genomes and understand how lab accidents can happen, NPR found that an accidental release would have required a remarkable series of coincidences and deviations from well-established experimental protocols.
So I quote a SARS expert whose bet on the origin of this virus is on raccoon dog farms, and it gets no mention at all? It seems like a much more likely explanation than the lab and wet market theories.
The virus can pass from humans to some animals and back, and the odds of that happening are greatest in places where there is intensive human - animal contact, like on farms.
That’s even happening right now. In the Netherlands an infected farmer has passed the virus on to his minks, who in turn infected at least two other farm employees.