Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats.
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A BSL lab that’s not meeting safety regs is still astronomically less likely to set a zoonotic virus loose than these wet markets where it’s just the Wild West, what are we even talking about here.
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Well we’ve gone from impossible to a small chance, which is about where I already was. And honestly, this warning (more than a year before this started) seems to suggest something larger than a tiny risk:
What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.
It’s where every sensible person has always been.
Cool, thanks.
even this opinion article admits they were getting the bats from the same place other people were getting bats. It concerns me that non-scientists hear this stuff and think the virus was created in the lab. The virus was out there, and the question is did it make the mutation to jump species out in the wild or in the lab, presumably engineered on purpose as the article mentions a rumor that implies they were inserting gain of function mutations on the virus and testing it on animals. Frankly the likelihood that it mutated human transmission accidentally in a lab is preposterous.
That lab and others have been warning that the leap that the first sars did can happen again, that’s WHY they were studying it. The fact that that happened is evidence to me that they were right all along, I’m not at all inclined to blame them for it happening.
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Credit to all of you more knowledgeable and invested in this stuff, but I feel like I’m just falling into a troll trap every time I start thinking about the virus origin. Wasn’t the recent resurgence of this debate largely sparked by Trump’s ongoing “look over there” strategy? For me, at least, I’m not sure there’s a lot of utility to be had by investing time and energy into the topic.
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Conspiracy theories abound (lol)
Don’t miss closer to home. This US facility was shut down by the US cause it was unsafe as *uck (August 2019). Then, the same US govt. instution ran off to (no shit, of all places) Wuhan to play some biological wargames (Sept 2019) 2019 Military World Games - Wikipedia
I have no idea why this article was in the opinions sections because it’s not like “opinion” pieces I’m familiar with. It directly quotes State Dept cables, (even if SD had “no comment”), and other prominent researchers.
The fact that they were doing research at this lab on bat coronaviruses interacting with ACE2 receptors on bats which originated in an entirely different province of China than from where this pandemic started is enough of a coincidence to take notice, imo. Then add in the safety concerns expressed a year prior and it makes you wonder.
Also from the same piece:
As my colleague David Ignatius noted, the Chinese government’s original story — that the virus emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan — is shaky. Research by Chinese experts published in the Lancet in January showed the first known patient, identified on Dec. 1, had no connection to the market, nor did more than one-third of the cases in the first large cluster. Also, the market didn’t sell bats.
I think there is enough here to avoid having to put on a tin foil cap when talking about it.
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it’s in the opinion section because its thesis relies on gossip and rumor that’s not up to the standard of the wapo the news section
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Patient zero wasn’t associated with the Hunaan wet market where the outbreak got going in earnest.
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I guess the reporter could possibly be lying about seeing both State Department cables, but if the WP had any concerns about that I’m surprised that they published the article at all.
Yeah who knows - the US is probably leaking that stuff on purpose. But I doubt it was completely fabricated. I’m in the 1%-25% camp, just based on the coincidence of where this started, and assume we’ll never know.
I don’t want proof to come out because Trump already hates China so much I could see him somehow Mr. Magoo stumbling his way into WWIII
But WH / US, after being given the genone sequence of Covid by Chiner >3 months ago still hasn’t come up with anything credible / BS / a conspiracy linking this virus to a Chinese lab / man made.
There isn’t even any half believeable theory after months apart from ‘OMG a lab got closed’ which also happened in the US in the last 6 months
Nobody is arguing that it’s man made. And seriously go fuck yourself with this condescending bullshit. I have no idea what you’re even referring to with the “OMG a lab got closed” comment.
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A lab which was studying coronavirus in bats, and was probably called out in the past for lack of adequate safety procedures, and was like a mile or something from the Hunaan wet market, which supposedly patient zero wasn’t even associated with. IE - maybe s/he took it there and then it went nuts in a perfect environment.
It’s not a conspiracy if you have two competing theories which seem plausible and know the govt would do everything they can to cover up one of the possible sources.
Much like nuclear reactors, virology labs have elaborate safety procedures precisely because something like this could happen. And sometimes they do. The former is impossible to hide, while the latter isn’t.
Your position is just as ludicrous as someone insisting they know it was released from a lab imo.
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I thought it was pretty obvious at the time that the government pushing no masks was nonsense. At the same time they said we didn’t need masks, everyone was desperately trying to get masks to healthcare workers.
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Counterpoint:
We figured out masks itt before the damn govt.
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I mean, these wet markets are just like that but without any of the safety precautions.
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And still somehow this bat coronavirus waited all this time to jump to humans. Wet markets have been around a lot longer than virology labs.