Alright, fair enough. Sorry if I was a bit over the top toward you, or made assumptions that everyone’s read what’s been in the COVID threads.
I have no concept for this, like 10 people? 25 people? 200 people? This might make me revise my percentages downward. As for the smoking gun, they’d have to volunteer that one.
As for why this matters… to us, not much, we can’t do anything about it. To the world, quite a bit in my opinion. Here’s why - and scientists and people with any related expertise, please correct me if I’m way off here…
But my guess is that when a team of researchers decides to study coronaviruses in bats that could make the jump to humans, they don’t do so randomly. According to this article from NPR (Bats In China Carry 400+ Coronaviruses With The Potential To Spill Over Into Humans : Goats and Soda : NPR), there are at least 400 bat coronaviruses that could infect humans.
I assume researchers do not pick which ones to study randomly. So let’s say they pulled out 100, and took a look at them. Let’s say 95 of them were pretty similar to SARS or MERS, and 5 were pretty different and unique/weird. Which ones are they going to devote the most resources to studying? I mean, we already almost have a vaccine for SARS, it just fizzled out before we got across the finish line with testing. We understand SARS reasonably well.
So, if a virus escaped from a lab, the likelihood that it was one of the more dangerous/different/unique strains would be way higher than if one of the 400+ viruses randomly made the jump based on sheer chance.
I feel like that might impact the approaches of the scientific community worldwide, and thus it’s important information. I also feel like, working backwards, when you know that this novel coronavirus is different/weird/more dangerous and that the outbreak (most likely) started in close proximity to a lab studying coronaviruses in bats that could make the jump to humans… You’ve got a couple of key pieces of information to consider, and they raise the likelihood significantly that this was a lab fuck up.
Put another way, if you told me a year ago that a novel coronavirus would start a pandemic at some random place in the world, and asked me what the likelihood would be that it came from a lab, I’d probably have said way < 1%. But if you told me those two pieces of information as well, I’d land at least in the 5-10% range.
Now for all I know, 200 of the 400 are weird/different, and we are randomly as likely to land on that side as the more familiar side of the range of strains… So it’s hard for me to really quantify the likelihood or understand it. But I do think it’s reasonable to think that it’s at least in the 5-10% range based on what we currently know.
Last place I worked we had a blind albino research mouse get caught in a mousetrap in the company cafeteria. The janitor called me into the back of the kitchen and showed me the mouse, which was clearly a research mouse - still had the wound from the little mouse surgery where they implanted the cancer.
I called the EH&S guy, (who handled all compliance stuff at this small company), and he told me not to tell anybody anything. A few days later I asked him if they figured out which study the little guy escaped from and he told me he had no idea what I was talking about.
I imagine something like this would be hushed up even more quickly.
Just rename thread something like Where Stressed Out Unstuckers Can Torch Each Others Straw Men Til Their Hearts Content
you can’t let these fuckers breed so you gas em when you’re done with em. i know this sounds like eugenics but it’s actually like star trek’s the prime directive
Leave me out of this one. Ill made my comment and let it stand. Things that happen 1 in 100,000,000 but for which there are 10,000,000,000+ occurrences happen all the time. Then it’s up to nature and to some extent chance.
If you reject creationism and intelligent design then to explain humans you need to acknowledge that low probability events given enough selection power can produce Mozart. Of course trump too. But point is the same.
Late to the thread but the biggest issue with the lab theory is that we don’t know which intermediate host allowed the move from bat virus to human virus. Based on current knowledge there has to have been one. So how did it get from the lab into a human as they don’t have the intermediate host in the lab and a human could not have carried it out no matter how lax the lab was.
OP is like a Trumpian argument from ignorance. “I don’t know anything about molecular biology, biochemistry, virology, medicine, germ warfare, or the history of pandemics, so please explain in simple terms how we don’t know this is man made.”
The answer for you is that informed people have looked into it and determined it wasn’t. The real answer is that there are common sequence (and other) markers for human manipulated organisms and this has none of them. Also, humans don’t know enough about genetics/biochemistry and immune response to knowingly create new viruses that have an intended effect. Best we can do is try a bunch and hope they don’t wipe out humanity, which is one reason it’s both stupid and an act of war and violates treaties to try.
I swear the Trumpian/Tucker Carlson/Joe Rogan, “I don’t know shit but I’m just asking questions” (wut about that 5G?) is the core of most simple minded thought. People who know about a domain see a blank page covered with 50 dots that don’t connect. People who don’t know anything see 3 dots and draw a line connecting them and think, “well, that’s revealing” (this isn’t only in science, it’s extremely common in peoples’ understanding of the forces that shape politics and society in every culture, eg, in middle east politics and society, brexit, really everywhere. Introduce religion or some bullshit about the masses or landlords or whatever and you are singing the song of the people in a language they understand.) The “secret” is that the leaders are also rubes themselves. They are also Believers.
This is basically Trump (or duturete, or bolsinaro, or Putin, etc). Be as stupid as the average person and have a party that is so ignorant and craven and grifting (gotta also attack “the media” for obvious reasons) that no one corrects and you can appeal directly to the people, especially if you demonize one group or another. Then you can do a lot based on whatever “plausible” delusions you exploit or sell and at least partly embrace.
So, to answer your question, we know because it’s the kind of thing Tucker Carlson and Trump would encourage (and themselves believe), and thus requires a bottomless well of ignorance and stupidity. (Not calling you out personally, but I’m triggered by the spectre of this sort of conjecture and there have been articles written on this at serious outlets like Vox, New Yorker, or whatever, not to mention academic sources, that go into the details).
It all goes back to Socrates’ response when he was informed that the Oracle at Delphi proclaimed him the wisest man in Athens. “I don’t understand why the Oracle would name me. I don’t know anything.”
We mostly murder people outside our borders. (For the last 110 years) Explain why that’s better.
In the context of a free and open society and a government that is challenged by the press and accountable to its citizens, of course the US government is better than the Chinese government.
That’s not an answer. Why does killing people inside one set of borders make a government worse than murdering people outside them?
Insofar as we are a democracy though it does make us more complicit as individuals. So, Americans are worse than Chinese people obviously, right?
Look at the posts I was replying to. That’s the context of the reply.
Well I don’t think it does, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to go around pretending that the Chinese govt doesn’t suck.
Whatever, I don’t agree with that but why do we have to have a meta argument now? Can’t you still answer the question?
what question?
The thing that ended with a question mark, troll.
Almost every post was discussing the chance of it escaping from the lab, and not that it was designed and/or intentionally released. And cuse’s post wasn’t intended to be a thread starter. I don’t think he seriously believes there is any chance at all that this was designed.
You haven’t seemed to ask any relevant questions and don’t seem interested in conversation, so fuck off I guess.
Escape from the lab is much more like than created. Maybe 25%. Dunno, I haven’t read the evidence or even the actually serious articles that have been written.
So what if it did escape a lab due to poor safety protocols? What are we gonna do, sue China in the UN Court of Pandemics?