I responded perhaps too early but I wanted to make a general point about how people are prone to conjecture from a position of ignorance, about everything, all the time. It’s the defining feature of politics and society.
Probably the only reason we don’t live in yurts is that people can someone actually profit from truth. Not all the time, but in the fashion of a competent poker player over time.
aren’t you the guy who thinks Epstein killed himself?
Yes, me and my friend William of Ockham.
@joltinjake already posted this, but I wanted to extract some of the money quotes, which in fact do not serve to make me any less paranoid. (But it seems to be a very well sourced and fair article, which imo supports the views of the “conspiracy theorists” ITT.)
One of the few scientists to speculate publicly was the well-known Rutgers microbiologist Richard Ebright. “The possibility that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans as a direct result of the activities of PREDICT—during field collection of bats and bat excreta, or during laboratory characterization of bats, bat excreta, or bat viruses—cannot be excluded and cannot be dismissed,” he told me, comparing the idea of actively seeking new viruses in remote places and bringing them back to labs (in densely populated areas) to “looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.”
“It’s important to be upfront that we do not have sufficient evidence to exclude entirely the possibility that it escaped from a research lab,” the respected University of Washington biologist Carl Bergstrom wrote on Twitter. Though he called a natural zoonotic spillover “far more plausible,” he cautioned: “Whatever the origin of #SARSCoV2 may have been, going forward we need to carefully assess and manage the risk associated with a range of activities.”
There’s already been one lab-caused mini-pandemic, in 1977, when a strain of influenza erupted in China and swept the globe. (Luckily, it was a mild one.) Flu strains are famous for constantly mutating, but this one was nearly identical to one last seen in the 1950s, meaning it had been held somewhere in suspended animation. Suspicion fell on the Soviet Union’s robust bioweapons program, but researchers concluded the pathogen had more likely been released during a vaccine trial gone wrong. Nobody fessed up.
The original SARS has not reemerged from the wild since 2003, but it has actually escaped from three different labs, one in Taiwan, one in Singapore, and one at China’s National Institute of Virology in Beijing, where two researchers were infected. The researchers mistakenly believed they were handling a version of the virus that had been inactivated.
The biosecurity expert Lynn Klotz, together with science journalist Edward J. Sylvester, surveyed the CDC’s lab accident data and conservatively estimated the chance of a pandemic pathogen escaping a lab at just 0.3 percent per year, meaning there would be an 80 percent chance of an escape from a single lab over 536 years of work. Perhaps that would be acceptable, but they quickly counted 42 labs known to be working with live SARS, influenza, or smallpox, which translated to an 80 percent chance of an escape every 12.8 years. And that was in 2012, when such work was far less commonplace than it is now. The two later estimated the likelihood of an escaped virus seeding “the very pandemic the researchers claim they are trying to prevent…as high as 27%, a risk too dangerous to live with.”
In 2010, 244 unintended releases of bioweapon candidate ‘select agents’ were reported. Looking at the problem pragmatically, the question is not if such escapes will result in a major civilian outbreak, but rather what the pathogen will be and how such an escape may be contained, if indeed it can be contained at all.”
I definitely jumped in too early with my argument concerning the “man made” theory, which isn’t taken seriously in this thread. (Hint: it was bill gates, not the Chinese, though the Iranians say it was the Americans framing the Chinese.) Some people seriously assert or believe such things (5G!), while meanwhile they need to use finger puppets to brief Trump about nuclear weapons.
I know a bit about psychology experiments and “critical thinking” and informal logic textbooks but I don’t think there’s been that much work done on the mechanics of how people systematically jump to conclusions and embrace ignorance. I remember being bummed that my philosophy of religion class was about things like debates over proofs for the existence of God and not some general theory of why people are prone to believe religions or Freud or Marx or whatever
All the examples are off viruses that escaped labs are viruses that already had the ability to infect humans. All evidence so far says that covid-19 needed to go from bats to xxx, mutate in xxx and then went to humans. So researching virusses collected from bats even if it included the ancestor of covid-19 has no risk of introducing covid-19 into humans unless they also were holding live xxx in the facility. That is why the odds of the lab being involved is extremely low. Some viruses are able to go from bats directly to humans but corona viruses appear to always need an intermediate.
Like everybody else, I’ve heard this from some sources. (Mostly based on the fact that other coronavirsues required an intermediate host before transferring to humans.) But that doesn’t seem to stop the well known researchers quoted in the article from opining specifically about Covid-19 and that lab that it was in fact possible. And I’m going to assume that they know more than I do.
I also recently read about some research that suggests it could have gone from bats to an intermediate host, and then back to bats and on to humans. I cannot seem to find it at the moment but it was recent and pre-publication (so not yet peer reviewed) so who knows if there is validity.
Guess you haven’t actually read ~any of OP’s posts on the topic. Thanks for contributing and calling my argument Trumpian, jackass. Hope you enjoyed writing out a long post about how it’s not man made to address my argument, wherein I specifically and repeatedly specified that I did not think it was man made.
Ha. Yeah, okay buddy.
This too, it was a reply to a post in the COVID thread about an article where the scientists were talking about how weird/unique this virus is. The ensuing discussion got moved to a new thread.
LMAO… So let me get this straight, to paraphrase:
me: I think there’s a 5-10% chance this escaped from a lab, but I think there’s virtually no chance it was manmade.
simp: OP is a Trumpian buffoon who knows nothing about any of this who is making nonsense up out of sheer ignorance, it is people like him thinking like this that cause all sorts of problems etc etc.
also simp: 5-10%? Fuck no, at least 25%!
I made a post upthread about why I think it might have an impact on scientists’ processes for studying it. Surely the researchers who were already working with it would know a few things that would be helpful to the world.
Oopsie, their bad. Someone please lecture me more on how these things can’t get out of labs and I’m a fucking lunatic conspiracy theorist.
OK, fair enough. I blew off my steam and I’m not mad anymore. No hard feelings.
lmfao.
In fairness to simp, the “OP” could kind of be taken as suggesting you thought this thing was a designed virus.
In fairness to you, your post being made into a thread starter removed it from the context from which you were making the comments.
I’d also like to think my body of work posting in this community over the last five years or whatever might make one realize that I probably don’t think Bill Gates made the virus in a lab with Chinese scientists then had Joe Biden sneak it into the population while Hillary was snickering in the corner in order to… my head hurts, I can’t even finish.
I thought Covid-19 can’t infect bats so not sure how that last example is possible. A virus can only jump directly from a to b if it can infect both which means b to a is also possible. They might not have the same probability of happening but it needs to be possible.
They shouldn’t have killed Jeffery Epstein…
If the lab was only holding/studying bat-borne viruses that couldn’t directly infect humans, then yeah that does seem to shut the door on lab involvement.
If that guy thinks it’s possible, I’m going to guess it is.
Speaking of that guy, he is spitting fire on twitter:
https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1264701503979339784
I’m a fan of 'cuse, but I get get why this is an an annoying exercise, esp for beetlejuice who does this for a living. Health experts have been warning for years that these wet markets are a disaster waiting to happen just like with SARS and bird flu and then when disaster strikes people start seriously tossing around the idea that a facility meant to contain these beasties might have been the cause. You couldn’t dream up a better breeding ground for zoonotic diseases than these wet markets where all these species are jam-packed together and sanitation seems to be an afterthought. It’s as if we caught the culprit red-handed with a smoking gun and people are toying around with the idea that the butler did it.
Let me quote my favorite line from the documentary Contagion: " Someone doesn’t have to weaponize the bird flu. The birds are doing that"
I mean …
Do you think there’s a non-zero chance that Mike Postle was not cheating?
Because to me–a poker layman–it just looked like a guy reading everyone’s souls.