Lab Leak?
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https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html
What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed. Many thoughtful people dismiss this notion, and they may be right. They sincerely believe that the coronavirus arose naturally, “zoonotically,” from animals, without having been previously studied, or hybridized, or sluiced through cell cultures, or otherwise worked on by trained professionals. They hold that a bat, carrying a coronavirus, infected some other creature, perhaps a pangolin, and that the pangolin may have already been sick with a different coronavirus disease, and out of the conjunction and commingling of those two diseases within the pangolin, a new disease, highly infectious to humans, evolved. Or they hypothesize that two coronaviruses recombined in a bat, and this new virus spread to other bats, and then the bats infected a person directly — in a rural setting, perhaps — and that this person caused a simmering undetected outbreak of respiratory disease, which over a period of months or years evolved to become virulent and highly transmissible but was not noticed until it appeared in Wuhan.
High-containment laboratories have a whispered history of near misses. Scientists are people, and people have clumsy moments and poke themselves and get bitten by the enraged animals they are trying to nasally inoculate. Machines can create invisible aerosols, and cell solutions can become contaminated. Waste systems don’t always work properly. Things can go wrong in a hundred different ways.
Hold that human fallibility in your mind. And then consider the cautious words of Alina Chan, a scientist who works at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “There is a reasonable chance that what we are dealing with is the result of a lab accident,” Chan told me in July of last year. There was also, she added, a reasonable chance that the disease had evolved naturally — both were scientific possibilities. “I don’t know if we will ever find a smoking gun, especially if it was a lab accident. The stakes are so high now. It would be terrifying to be blamed for millions of cases of COVID-19 and possibly up to a million deaths by year end, if the pandemic continues to grow out of control. The Chinese government has also restricted their own scholars and scientists from looking into the origins of SARS-CoV-2. At this rate, the origin of SARS-CoV-2 may just be buried by the passage of time.”
I asked Jonathan A. King, a molecular biologist and biosafety advocate from MIT, whether he’d thought lab accident when he first heard about the epidemic. “Absolutely, absolutely,” King answered. Other scientists he knew were concerned as well. But scientists, he said, in general were cautious about speaking out. There were “very intense, very subtle pressures” on them not to push on issues of laboratory biohazards. Collecting lots of bat viruses, and passaging those viruses repeatedly through cell cultures, and making bat-human viral hybrids, King believes, “generates new threats and desperately needs to be reined in.”
“All possibilities should be on the table, including a lab leak,” a scientist from the NIH, Philip Murphy — chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Immunology — wrote me recently. Nikolai Petrovsky, a professor of endocrinology at Flinders University College of Medicine in Adelaide, Australia, said in an email, “There are indeed many unexplained features of this virus that are hard if not impossible to explain based on a completely natural origin.” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, wrote that he’d been concerned for some years about the Wuhan laboratory and about the work being done there to create “chimeric” (i.e., hybrid) SARS-related bat coronaviruses “with enhanced human infectivity.” Ebright said, “In this context, the news of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan screamed lab release.”
For more than 15 years, coronavirologists strove to prove that the threat of SARS was ever present and must be defended against, and they proved it by showing how they could doctor the viruses they stored in order to force them to jump species and go directly from bats to humans. More and more bat viruses came in from the field teams, and they were sequenced and synthesized and “rewired,” to use a term that Baric likes. In this international potluck supper of genetic cookery, hundreds of new variant diseases were invented and stored. And then one day, perhaps, somebody messed up. It’s at least a reasonable, “parsimonious” explanation of what might have happened.
This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.
I hope the vaccine works.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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It always struck me that this was possible, but most scientists I've read about say this is naturally occurring and it almost certainly didn't happen this way.
Sorry to be cynical, but I guess that wouldn't make as interesting an article.
Proud supporter of Plan 2525. Everything you think, do and say will be in the pill you took today.
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Politi"fact" backtracks. I thought "facts" were, you know, something true, and immutable. That's why they're called "facts" and not "opinions."
But, be that as it may....
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/politifact-retracts-wuhan-lab-theory-fact-check
Later, in Sept. 2020, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a virologist and former postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hong Kong, repeated the theory on Fox News, saying, "I can present solid scientific evidence to our audience that this virus, COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2 virus, actually is not from nature. It is a man-made virus created in the lab."
PolitiFact gave her a “pants on fire rating.”
Now, months later, major news organizations are backpedaling, publishing corrections and reports conceding that their initial assessments may have been premature. PolitiFact, which has as much egg on its face as anyone, has retracted its article awarding Dr. Yan a “pants on fire rating.”
“When this fact-check was first published in September 2020,” the group said this week in an editor’s note, “PolitiFact’s sources included researchers who asserted the SARS-CoV-2 virus could not have been manipulated. That assertion is now more widely disputed.”
The note adds, “For that reason, we are removing this fact-check from our database pending a more thorough review. Currently, we consider the claim to be unsupported by evidence and in dispute.”
The original fact-check is still available on PolitiFact’s website for, as the group says, “transparency and archival purposes.”
The editor’s note fails to explain why, exactly, they chose to believe their sources over others. What hard evidence did PolitiFact’s sources provide that led them to believe Dr. Yan was indisputably wrong? Not even a little wrong — "pants on fire" wrong.
For that matter, what evidence did the Washington Post have when it accused Cotton of pushing a “conspiracy theory”?
These media outlets were so certain the lab theory was wrong. They were so certain Cotton and others couldn’t possibly be right. Their misplaced certainty had them practically tripping over themselves to declare the theory a lie and a falsehood, even though they had no evidence proving anything of the sort.
“The possibility of a laboratory accident or inadvertent leak having caused the coronavirus outbreak must not be ignored,” the Washington Post’s editorial board said in January. “The genetic makeup of the coronavirus is similar to a variant found in bats. Research into bat coronaviruses was being conducted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which collected samples from a mine in Yunnan province in 2012 and 2013.”
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@doctor-phibes said in Lab Leak?:
It always struck me that this was possible, but most scientists I've read about say this is naturally occurring and it almost certainly didn't happen this way.
Sorry to be cynical, but I guess that wouldn't make as interesting an article.
The scientists in this field are hardly disinterested disinterested observers. If it comes out as a lab leak, this affects all of them when it comes to grants and funding. As noted in the original article, the manipulation of these viruses is pretty widespread in their community.
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Too far from the epicenter of the pandemic for the Wuhan Virus to where the supposed host resides. Secondly, the Chinese have been living with and eating these bats for centuries.
No I understand a bit about mutations and fully realize that a disease that formally only resided in bats could transmit over to humans (i.e. Monkeys/Ebola in Africa), but I also know that there are two biolabs in Wuhan, one of which is probably working of Gain Of Function virus weaponization.
So, I've always been pretty convinced about the Duck Argument. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc. I don't think of zebras when hearing hoofbeats (hey, a twofer!). So, I think the probability pretty high that it came from the Wuhan lab.
The question I really would like to know, was it a naturally occurring virus the Chinese found and it leaked out while studying it, or is it a weaponized variant that got loose?
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If it's a weapon, it's a pretty shit one. How many weapons are designed to primarily kill old overweight people?
Proud supporter of Plan 2525. Everything you think, do and say will be in the pill you took today.
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@doctor-phibes said in Lab Leak?:
If it's a weapon, it's a pretty shit one. How many weapons are designed to primarily kill old overweight people?
We are not a good enemy to have. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if lefties and communists the world over have murderous plans specifically targeted at us.
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@doctor-phibes said in Lab Leak?:
If it's a weapon, it's a pretty shit one. How many weapons are designed to primarily kill old overweight people?
Maybe, maybe not.
Maybe the Chinese found the transmission ability they wanted, but not quite the symptoms they needed.
OTOH, if you could saturate an urban center with the virus, you render their healthcare system ineffective in days.
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Huh??
Look at the results, if Covid was deliberately released. It's not difficult to go through the various impacts of a "what if" game.I don't believe it was deliberately released. No human could be that horrible, to either demand it to be done, or released by one sick MF.
But I would really like to know, what happened, where it is now OK to talk about a possible leak, when up to now it has been forbidden, or you're racist.
What changed, I wonder?
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@doctor-phibes said in Lab Leak?:
If it's a weapon, it's a pretty shit one. How many weapons are designed to primarily kill old overweight people?
It cost our economy 15-20 trillion dollars and while we were distracted they got Hong Kong, built several islands consolidating their hold on the South China Sea, expanded their belt and road and then told us as the pandemic ended they were equal to us.
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Based on what I am reading here and the sentiment it is arousing.....
So what's stopping the US from building an international coalition of the willing and taking out the Chinese communists one and for all? Apparently they have no credible military allies and are essentially isolated politically. Yes, it will cost the US a few more trillion dollars or so, but it'll boost the economy by getting people back to work in well paid manufacturing jobs.
A good start would be to bring these articles and similar and select information to the UNSC and present the findings. Hell, it could prove to be the yellow cake or smoking gun giving cause for this next world tour of US military adventurism.
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“Little by little I am learning the art of being quite content by doing very little slowly” ~ Lionel Hardcastle
