I disagree, I have yet to see anyone refute that it was brewed in a lab.
That said it’s been an open question for a year now without much progress.
have you seen anything to make it more probable manufactured in a lab as opposed to natural and being researched in a lab?
Maybe? I don’t know? To me, there’s not really any convincing evidence in any direction.
The strongest evidence towards it being created in a lab is that we were just recently considering funding experiments that read a lot like creating COVID-19.
Specifically the plan was to insert furin cleavage sites into SARs-like viruses, and then try to infect humanized mice. And the remarkable thing about COVID-19 is its novel furin cleavage site. It just reads like a big coincidence, not that a coincidence is proof.
And of course, the plan also involved sending folks out into caves to collect thousands of viruses, so really it supports both lab hypotheses.
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The very stable genius who made it into office by constantly throwing out red meat…maybe he’s going to run into credibility problems when he does it during a pandemic.
Iraq seemed like such a BS sell at the time I am not sure how anyone bought into it.
Lab created leak, natural cause…either way, COVID seems to have played out almost identical to the pandemic of ~1890, which very well could have been caused by one of the existing endemic coronaviruses.
Interesting comparison. Because that’s my attitude to Corona now. Eh, it’s basically the flu, time to carry on bit no pending personal emergency.
Granted my behaviour has changed permanently with masks and hand washing and caution, but otherwise, back to normal, it’ll come around once year like the flu. And I don’t worry about the flu.
Can you tell me more about these ‘humanized mice’?
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This one is hot off the press, or rather not off the press yet. Why is the economist rushing to cover a pre-print?
Anyway, the basic idea is to ask how COVID might have been “stitched together”. To do that they look at what biologists sometimes do when stitching together SARS viruses, which here means adding restriction sites (ie. the seams) that make it easy to stitch.
There’s already a few issues here-- the sites are naturally occurring, there’s many different possible enzymes that could be used, and the sites are often removed afterwards, so it doesn’t necessarily make sense that they would be there anyway.
In any case, they looked for the most popular to work with enzymes, and tried to analyze them and found a bunch of apparent outliers. Like the sites are somewhat evenly spaced, and the genes around the sites are all silent, which again is something you would do if you were engineering the virus, and is arguably an outlier naturally.
Note this paper is not published yet. Assuming it clears peer review, and all the arguments made are reasonable, it’s still not anything like definitive proof.
Study:
TLDR
Come back in another week or two.
For now it’s mostly just fodder for Twitter wars.
some one is offering a pretty detailed background of the lab leak. my truth-o-meter is somewhere in the middle, but parts of this are very beleivable.
When i search his name, I only get foreign news outlets. like US news is still vetting (or awaiting orders…)
I’m curious what others will make of this, but at a quick glance he sounds too full of himself to be taken at face-value.
This looks like BS to me.
Lots of ‘he believes US’ is responsible for funding, ‘he claims to know must be from a lab leak’, etc.
But missing are phrases like ‘he has evidence that …’.
Sounds like the guy wrote a book and is trying to make money.
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The Sun isn’t exactly the most reputable news source. I forget how it compares to Fox News or the National Enquirer.
The idea that covid escaped a lab is plausible to me, and there is a known association between the lab in question and the United States.
I could even accept the idea that poor risk management could be blamed for such a release, and that US federal officials share some of the blame for for those failures because of that old association.
But if these things were true, the article smells a bit like it’s transcending plausibility in the interest of sensationalism.
And even if it’s true that it was a virus modified by humans, and not a naturally occurring virus, calling it a “bioweapon” is pretty over the top. The Chinese had even more terrible than we had developing a vaccine. Weapons are generally things you can point at your enemies, not things that blow up in your own face.
It still seems more likely that it was a naturally occurring virus. That lab was in the business of collecting them, and also the wet market was a natural place for them to show up.
I still have my conspiracy theory hat on and think it could have just as easily originated in the US or Italy. COVID was not isolated to Wuhan when it was identified, it had already been circulating for weeks. New viruses are only found when symptoms are different enough from existing viruses and a number of similar cases exist that someone connects the dots and raises an alarm.
In a time where every republican accusation ends up being a confession, Trump’s constant calling it the China virus and Rand Paul’s attacks on Fauci around gain of function research make for a good distraction that our own lab here in the US is in Atlanta along with the busiest airport in the world.
Anecdotally, my brother in law has a sister that is a nurse in Atlanta and said they were seeing a weird wave of pneumonia cases in November 2019.
Within China, it almost certainly started in Wuhan. They also have a large international airport, which seems just as likely a source for a new virus in the area as a wet market.
Eh, weapons blow up in people’s faces all the time. I say this as someone whose Girl Scout camp shut down after it became known that radioactive waste from the nearby nuclear warhead manufacturing facility was leaching into the groundwater and on multiple occasions radioactive dust was accidentally released into the air.
It’s quite possible for a government to develop a bio weapon, accidentally release it to their own population instead of their enemy, and do so prematurely, before they’d figured out a cure/antidote/vaccine.
Whether that is what happened in this particular case is a different question. But I don’t take the fact that it hit China hardest as evidence that they weren’t developing a bio weapon. They may not have been, but I don’t make that inference based on the fact that they hurt themselves in the process.
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+1, our own bioweapons program had (at least) a couple deadly accidents in the 50’s and 60’s. Not to mention the 2001 anthrax terrorist attacks.
I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it were at least funded by/associated with China’s military.
That said, it seems to me that plenty of very earnest peace-loving people believe in this research. So it’s a kind of unnecessary accusation.
Sounds like a stretch. If we engineered the virus, then we did so in UNC, snail-mailed it back to Wuhan (as we’ve done before), and then there was the accident.
The odds that there was an outbreak at Atlanta, that spread through city, but also somehow got contained, and never identified, and went specifically to Wuhan, but not any of the hundreds of other more popular cities, are like one in a billion, imo.
There’s no need for a big conspiracy hat. A small one will do. We have the DARPA proposal that outlines a recipe for “making COVID”. It involves American funding and American scientists. As far I know we didn’t follow through, but the fact that it was proposed to us suggests that we are much closer than we want to admit (assuming that it was engineered).
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