I think there’s a big mushy overlap between “defense” and “weapon” research. Because you need the weapon to make the defense. So any military might feel safer by having both. In the same way we feel safest when we own all the weapons and all the defenses.
Even reading the DARPA proposal is a bit nonsensical.
You can see a picture of some bats and some soldiers, for no reason. I mean, it’s not like we have US military bases next to horseshoe bat caves in Rural China.
I disagree that they’re not a threat to the military. Military bases were hit pretty hard by Covid, especially when you consider the average age and health of those involved compared to the population at large.
I think it’s fair to say that viruses and bio weapons in general are not threats exclusively to the military, but I would go as far as to say that the military was somewhat uniquely affected by Covid due to the close living quarters in ships and on bases, especially in barracks.
Ok, well you edited your post after I started typing my response. I was taking issue with your statement that the military was not particularly at risk, or something close to that.
It’s like saying “I won’t be able to take you to school tomorrow, if an H-bomb goes off in our city. So I better stop that from happening, for the sake of your education.”
On the contrary, if the military is largely incapacitated right when they might be needed most, it’s a huge threat. And one that they ought to have plans for.
I’m glad that they are treating pandemics and bio weapons as the bona fide threats that they are.
Bioweapons for sure, since “weapon” implies that it’s used to win a war.
But the paper was about a zoonotic pandemic, coming presumably from rural bat caves, and killing everybody. I guess it’s the nature of a grant proposal, but I would describe it as a threat to the world, including the US civilian population, rather than a threat to the military.
Were they denying that it was also a threat to the world? Most threats to the military are threats to all of us. The attack on Pearl Harbor, the Nazis firebombing London, us dropping nukes on Hiroshima & Nagasaki, practically any ground battle… all of those involved lots of civilian deaths.
Yet attacks on naval bases, dropping bombs (of any kind) on cities, military battles are all things the military prepares for.
I’m hard-pressed to think of a conflict where the only deaths were military short of some extremely isolated incident such as bombing the Marine barracks in Beirut.
I dont think we will ever see real evidence of what happened. but the lab leak theory has gone from ‘right wing anti-Asian hate group conspiracy theory’ to ‘likely happened’.
most people are still questioning the details of if this was intentional, how much it was modified, what was the US gov involvement, but it seems like the virus is actually from that lab.
this book reads almost like fan-fiction.
if the author drops dead suspiciously in the next few weeks, Ill give it some more credit.
This is my opinion as well. "probably’ from the chinese lab.
I’m OK with that not being entirely confirmed at present. I think if it was actually confirmed, that the anti-asian racism and hatred would be as big a problem as covid. So, leave it at ‘yeah, likely china, likely an accident’ and not worry so much about random asians getting beaten up and/or killed.
There should be evidence of something that “likely happened” shouldn’t there?
I don’t know how to evaluate the probability that it was a lab leak. At least some people with serious opinions seem to think it probably leaked. Others think it was probably natural.
I don’t consider the guy in that interview to have a serious opinion though. he doesn’t move the needle on my judgement one way or the other.
I’m still in the “probably natural” camp. Which doesn’t mean it wasn’t also a lab leak; that lab collected nasty natural viruses. And it’s easy to make a mistake when you are playing with nasty infectious stuff, regardless of where it came from.
There’s NEVER been a conflict between “natural” and “lab leak”, and all the “which one?” speculation drives me nuts.
But don’t those all have either a propensity model to support them, or some prior experience/data?
To come up with a prior probability, i’d want to know the number of potentially human transmissible viruses in animals, the number of individual animals with those viruses, the rate of interaction with people, and the probability of transmission.
For the other, i’d want to know the number of labs with that kind of virus, and the failure rate of those security controls.
Then some kind of ratio would give a prior probability.
I haven’t seen any of those things. Maybe somebody can estimate them.
Those are tough questions. Obviously we don’t really have the answers.
Before COVID occurred, people tried to consider the proliferation of biolabs as well as the increased human activity near certain spillover sights, and tried to make (as you might imagine) off the wall guesses based on that.
It also doesn’t even account for the possibility of an engineered virus.
