And of course, before we had biolabs, we had any number of new diseases. A lot of our “childhood” diseases were pandemics that affected the Roman empire, but we’ve also seen HIV, Ebola, Zika, SARS1, Legionnaires disease, and Lyme disease (and no doubt others that don’t spring to mind) more recently. It’s not as if “new disease” is a weird or unusual thing.
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There was a very vague guess made using your sort of back-of-the-napkin math here. In 2012 someone noted noted that the 40ish biolabs studying pandemic level viruses, making 0.3% spills per year would have make a spill every 13 years on average.
I don’t know of any guesses of the probability of a spillover, but I’m reminded of this book, also from 2012, that painted another pandemic spillover as imminent, with the last chapter landing on Chinese Wetmarkets, of course.
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well if there was real evidence (smoking gun type), its wouldn’t be ;likely happened’, it would be ‘definitely happened’.
This is more of a if there is smoke there is fire situation. enough unlikely events happen in a row that its hard to attribute it to coincidence.
certain factions have tried to shoot down anything without smoking gun evidence as crazy right wingers. sometimes correctly, sometimes just with extreme bias against a position that was actually correct.
Now imagine the anti-vaxxer crowd, if it were confirmed that scientists had created COVID.
likely would have seen an OK City bombing level event.
Yep. Also just a fundamental and lasting distrust in all things science.
We already have this very strong love for the Jurassic Park / Icarus / Faustus story, despite it not really being a real thing. If it was, it would be pretty horrible.
It’s psychologically hard to accept it’s coincidence. But often it is.
Maybe we just had a 1 in 100 year pandemic about 100 years after the last one.
I heard someone argue that AIDS must be a disease genetically engineered circa 1940 to suppress africa because, how else could a disease be transmitted both through sex and drug use? For them, that was enough “smoke” to signal fire, never mind that RNA viruses like HIV were not even discovered until the 1980s.
Agree with what you’re saying, but the AIDS stuff is not a coincidence at all, just something truly new. Maybe an example of human nature wanting to believe conspiracy theories, but not really addressing the many signs pointing to lab-leak with Covid.
A lab leak isn’t a “conspiracy”. It’s an accidental release of a virus that was probably natural, collected from bats.
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my point is only that common sense doesn’t help much when trying to figure out whether it is a lab leak or not.
for hiv, i’m sure that many people look at the history of how the united states has treated africans and african americans, and their own experience as well, and find it common sense that this must be the cause. and this common sense is arguably well grounded. but the right specialized knowledge about rna viruses shows it to impossible. (whether it is plausible is more arguable.)
Here is a paper by a panel that finds the evidence points overwhelmingly to zoonosis, which i think is meant to exclude the possibility that it was an animal virus being studied in a lab (without intentional or unintentional gain of function) that was then accidentally released.
the article notes there are other scientists who still think it was leaked.
https://www.science.org/content/article/evidence-suggests-pandemic-came-nature-not-lab-panel-says
“For nearly 3 years we’ve been running in circles about different lab-leak scenarios, and nothing has really added to this hypothesis,” says co-author Isabella Eckerle, a virologist at the University of Geneva. “We have missed the chance to say … what can we do better the next time?”
Uh, maybe prevent China from incinerating all the evidence, including all the animals taken from the market where it was suspected of passing to humans?
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It’s not great that the article opens by saying the Chair quit and tried to disband the Commission due to bias.
Which pretty well encapsulates the last 3 years of debate.
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I’m comfortable with calling it a Chinese government conspiracy theory. They probably have more viruses on file. More experiments. More info from the scientists. And especially more early case records. They haven’t been open at all about any key information. If it were a lab leak, I bet they would know about it, or at least have the means to find out.
I don’t think “conspiracy theories” are that wild though. Our own government has kept many secrets, only to reveal (or leak) them decades later. To some degree it’s pretty normal.
The frustrating thing is that the lack of transparency doesn’t tell us much, since we never expected China to be transparent or open. If it had been a leak in an open democracy, the government would at least be trying to appear transparent, here they don’t even need to do that.
maybe those guys wearing tinfoil hats weren’t wrong…
That’s not what Jimmy Kimmel said on this show.
It’s one of the possibilities. Definitely not most likely.
I read your link. Where does it say it’s “most likely” other than the title?
The title’s not enough? How many times you need it repeated?
In the first sentence?>
The US Department of Energy has assessed that the Covid-19 pandemic most likely came from a laboratory leak in China, according to a newly updated classified intelligence report.
Two sources said that the Department of Energy assessed in the intelligence report that it had “low confidence” the Covid-19 virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan.
However, they make that assessment with low confidence.
So WAG after looking at all the evidence they have access to?