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A comment on Pangolins found to carry viruses related to Covid-19. Parent comment

Re:Pangolins found to carry viruses related to Covid-19 by ralph84 on Thursday March 26, 2020 @01:02PM (#22695592)
That the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing research on engineered coronaviruses isn't in dispute. They have published several research papers describing their work over the last 10 years.

It wouldn't have had to have been a deliberate release for SARS-CoV-2 to have come from there. Accidents happen, and there have been several accidental releases of the original SARS-CoV from Chinese labs. It's also not beyond the realm of possibilities that someone tasked with destroying animals that were research subjects decided to make a few extra yuan selling them to the wet market across the street instead.

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Re:Pangolins found to carry viruses related to Covid-19 by nate_meurer on Thursday March 26, 2020 @01:32PM (#22695871)
> there have been several accidental releases of the original SARS-CoV from Chinese labs.

I've never heard of any accidental escapes of SARS. Do you have a source for this claim?

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Re:Pangolins found to carry viruses related to Covid-19 by ralph84 on Thursday March 26, 2020 @01:38PM (#22695939)
https://nationalpost.com/news/a-brief-terrifying-history-of-...

> SARS has not re-emerged naturally, but there have been six escapes from virology labs: one each in Singapore and Taiwan, and four separate escapes at the same laboratory in Beijing.

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Re:Pangolins found to carry viruses related to Covid-19 by nate_meurer on Thursday March 26, 2020 @01:59PM (#22696135)
Perfect, thank you. The links in that article don't work for me, but they do in the original essay from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/threatened-pandemics-and-lab...

Those accidents are fucking terrifying. I'm not sure whether to be more scared of that, or of wet markets and antibiotic-soaked factory swine/cattle/poultry farms. Humanity certainly isn't taking any of this seriously enough.

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