I don't think dailymail or nationalreivew are reputable source other than presenting a story.

There is an article on Nature one month ago on this topic:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

> Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus

That doesn't mean it didn't come from a lab though. "Coming from a lab" does not = man made. If they were doing research on the bats in this lab, looking to identify potential scary viruses to be ready, it is entirely possible the virus jumped from bat to researcher there and that was our patient 0.

How many times do we need to repeat this... everyone assumes that “came from a lab” means “engineered bioweapon”. No!

Also, people quickly forget that humans have been selectively evolving plants and animals for thousands of years without touching the actual genomes.

How did it come from a lab? I've heard "workers got sprayed with blood and infected", "someone screwed up"(vague), "mishandled lab waste".

Just saying it "came from a lab", makes it sound man made. If you don't want misunderstandings, you need spell it out and make it absolutely clear. It doesn't even sound like there is a clear narrative about how it "escaped from the lab", just a lot of rumors. Rumors about a rumor, certainly doesn't sound more credible than China's official stance, and their credibility is already very low.

You get it from a bat the same way you get it from another person you touch the bat and touch your face or you clean the cage drop get . You dump out the litter box/tray and huff some particles. You draw a blood sample and a drop of it gets on your visor/goggles. You take it off late and touch your face. It's nothing sexy.

Note that that the Wuhan CDC, the lab ~300m from the market, the lab that was experimenting on bats, is not the BSL4 Wuhan Institute of Virology miles away from the seafood market, that everyone loves taking about. It's probably a level 2 or 3 lab.

Escape from a lab doesn't imply man made any more than tiger escaped from zoo implies that the tiger was born there. SARS escaped from BSL3 labs on China on multiple occasions, that doesn't imply that SARS was man made.

This article from 2014 (it is untainted by coronavirus politics) documents the long history of viral outbreaks from labs throughout the world. This is a known and relatively common phenomena, appearing to occur once every few years.

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

Yeah but the story matters only if it's man made. However what's the story ? "they made a mistake in a lab" ? great.

The story is that "they made a mistake in a lab"...

1. while doing research that has been banned in other nations due to the extreme hazard

2. despite having a history of lab virus escapes that killed people

3. and then they covered it up

BTW, the virus is at least sort of man made. The lab was breeding viruses. There is no evidence that gene editing technology was used, but we do know that the lab has published multiple research papers about making coronaviruses more infectious in humans.

I think there needs to be a damn good justification for purposely making viruses more able to infect and harm humans. Why would you do that????? Mere scientific curiosity is not a proper justification for putting all of humanity at risk.

> the lab has published multiple research papers about making coronaviruses more infectious in humans.

that's frightening. Do you have any more information about those papers?

Here is China making a coronavirus like the one causing the pandemic, even acting on the ACE2 receptor and testing it in human cells, publishing it in early 2008:

https://jvi.asm.org/content/82/4/1899

Here they are again, years later, still playing with extremely hazardous coronaviruses that act on the ACE2 receptor in humans:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711

This one gene-edits the host cells to have both human and bat traits, making it easier to breed bat viruses into becoming human viruses:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00705-010-0729-6

>https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00705-010-0729-6

It's not correct to call insertion of a plasmid to be gene editing of a host cell, though this could be arguably pedantic.

I'm curious how you concluded that what they did made it easier to breed bat viruses into becoming human viruses?

Great point. It may have evolved once out of the lab

If animals to human transmission can happen in a wildlife market, then it can also happen unintentionally in a virology lab researching very same family of virus. In the absence of substantial evidence, both theories are equally plausible to me.

You miss the point entirely. Nothing in the Nature piece is in conflict with the theory that it accidentally escaped a lab were Coronaviruses are studied.

Not that it was a weapon. Not that it was man made. Simply someone working at a research lab, screwed up and released a dangerous virus.

Occam’s razor, it seems to fit

The Daily Mail is not a credible resource. Wikipedia banned, as one example.

This paper is only about engineering a virus using a common backbone virus as a starting point.

That does not mean the virus could not be derived within a lab using recombination methods in other animals and sourcing the starting novel virus from bats. In fact, this type of research was the exact research being done at the Wuhan Virology lab.

> the exact research being done at the Wuhan Virology lab

I would like to see the exact research they tried to do there. Navigating through their published research list, I couldn't locate any, but I am not an expert:

http://www.whiov.cas.cn/kycg_105248/lwqk/index.html

I don't think they're particularly reputable sources in general either but in this case all the source material is publicly accessible and verifyble. They just happen to be one of the few actually presenting it in English.

I agree that Daily Mail should not be used as source in informed contexts, however the thebulletin.org link has very well informed comments (at least).

Can anybody explain the downvotes? Daily Mail is a well-known unreliable source, pretty much a tabloid. The article mentioned it poor, as a matter of fact.

I agree with you people are linking to garbage sources pushing propaganda, misinformation or muddled garbage.

What a lot of people are trying to do is execute the classic psychological trick; make the problem go away by finding someone safe to blame.

Won't work for SARS-COV2. It doesn't care.

The Mail Online is constantly dissed in left-leaning forums like this one, but if you just go read the articles and check the claims they're not usually any less accurate than any other news source (this doesn't mean they're very accurate of course, just that other sources are no better).

This article consists of some publicly known facts, along with some anonymous sources in the British government's emergency committee (the Cabinet leaks like a sieve so this is entirely plausible). It also cites an academic, some report from Beijing News (whilst noting that the report was retracted) and an academic paper that was uploaded and then deleted. It's written in a pretty neutral tone and explicitly calls out cases where its sources may have issues. The article is no different to the sort of speculation routinely found in Bloomberg, the WSJ, NYT, the Guardian etc.

What we're seeing here is just another day in no-platforming land. To the left what is said doesn't matter, who says it is everything. Based on prior experience I'd be willing to bet that virtually none of the people spitting fire over a Daily Mail or National Review link here have even read the articles, let alone rigorously apply the same purported standards to every news link they see posted.

Well said. It's a disturbing trend throughout the internet that the Left completely disregards publications that don't follow the accepted narrative. Those individuals and publications that do follow the narrative - very often entities that the public has placed a significant amount of trust in - are all too eager to agree and encourage this sort of delegitimization.