I think the problem is that when people think of "lab" they think of some sort of devious genetic engineering bioweapons program, and not something considerably more likely but much more mundane like some scientists studying what sort of potentially bad viruses the local bats have.
2. The person who accidentally leaked it from the lab may not even know it. Research into COVID-19 has estimated up to 20% of people infected may be asymptomatic carriers of the disease who can still spread it to others. Person who works in the lab gets infected, doesn’t get visibly sick, accidentally spreads it to someone in the vicinity of their lab by breathing or coughing or singing or sneezing, virus is now out and they don’t even realize it.
The 1977 H1N1 pandemic is widely believed by scientists to have been an accidental lab release. Evidence as to which lab it escaped from has never been found and we will probably never know. https://mbio.asm.org/content/6/4/e01013-15 “A biosafety lapse in a research laboratory is now most often cited as the cause of the 1977-1978 reemergence of the H1N1 influenza virus strain”
If this were one of those, as has been claimed on the basis of the frequently mis-cited October 2019 WIV paper, anyone in the world would be able to see that by comparing the SARS-CoV-2 sequence accessioned in NCBI's database with one of the many HIV sequences also available there. I've done the alignment myself, against several HIV sequences. So can you; you don't even need a local toolchain, you can pick them and BLAST them right on NCBI's site.
When you do, you'll find the same thing I did: there is no significant similarity between any HIV strain and SARS-CoV-2. So the "escaped chimera" theory is not only implausible on its face given the nature of pseudoviruses, but disproven by genomic evidence, besides.
Please don't spread disinformation.
1) where did hiv sequences come from? Are they the human immuno deficiency virus sequences?
2) you are suggesting that chimeras are created impotent, and that hybrid viruses cannot be created to be effective otherwise. My question is that whatever combination of pangolin and bat viruses is said to have happened naturally in a host, could it happen in a petri dish too? Could WIV be conducting such research? Or are such petri dish chimeras always unable to jump from human to human. Is it a natural property or choice when creating chimeras?
3) it seems that the virus is like SARS but has receptor proteins similar to a known pangolin coronavirus. Is it also possible for two viruses to leak to a single lab employee, and then combine in the first human host right away. It still can be said to leak from the lab in this scenario.
Thanks for having patience for my uninformed opinions.
I'm sure I'm missing
1. Yes. The claim based on the misreading of the 2019 paper is that SARS-CoV-2 is actually a lab-created combination of another coronavirus and the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. If that were true, the genome of SARS-CoV-2 would incorporate large parts of the HIV genome verbatim. It does not; comparing these genomes for identical or nearly identical subsequences via BLAST, by far the tool most widely used for this purpose, shows no such similarity.
2. Viral recombination occurs when multiple related strains of a given virus infect the same cell at the same time. That can be done in vitro, but I haven't seen any papers from WIV describing such experiments. Notably, the frequently cited 2019 paper describes a totally different kind of experiment, which could not under any circumstances have produced a virus with the genome which SARS-CoV-2 has been observed to have.
3. For that to happen would require two different strains of the same virus to independently develop the same mutation allowing them to cross over and infect humans, and to simultaneously infect the same worker in the lab, and to then recombine in such a way as to produce SARS-CoV-2.
That is not impossible, but it is about as likely to occur as it is for every atom in your body to simultaneously transmute into gold.
I find the wet market theory full of such improbabilities too. How is ncov19 relatively close to two known viruses, 1) the sars like bat virus it was 96% similar to, and 2) the pangolin virus with which it has resembling receptor proteins. Seems a lot of coincidence for these two to combine, both of which can jump to humans, and 300 meters from a leading Coronavirus research lab.
I know I'm just repeating the conspiracy theory, but just explaining my position. The virus was found initially at the wet market, and there is no proof of its origin being there. Plus it seems perfectly feasible for it come out of the lab and not be a deliberately engineered virus, atleast not one using the 2019 paper's chimera virus techniques.
Those same traits also produce a high degree of similarity between a lot of genomically differentiable strains of coronavirus, especially since spike proteins tend to be strongly conserved for their direct effect on virulence - a significant mutation there is likely to be maladaptive, if it changes the protein structure enough for cells to no longer uptake a virion that expresses it. So it's not really a surprise to see that two different strains have similar spike proteins, and doesn't really give much basis for inference about relatedness between them.
Another important point is that coronaviruses are so common specifically in bats, which are both extremely plentiful and unusually accommodating hosts for many kinds of viruses including coronaviruses, very often with multiple strains infecting a single host at once. That gives coronaviruses - which, remember, are already good at recombining to produce new strains, every one being possibly able to jump species - more chances at that kind of recombination than they would have otherwise.
Too, bats shed virus in feces the same way humans do, and bat guano is so effective a fertilizer that wars have started over access to supplies of it. So it's not difficult or unlikely to postulate a chain of events like this:
- a recombination event in a bat produces a virus capable of infecting humans,
- which is then deposited in feces used to fertilize a human food crop,
- which is then harvested and taken to a city market to be sold,
- and all it takes for someone to get sick from there is not washing their hands often enough while they're cooking.
To be clear, I'm not saying this is what happened. Nobody knows that yet. But precisely because nobody knows that yet, it's important to consider the relative likelihoods of various ways that the pathogen might have developed into a form that can infect humans, and then reached the point of actually doing so.
That's what I'm doing here. Each stage of this postulated chain of events relies only on things that are already known to frequently occur, and have been so known since long before SARS-CoV-2 was even known to exist.
The result is unprovable, of course, just as with every other theory of this disease's origin that anyone has advanced so far. But it doesn't rely on any unusually small probabilities, and so it seems a lot likelier to me than the combination of a lab accident of a kind known to have happened only a few times in the last two decades, and a simultaneous superinfection of a single researcher with two different strains of coronavirus.
All people are saying is that there's a reasonable hypothesis that this thing came out of that laboratory. There's enough circumstantial evidence to support that theory even if it's not a leading theory.
US supermarkets sold lettuce that killed people. Should those supermarkets be shut for good?
If China can enforce the largest lockdown ever and enforce a one-child policy for decades, they can easily ban live animals at markets.
B)Food-borne illness actually does kill around 150,000 per year worldwide. It is a serious concern, and difficult to track/contain. There are also concerns around regulations being too lax, not enough inspectors, and living conditions of those who harvest food.
C)Maybe China should ban wet markets, but then maybe people should be home for Easter Sunday and not at a church. Now we start to ban "cultural norms" and "ways of life", which people get fussy about.
B) I'm not disagreeing with you.
C) People should not be at an in-person Easter Sunday. I realize a percentage of churches decided to not close. That being said, wanting to eat bats is not comparable to wanting to practice religion.
Given poor testing/tracking, it probably was floating around in the USA 3 months ago. I am not saying that COVID-19 is not deadlier, but that food-borne illnesses are serious and rife in the food supply, and can lead to death for compromised individuals, yet we have not shutdown our markets or meat processing facilities despite outbreaks of food-borne illnesses being somewhat common. Those illnesses can indeed lead to death for thousands of people each year, especially those with pre-existing health conditions.
Also the cruise industry is notorious for food-borne outbreaks of Norovirus. These cruises typically have multiple incidents every year, and are great vectors for spreading viral infections, yet the cruise industry has never been shutdown.
You think eating bats and going to church are not comparable, because that's your opinion on what's culturally normal. Others might say eating a bat is delicious and going to church is dumb. Both have risks and I am not a fan either. No one should be eating bats or going to church right now, but that's going to offend people on both sides.
This is a ridiculous claim if I ever saw one as food poisoning or food related diseases have never overwhelmed hospitals anywhere in recent history. Unless you are talking about some remote place where COVID has not landed yet, in which case the comment has no point. And we are not even talking about the past, COVID19 is still pretty much active and killing people still as we speak. We'll draw comparisons when it's over, which is not now.
Someone accuses you of murder and says "prove you didn't do it". You didn't do it, but can't satisfactorily prove such a negative. Maybe you were outside taking a walk and no one can provide an alibi. Does that mean you should be assumed guilty?
Also, I'm just saying any evidence that anything may have escaped by mistake; not that it was intentionally spread. Sure, CIA and such can discover such evidence much more effectively than any commenter here, but in that case, shouldn't you let the CIA / US government make those accusations instead of a random commenter who has no knowledge of the situation or basis for their claim?
>China has hundreds of documents of this base and backgrounds on all scientists, which it can release to no detriment at all, supposing the lab had nothing to do with corona.
What documents, exactly? And how would that help disprove that the virus inadvertently escaped from the lab?
You might have had a point if the Chinese regime wasn't putting it's propaganda machine into overdrive spewing conspiracy theories on how covid19 was created by the US to attack China.
Or are you just saying the best geopolitical response to unsubstantiated propaganda is more unsubstantiated propaganda volleyed right back at them?
This is similar to people who accuse the CIA of orchestrating every big event or crime. They say they don't need to provide evidence, because the CIA is untrustworthy and tries to deceive people. But this is a completely bullshit argument.
Is it though? I think that it makes a lot of sense.
You always need evidence, regardless of the nature of the accused person or entity. You could be accusing Stalin himself; you still need evidence
Either you didn't understood the point or you don't want to address it.
The point is that if China's regime tries to portray the fact that they operate a coronsvirus military research lab a few meters from the outbreak's alledged epicenter as nonsense while at the same time they try to pin the blame on the outbreak on military coronsvirus research work conducted by other nations.
I mean, if a work accident committed by China's military is ruled out as outlandish then why are they pushing conspiracy theories akin to area52 aliens as reasonable and plausible?
The lab escape theory is certainly completely plausible. But it becomes no more or less plausible just because there's "US military conspiracy" propaganda spread by the government.
They easily could've done that to counter all of the accusations hurled at them by US citizens that it's an intentional bioweapon, or due to Trump calling it "the Chinese virus" and constantly trying to associate it with them, or to pull attention away from themselves due to the outbreak starting there and just generally to reduce embarrassment and spread confusion that they hope will improve their reputation, or even specifically because of posts like yours.
If you assume for the sake of argument that the lab hypothetically isn't responsible, but lots of people think it is, this would be one way to provide such a distraction. It would as well if the lab were in fact responsible, but that definitely doesn't mean that's proof the lab is responsible. They have a ton of possible reasons for why they would want to spread this propaganda.
The hypothesis that "they're more likely to spread propaganda about the US military causing it if their lab caused it" carries a ton of implicit assumptions which may or may not be true. It's reasonable to speculate about and discuss, but it alone is evidence of nothing. If there were some leaked document saying something like "hey, since our lab fucked up let's distract people by accusing the US", then it'd be a different story.
Of course, China's government promoting and spreading absurd conspiracy theories needs to be condemned no matter what, but an analysis of the true root cause of the outbreak needs to be totally impartial and objective.
Because the incident isn't about deflection to US.
It was retaliating and warning US against pushing Wuhan conspiracy theory (Tom Cotton) and calling covid19 Wuhan virus (Pompeo) after WHO re-designation. Both these events proceeded the Chinese tweets.
Current US administration has consistently been the instigator of bellicose diplomacy. But people conveniently forget when it comes to China who has been remarkably patient compared to other countries, including US allies.
US is pushing crazy propaganda to deflect blame from their inadequate response. In return, China unleashed one of their mid tier diplomats to troll crazy US rhetoric coming from a Senator and Secretary of State to demonstrate that China is willing to escalate to dirty propaganda games. Hence why it had to be de-escalated by Chinese ambassador to US, a diplomat 2 levels higher than the original foreign ministry spokes person. It also plays well to Chinese domestic audience.
If China wanted to deflect blame, there would be much more plausible ways. The fact that China chose to confront US conspiracy with Chinese conspiracy should be interpreted as signalling to not go full retard. The message and messenger was calibrated for this affect. And what do you know the US backed off on this avenue of attack and has shifted to boosting Taiwan. Also concurrent to the conspiracy tit-for-tat was banning each others journalists. These events have to be evaluated in proper context and timelines.
It would also do you well to keep in mind that if we're using the criminal justice system as some standard obstruction of justice itself is a crime, as is destruction/tampering of evidence as well as witness tampering. Physical evidence is not required to convict; strong circumstantial evidence is often sufficent.
How exactly is the Chinese regime not to blame for this mess? Between the blatant cover-up and falsified reports and underreporting deaths by a couple of orders of magnitude and knowingly stating that the virus didn't spread when they knew full well it spread like wildfire and intentionally leaving out demostratedly infected but asymptomatic cases out of the statistics while simultaneously blaming new cases on infected foreigners, how is China's regime not to blame for this whole mess?
And should we now just forget that the Chinese regime has been trying to pin the blame on their covid19 mess on Italy of all places?
Stating it's compelling isn't evidence, just that it is an explanation that appeals to large populations of our species who are hold certain suspicions.
There is, however, a long history of animal to human transmission of diseases.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I have yet to see anyone provide evidence, only twitter rumors, and twitter rumors aren't even regular evidence.