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