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Re:Officer of China’s People’s Liberation Army Arrested at LAX by ALittleLight on Friday June 12, 2020 @10:48PM (#23506303)
I don't know why you would call a lab escape a "wildly implausible conspiracy theory." We know viruses like this are studied in labs and that lab escapes are possible. Maybe it didn't escape from a lab, but it's not a wild conspiracy like saying 5G causes Covid.

As I understand it, the best reasons to suspect lab escape are:

1. The horseshoe bats thought to carry the virus live about a thousand miles away from Wuhan. Why wouldn't the virus start over there instead of in Wuhan.

2. The Wuhan Virology institute was a "BSL-4" lab, China's first and only. The BSL-4 lab is the only kind rated to handle very severe or infectious pathogens.

2.5 There were preexisting documented concerns about the safety protocols at the lab, saying they were substandard.

3. The Wuhan lab worked on "Chimeric coronavirus" exactly like Covid.

There's a lot more evidence and analysis from people more capable than me (see sources 3 & 4), but to me, the basic case "We are absolutely certain it came from bats a thousand miles away and definitely not the bioweapons lab next door researching this exact type of virus" makes me pretty suspicious. Add on to that the "mainstream" consensus has been wrong at every step, no lockdown, it's the flu, masks won't help, slow and few tests, etc - and I don't think anyone is really justified in dismissing the lab escape theory out of hand. Perhaps the experts are wrong. Again.

I'm actually not familiar with the evidence claiming that it's certainly zoonotic. My understanding is that is less likely due to the fact that it looks like a combination of a horseshoe bat virus and a pangolin virus - which theoretically could happen if a bat caught a pangolin virus, those two viruses infected the same cell, while reproducing the viruses were accidentally merged to cause the resultant virus to still be viable and have gained function, and then that unlucky bat traveled a thousand miles away to Wuhan to enjoy a bat stew...

Either all that, or, again, the neighborhood bioweapons lab with sloppy safety controls that was genetically modifying coronaviruses accidentally let one out.

1. https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-wuhan-lab-complicate...

2. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52318539

3. https://project-evidence.github.io/

4. https://link.medium.com/MI3PjBt0g7

Re:Officer of China’s People’s Liberation Army Arrested at LAX by FuckButtons on Saturday June 13, 2020 @02:23AM (#23507285)
Look, believe what you want to, I honestly don’t care, but if you think this is what a bio weapon looks like you need your head examined. Why would anyone make a weapon that kills old people by the tens of thousands and leaves most of the rest of us fine after a few weeks? Also, there are virologists aplenty out their trying to inform the world at the moment, maybe listen to them, this is literally all they do, they might know more than you do about how viruses evolve.
Re:Officer of China’s People’s Liberation Army Arrested at LAX by ALittleLight on Saturday June 13, 2020 @01:32PM (#23511072)
Thank you, I was waiting for your permission to form my own opinions based on evidence.

Whether or not this is a bioweapon is unclear. If it is, perhaps it's designed to shut down economies rather than kill people. On the other hand, perhaps it isn't a weapon at all and is just a research project similar to the other Chimeric coronaviruses produced and studied at the Wuhan lab.

There may be plenty of virologists who think this couldn't possibly have come from a lab, but the problem right now is that when they say it couldn't possibly have come from a lab, they don't have any good reason, that I've seen, to support that conclusion, whereas there's a lot to suggest lab escape is possible. I'm willing to listen to people who know more than me, but I need them to actually show some evidence. The people who are showing evidence are those I linked to in my previous comment in points 3 and 4. It seems like there's a great deal of evidence for a lab escape.