Re:Longbets: A bioerror will lead to one million casualties ...
by gojomo on Thursday December 10, 2020 @03:11AM
(#25371131)
Sister reply only seems to address the Yan report & malicious/military engineering - nothing about more generic lab escape.
In particular, your NatGeo link's description of constant natural discoveries, and continuing searches for natural origins, is totally consistent with the most trivial & non-malicious lab escape scenario:
(1) lab interested in this topic collects hundreds of novel natural strains that wouldn't normally cross from bats to human;
(2) lab accident infects researcher;
(3) researcher infects community.
Isn't Peter Daszak, author of the tweet I quoted, a domain expert?
We now know, from the pandemic, that a bat-related SARS-CoV2 virus that's highly transmissible in humans
actually exists, somehow.
There are human-staffed error-prone labs that specifically search for those kinds of viruses in bulk – for example, sending people deep into rarely-visited bat caves, collecting strains, then replicating (& remixing!) those strains to test them against human (and 'humanized') tissue for pathogenecity & treatment-resistance.
Given those plain facts, what makes you think some other bat-human (pangolin-human?, something-else-human?) contact should be presumed a more likely route into humans than something involving a lab researcher? Until there's more evidence, why aren't they all live hypotheses?
In particular, your NatGeo link's description of constant natural discoveries, and continuing searches for natural origins, is totally consistent with the most trivial & non-malicious lab escape scenario:
(1) lab interested in this topic collects hundreds of novel natural strains that wouldn't normally cross from bats to human;
(2) lab accident infects researcher;
(3) researcher infects community.
Isn't Peter Daszak, author of the tweet I quoted, a domain expert?
We now know, from the pandemic, that a bat-related SARS-CoV2 virus that's highly transmissible in humans actually exists, somehow.
There are human-staffed error-prone labs that specifically search for those kinds of viruses in bulk – for example, sending people deep into rarely-visited bat caves, collecting strains, then replicating (& remixing!) those strains to test them against human (and 'humanized') tissue for pathogenecity & treatment-resistance.
Given those plain facts, what makes you think some other bat-human (pangolin-human?, something-else-human?) contact should be presumed a more likely route into humans than something involving a lab researcher? Until there's more evidence, why aren't they all live hypotheses?