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so intentional release?
What makes you say that?
The majority of US spy agencies think it escaped from the lab across the street from the Wuhan wet market.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/majority-of-us-spy-a...
The UK is no longer discounting this theory:
https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/25214/20200406/uk-fear...
Similar to the Russian DNC hacking, I trust our intelligence agencies over the CPC state media in this case.
Seems plausible. And yet when people started dropping like flies from a nerve agent just down the road from the UK's top nerve agent lab: definitely just the hand of Russia again.
It's an amusing point, but most COVID victims haven't been Russian dissidents
I wasn't going to post more but since some other people are taking an amusing point seriously enough to try and bury:
- No victims in the UK were Russian dissidents; in fact most were not even Russian.
- Skripal was a Russian military intelligence officer working for MI6.
- He did not live in swinging London or some random backwater, as a typical Witsec might, but in the top British military county of Wiltshire.
If an American working for China's intelligence service and living right next door to the Wuhan lab was one of the first victims of Covid-19 anyone insisting it could only mean the US carried out an attack would be written off as a conspiracy loon.
What's more believable? The CPC state media, or the right-wing media complex that both of your articles was churned out from?
From the first article: > The Daily Caller cited a senior intelligence official earlier Saturday who stated the majority view among U.S. spy agencies is that COVID-19 is natural and that it was accidentally leaked out of a Wuhan lab.
The Daily Caller: "The Daily Caller is a right-wing news and opinion website based in Washington, D.C. It was founded by now Fox News host Tucker Carlson and political pundit Neil Patel in 2010."
The second article references the Daily Mail.
Until an official report comes out from the government, I'd be cautious with your reading of "journalism."
Fox was the one to confirm this: https://twitter.com/johnrobertsFox/status/125657685892307353...
Yes Fox and more so The Daily Caller are right leaning, but you're attacking the source not the substance.
China runs hard labor camps, they're not on the same level of trust of even the most right-wing/liberal media sources.
It seems like a very confident report, citing an exact 17 agencies. I'm sure you'll see confirmation soon.
Funny that anonymous sources are attacked when it's a "right-wing" journalist.
Read up on John Roberts and see if you trust him based on his previous reporting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts_(journalist)
Remember to do this for all news sources! Pay attention to their sources, follow-up when they are anonymous.
Yes, if you read your articles instead of just the titles they referenced John Roberts as well. Basically, they all just reference each other, almost as if they are pushing a narrative or something.
There is no substance. It's an anonymous guy saying something. Misinformation is dangerous regardless of who it comes from - including China and far left or far right media. Such a confident report would likely have other sources that aren't from the right wing mill machine - but if you actually look at the other sources, they all say a completely different take, I'll let you look yourself.
I'm very anti-China, especially with regards to how they run their country and treat their people. I hope that all of the world's governments, when THIS IS CONTAINED, investigate the cause. It may be that it did leak from a lab. Or it didn't. I wish our government and media would focus instead on containing it first and then figure out the cause.
You can do both. Like I also mentioned, UK isn't ruling it out. I simply posted those sources to bring awareness to the other side to the theory, it was lacking in OP's article. One reason it was lacking is because my links are newer. I was providing developing information, we'll see if it's real, but it looks interesting.
Are you arguing that we can't talk about the origin at the same time as figuring out solutions to the virus?
The article is about the origin, it seems appropriate to mention these things.
Interesting DHS report: https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/05/03/intelligence-report-c...
The right-wing media complex, hands down.
Furthermore, you should be asking why a left-leaning media outlet (Washington Post) is reporting essentially the same facts, but puts an emphasis on there being "no evidence" of an accidental release. You should be asking why they aren't mentioning that the CCP had potential evidence destroyed.
Wondering if you can pinpoint those two locations on a map and reconsider using the phrase "across the street"?
If someone said to me that the World Trade Center is just across the road from Madison Square Garden I'd find it hard to take them seriously.
The two are separated by Fazhan Ave. The distance is about 911 feet.
https://img-prod.tgcom24.mediaset.it/images/2020/02/16/11472...
You're linking an image of Google Maps, from a random PDF that someone posted on a website that anyone can post to without any peer review. The Google Maps image doesn't even say anything that means "Wuhan CDC." In fact, one of the buildings in the cluster is labeled a tire shop by Google Maps.
If you search on Google Maps for the Wuhan Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, you instead find a building about 1.5 km from the seafood market. If the random PDF you linked doesn't even get the location of the building right, how can I trust its other claims? But further, when I look at the web page of the WHCDC, it looks like they're mainly a community health institution, not a research institute. The people studying coronaviruses are 15 km away, in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But if they're doing research, there should be publications, just as there are for the WIV. When you search bioRxiv for papers from them, all you turn up are papers from Jianghan University Medical School, which is even farther away from the market. The random PDF you're linking to appears to be wrong on a number of counts: both on where and what the Wuhan CDC is.
In short: Random PDFs from websites that anyone can upload to are not reliable sources of information.
There is not just one building, this is the one mentioned:
https://map.baidu.com/poi/%E6%AD%A6%E6%B1%89%E5%B8%82%E7%96%...
Remember that Google is effectively not operating in China anymore, so their information is bound to be outdated and incomplete.
Scientists at the Wuhan CDC are studying live bats and bat coronaviruses:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovnUyTRMERI&feature=youtu.be...
Here's where the PDF map says is the WHCDC offices. This is incorrect, isn't it? Both of the offices are not "across the street", but at least 3km away.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Wuhan+Jiang'an+Center+for+...
Yes, but not in the two buildings you're linking to.
It isn't incorrect. The Baidu Maps link[1] shows the WHCDC office also shown at the location in the PDF map, next to the hospital - a few hundred meters from the seafood market[2].
[1] https://map.baidu.com/poi/%E6%AD%A6%E6%B1%89%E5%B8%82%E7%96%...
[2] https://map.baidu.com/search/%E6%AD%A6%E6%B1%89%E5%8D%8E%E5%...
I have no source that either proves or contradicts that - do you?
Yes, but the PDF that the GP comment scrounged up online used Google Maps. If you look at Baidu or Bing Maps, you see that the Wuhan CDC has many local offices. It appears to mainly be a community health organization that deals with things like vaccinations and awareness. What you're pointing to is not the central offices of the Wuhan CDC.
No, they're not. All the papers I've seen only discuss samples collected from bats in the countryside, and standard practice is to deactivate any virus in the samples before working with them.
Where the research described in the video you show is unclear to me, but it's not taking place in some little satellite community health center across the street from the seafood market.
It's really alarming how much of this Internet scavenger-hunting is being passed off as legitimate evidence, by people like "Project Evidence" (or whoever is behind it). People desperately want answers about the virus, and there are political actors taking advantage of that.
You said they got the location wrong. They didn't, you just failed to find the office at that location. You don't actually know what the WHCDC does, or where it does its work, but you think you know better than the authors of the paper, who have worked in Wuhan.
Yes, they are. Did you even read the paper? They're reporting that hundreds of live bats were hosted at the WHCDC. I haven't seen anyone come out and disprove these claims, so they're most likely not just made up.
"I didn't see it, therefore it does not exist" - your way of reasoning.
That paper was authored by researchers familiar with the matter, it's not "internet scavenger hunting". I'm not saying it's "legitimate evidence" either, but your "debunking" is a joke.
They used Google Maps, which doesn't actually list that as the location.
When you look for the main offices of the Wuhan CDC, on Google Maps, Baidu Maps or Bing Maps, you find a different location several kilometers away. I'll grant that a different map service, Baidu Maps, shows a small satellite community health center at the given location.
What paper? Nobody has posted any paper yet. All I've seen is a PDF from a website that anyone can upload to, which the authors subsequently deleted because they said they couldn't vouch for its claims.
Some random people on the Internet uploaded a PDF, so their claims are probably true? Is this the standard of evidence we've reached?
I still don't know what paper you're talking about. Are you talking about the non-peer-reviewed PDF that was uploaded to a site anyone can upload to, and subsequently deleted by the authors?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU
The sources listed in the description of this video seem somewhat reliable. While I'm not completely sold on the lab being the source I think the odds that it was are still pretty high for me.
We just don't know yet either way. We shouldn't discount that it was leaked by a lab.
From Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_market#China
"In 2018, wet markets were noted to have remained the most prevalent food outlet in urban regions of China despite the rise of supermarket chains since the 1990s.[66]"
Later in the article, about Hong Kong, they say "Most neighbourhoods contain at least one wet market.[12]"
So there are hundreds / thousands / tens of thousands of wet markets in China.
How many level 4 bio labs are in China? 1, in Wuhan.
It seems incredibly naive to me for anyone to believe that a virus just happened to naturally jump from animals to humans at a wet market in Wuhan, when that event could have happened in thousands of other wet markets. But it didn't; it happened in Wuhan. The unique thing about Wuhan is the level 4 bio lab.
There are more people in Wuhan City than in New York City.
Would you immediately jump to conspiracy theories if an outbreak of a novel flu started in Galveston Texas? Or Atlanta? Or Boston?
And that's just some of the BSL-4 facilities in the US. Coronaviruses can be studied in BSL-3 labs, which China has tons of, basically one in every major city (much like the US).
There are two labs in Wuhan which performed experiments with bats and bat coronaviruses under unsafe conditions, where animal-to-human transmission could have occured - one being the Wuhan CDC and the other being the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Those are the kind of bats that most likely evolved COVID-19, which are native to southern China, not Wuhan. That's factual, not a conspiracy theory.
The CCP has ordered the destruction of evidence at those places and imposed gag orders on the scientists involved. Again, just facts, not a conspiracy theory.
The CCP has furthermore suppressed the spread of information on the initial outbreak and has been uncooperative regarding investigation on the origin of the virus. A large amount of the initial cases had no connection to the Wuhan seafood market. Factual.
Note that none of these facts support the conspiracy theory that the virus has been engineered or intentionally released.
Source?
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market...
Correct, but note that they don't really support the idea that the virus was accidentally released from the lab either.
But misleading. The article you cite notes the much likelier cause: the long incubation period means that those who did come into contact with the market infected others.
Correct, but the Wuhan CDC is also where most of the early analysis of covid was being done after it was discovered. The CCP also silenced doctors in hospitals, they generally tried to cover up covid in general. Keeping the scientists working on it silenced isn't any different than how they treated hospital workers.
Let's suppose we had to decide between two scenarios, which one of these two sounds more probable?
A virus endemic to bats from southern China was first transmitted to a researcher working at one of two specialist centers in central China, while performing research on bats and/or bat coronaviruses, under a questionable safety regime.
A virus endemic to bats from southern China was first transmitted to a human in the wildlife market in central China where no bats are sold, presumably through an intermediate host such as a pangolin.
Which of these two scenarios is preferable to the ruling party of China?
Which is feeding the narrative that "human encroachment on nature is dangerous" (bad thing is dangerous), as opposed to "scientific research can be dangerous" (good thing is dangerous)?
How is that more likely? The finding is that there is no epidemiological link to the seafood market in 13 out 41 patients, including the earliest known patient.
Your interpretation is the opposite of what the paragraph regarding the incubation period says:
"Lucey says if the new data are accurate, the first human infections must have occurred in November 2019—if not earlier—because there is an incubation time between infection and symptoms surfacing. If so, the virus possibly spread silently between people in Wuhan—and perhaps elsewhere—before the cluster of cases from the city’s now-infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was discovered in late December. “The virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace,” Lucey asserts."
How likely is it that a virus endemic to bats in southwestern china was first transmitted to humans in a wildlife market in southeastern china where bats are not sold?
Well that's exactly what happened with SARS-1. The disease was passed to humans via civets. And in Wuhan the carrier seems to have been pangolins. Seems completely believable, given that it happened once already.
Patient zero in SARS-1 was a farmer from Guangdong, the same area where the novel coronavirus is suspected to have emerged among bats, where farmers have been found to carry bat coronaviruses. Wuhan is more than 600 miles away from that area.
The initial outbreak of SARS-1 was literally where you would expect it to be, among the population where you would expect it to occur. Civets were suspected as transmitters, but that link is neither proven nor necessary to explain the initial outbreak.
I'm not asking if it is believable. Both scenarios are believable. The "pathogen escapes from lab" scenario happened before as well.
I'm asking, which of these appears more likely?
Which of these would you be more inclined to believe, if you want to be as far away from right wingers as possible? Which scenario caters to your pro-environmental and pro-science stance?
Correct.
Incorrect, that's Yunnan.
Yunnan.
I suggest you go find Yunnan, Guangdong and Hubei on a map.
Bat caves in Yunnan are full of potentially dangerous coronaviruses, but the farmers living close to the caves are already immune to the strains they're in frequent contact with, so the only way for an outbreak to get big is by long-distance transportation carrying the virus somewhere else.
First of all, they conducted experiments with deactivated samples of bat coronaviruses, not with live virus or with bats.
Second of all, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is a world-class BSL-4 lab. They do not operate under "unsafe conditions."
A couple of things:
1. It is widely suspected that there was an intermediate host species between bats and humans, just as was the case in the last two major coronavirus outbreaks, SARS and MERS.
2. Nobody knows where, exactly, the virus first spilled over into the human population. Wuhan is just the first place where it was detected. A virus like this can spread for quite a while, particularly in the middle of flu season, before it is detected. There's nothing to say it didn't emerge in some rural village in Yunnan first.
With human-to-human transmission, this is entirely consistent with the first outbreak (or super-spreading event) occurring at the market.
Did the CCP order that, or did the Chinese government order that? I've noticed a trend in which people who make extremely anti-China posts refer repeatedly to the "CCP." I strongly suspect that these people are just using that terminology for the shock value.
Beyond that, the news report (from Caixin) that I believe is the origin of your claim about destruction of evidence says that after the virus was identified, low-security Chinese labs were ordered to either transfer their samples to high-security labs or to destroy them. I recall this being a safety measure, in other words, though you could ascribe other motives if you wanted to.
Great question. If an outbreak of smallpox happened in Atlanta, 10 miles from the BSL-4 center, would you be so quick to call out any questions regarding said center as 'conspiracy theories'?
Smallpox and a flu-like virus aren't comparable. So I reject your premise.
Like I said, if a novel flu-like virus appeared in Atlanta, would your first guess be that it leaked from the CDC facility? That's what you're faced with, not smallpox.
Do you have a source for how many research labs in China were actively working on bat coronaviruses? From what I can garner in the Western press, WIV is their #1 such research lab.
If a new flu virus, quite more virulent that the usual flu, popped up in Atlanta 10 miles from the BSL4 facility and the closest known relative is endemic in polar bears, yeah, I'd be asking questions. Both about BSL4 and about the zoo. And maybe there are private citizens raising polar bears in Atlanta. I'd ask about them too. Especially if it were already known that polar bear viruses can be quite dangerous, see SARS episode 1.
But then again, these discussions are by now futile. It is obvious that the conversation has been politicized. One side will try its best to dismiss and discredit the slightest mention that there was ongoing bat coronavirus research in Wuhan, including WTF moments like creating chimera viruses for the specific purpose of infecting humans. The other will overhype all the scary innuendo that can possibly be created around WIV, whether it relates even remotely to SARS-CoV-2 or not.
I don't have the energy to elaborate the full decision tree in every post. Have fun!
Much like smallpox isn't equivalent to a flu-like virus, polar bears aren't equivalent to bats/civets/pangolins in terms of how close they are to Atlanta. I don't know why you feel the need to exaggerate every time you compare to Wuhan, but it isn't interesting.
The bats from which RaTG13, the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2, was isolated, live in a cave in Yunnan, 1000 miles from Wuhan. To the best of my knowledge, they do not naturally occur anywhere near Wuhan. Pick your own North American animal that satisfies this constraint and answer the question.
Couple more points:
* Asking questions is a legitimate activity, even if the answer turns out to be negative. It's the fundamental mechanism for truth finding. I'm appalled, but not surprised, at the aggressive censorship strain that is spreading like wildfire in our society. Not only some people know all the correct answers, they know all the correct questions as well.
* Think hard about the wisdom of proliferating BSL4 centers in the middle of population centers of the size of NYC. That single fact is a scandal in itself.
Yes, but "just asking questions"[0] is also a rhetorical trick common enough to have a name, especially when the questions are leading, as some of yours are. That isn't to say that you're intentionally being nefarious, but hiding behind "I'm just asking questions" doesn't absolve one of responsibility for applying their own logical thinking.
As I mentioned elsewhere, this is exactly the same story as with SARS-CoV-1. Bats from Yunnan are the source of a virus first found in humans in Guangdong, around 1000 miles away. So we have literally the exact same thing happening, in essentially the same area, in modern times. Given that, I have a question for you:
Which is more likely: that SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 had essentially the same transmission path, or that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a government lab, but as far as we know, none of the early infections were related to said lab, meaning that it would have had to spread into the community without any of the lab employees getting infected (this reduces the reasonable escape paths significantly)
Yeah, I'm not seeing the issue here. We stick nuclear reactors in population centers, and I'm unaware of any known leaks from BSL-4 labs anywhere ever, so they have a better track record.
The wisdom, by the way, is that you need researchers and infra to support BSL-4 labs. You can't stick them out in the middle of nowhere, they usually need things like attached universities.
[0]: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
Few points.
That strain is said to be characteristic to large horseshoe bats from Yunnan
Bats in China don't seem to live so far north, and away from the coast. More so, for larger species.
The very few bats known to live near cities, are all small insectivorous species. SARS carrying bat species don't normally like living near humans.
Bats are not considered food, even by nouveau riche weird meat eaters in China.
The above mean that there should be no bats sold on wet markets. First responder reports confirm that.
1. So, out of where did the SARS strain very close to the wild virus came out from in the middle of a 10 million people megalopolis?
2. From where did the story about bats came out from to begin with?
3. It is now near certain that first reports of influx of respiratory patients happened as early as November, and it had nothing to do with the seafood market. If so, how media were first able to connect the dots to the market, and do it so quickly, and confidently?
4. The first report incriminating the market came out few weeks after first evidence of the government sending censorship directives, and instructions on outbreak handling to provincial authorities.
5. It means that a low key regional newspaper broke out a report at the same time when even a squeak about sars outbreak got people into trouble.
6. The amazing synchronicity with which top tier national medias republished the story of an obscure regional newspaper is clearly unnatural.
7. The way how zealously Chinese media came out to blast earliest reports doubting this outbreak originating from the seafood market even before that became news in the West stands out. Are all of them subscribed to the same obscure American academic journal?
8. Chinese government is no stranger to manufacturing bizarre hoaxes
Normally, this is not what Chinese government would cover up. The concealment of original SARS outbreak only happened after the fact of its existence becoming public.
What was covered up in 2003 was not its existence, but the lacklustre emergency response after it became clear that they completely screwed up.
Similarly, other natural disaster coverups only happened after it becoming clear that somebody screwed up.
I.E.: the Wenzhou train collision. The cover up was made not for screwup of signalling system designers, but to make the emergency response look "adequate." The guy wanted to render it a "small, manageable derailment accident," and not to show hundreds people dying on his hands while he did nothing.
I struggle with similar questions. Probably we'll never know.
As of your first point, there may be another natural virus, as of yet unidentified, possibly carried by a different species, that brought the disease to Wuhan. From the virologist chatter I hear, the genetic difference between RaTG13 is too large to have RaTG13 a recent direct precursor of SARS-CoV-2, either through genetic manipulation, or via culturing.
Alternatively, everything that came out of China since Jan 2020 is pure BS. As of yet, there is no independent verification of the origin of RaTG13, which conveniently was found 'lying around in a freezer' in Jan 2020, stored there all the way back in 2013. Nor there is independent verification of the genomic sequences of all the other viruses that are 'lying around in a freezer'. Nor are the Chinese authorities very open to international collaboration on this matter.
The sharp politicization of this issue is worrisome in itself.
RaTG13 wasn't exactly "lying around." The Wuhan Institute of Virology searches out and catalogs bat coronaviruses. They have a "library" of a few hundred frozen viruses. Most of them probably receive very little in-depth study after initial categorization.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology actually engages in a large amount of international collaboration. The international collaborators of the WIV (among them are some of the most prominent coronavirus and emerging infectious diseases researchers), in the United States and elsewhere, have been defending the institute against the various conspiracy theories circulating online (and being promoted by the US President). The researchers at the WIV receive training at national labs in the US, France and Australia. In other words, the WIV is tightly hooked into the international research community. It's not some secretive place that the outside world can't peer into.
SARS and MERS were both transmitted to humans through an intermediate host species. It's reasonable to believe that SARS-CoV-2 also went through an intermediate host. It's also not certain that the initial spillover occurred in Wuhan. It could easily have begun in the countryside and only blown up when someone brought it to Wuhan, which is a major transportation hub.
I want to know how they identified a new viral pneumonia back in late November with just a handful of cases.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but since the initial symptoms are flu like wouldn’t it require a statistically significant number of additional cases, deaths or symptoms in order to alert the health officials that something new was taking place, and an investigation was warranted?
In late November they had less than 15 cases but they had already identified it as a new virus. How would they know to look for a new virus with so few cases? Unless they had prior knowledge about a new virus that was accidental released, which prompted them to start looking.
Taiwan is a good calibration point. There, they managed to trace all cases down to a single arrival from the mainland.
From that, it looks quite believable that it would've taken 3-4 full generations of reinfections to take the count to 200 hospitalisations.
I think, 200 hospitalisations should've been around the same number for the signal to attract attention by Chinese disease surveillance, if it wasn't picked up by the purpose made SARS screening network.
If we believe the news that Hubei already saw hundred extra deaths in January, and that hospitals were already near full in mid January, then the number of infections should've been already above 1000 at Jan 1.
They didn't identify the new case in November. There is a report of a case that was retrospectively dated to mid-November, by searching through patient records and probably by re-testing samples. But that retrospective analysis was done months later.
The virus was not identified until the end of December, which is more than a month after the case in mid-November.
This is dangerous (and wrong) thinking. Wrong in the sense that, even if the conclusion were true, the reasoning is faulty.
There are many characteristics which, in hindsight, would look suspicious. One of this characteristics is the presence of a bio research lab. Other interesting factors would have been the presence of particular chemicals in the air/water, presence of certain types of bats, the presence of certain climate quirks, the presence of nuclear powerplants etc.
Let's say Wuhan was the only region which had a particular species of bats. Would you immediately conclude that the virus _must_ have come from that bat species?
You have a conclusion and are looking for reasoning to support it.
Being "ultra skeptical" for some non-scientific reasons is also a very dangerous way of thinking. Keeping in mind several factors, such as China being a developing country (and likely having lower standards of biosecurity than say US or Germany), poor conditions in that particular lab (cited by US observers), proximity of the lab etc. at least suggests that there is some non-negligible probability it came from that lab.
FWIW, my stance is that there is way too little information to draw any conclusion with sufficient conviction. This is a highly politicised issue so the bar for proving something is, imo, higher.
The post I was replying too had high conviction in the 'lab-grown' theory.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'non-scientific' reasons.
Interesting how it's turned around. A few weeks ago one of my HN accounts was banned for a neutral note that the lab hypothesis shouldn't be disregarded. Now it's openly talked about on WaPo.
Maybe not even the WIV Level 4 lab, which is 20 miles from the wet market, but the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control & Prevention lab is only 300 yards away, and would be a plausible shopping location for an accidentally infected research assistant, or even proximity to improperly destroyed refuse from the lab:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8009669/Did-coronav...
I think it's naive to believe that a spillover event is more probable in a high-security research lab than out in the real world. Do not underestimate the sheer amount of contact between humans and infected animals. Coronaviruses are not rare - for the animals that host them, they are just another common cold. Farmers, butchers, villagers who live near bat populations, people who frequent wet markets, and all sorts of other people are constantly coming into contact with animals that are sick with coronaviruses.
There are estimates that a few million people in Southeast Asia are infected with bat coronaviruses each year. In other words, spillover events are occurring thousands of times each day. We're just lucky that the vast majority of them do not lead to global pandemics, because they are not well adapted to humans and do not transmit efficiently from person to person, or because the epidemic never reaches a major population center. There are probably even pandemics that go completely unnoticed, because the symptoms caused by the viruses are no worse than the common cold.
So compare what's happening every day to thousands of people in Southeast Asia to a few people working under extreme safety precautions in a high-security lab.
If you go off what other virologists have said, that this virus looks like a random wild virus. Then what are the chances the virus escaped from a bsl-4 lab while a researcher was cataloging it. Bs any of the millions as you say random farmers, butchers, etc randomly getting infected. Yeah odds favor the latter.
Also the Wuhan seafood market looks exactly like the kind of enclosed place with lots of people we now know to avoid during the pandemic. So the only notable thing there is it's was a big enough cluster to be noticed. Looking from common origins is something every public health official does day in day out.
All this lab talk lacks nuance and is being abused as propaganda. You say "it came from a lab" and imply that it's some manufactured bio terrorism thing.
It's dissapointing to see how people's stance wrt to this is heavily affected by which political line they follow.
It's disappointing to see that, no matter how this virus emerged, we don't see universal condemnation of the CCP handling the outbreak.
It's also disappointing that the WHO isn't being harshly criticized by either sides, despite the fact that it was instrumental in downplaying the outbreak in line with CCP interests.
A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Donald Trump.
"Man stabs someone, no evidence of murder"
Would love a good Bayesian statistical analysis with different priors. Of all the places covid could have arisen, what are the chances it was randomly so close to this lab? 10%?
Are we throwing out statistics and common sense because we don’t have a YouTube video showing a researcher physically transferring it out of a lab? No idea...