Honest question--why are so many people quick to dismiss the possibility that the coronavirus leaked from the Wuhan lab?
-
pandemics don't just happen like covid happened.
three months before covid spread to the US the Trump administration closed down the CDC attache in China that would have been the first response to an outbreak. three months.
covid was first identified as a mysterious flu about 30 days after the US offices were closed.
The trump administration closed a million things. They’ve closed a million more in the past 6 months. Did FEMA cutbacks CAUSE the flooding in Texas? No. Did it make it worse? Sure.
-
The trump administration closed a million things. They’ve closed a million more in the past 6 months. Did FEMA cutbacks CAUSE the flooding in Texas? No. Did it make it worse? Sure.
can any country in the world make it rain? no
can any country in the world release a deadly pathogen to cause chaos and confusion? yes.
my point isn't the actual closure, it's the visibility of risk mitigation.
what's your point?
-
That, and the fact that it's a respiratory disease, and does not spread by surface contact, makes a lab leak seem exceedingly unlikely.
Wait, I thought it could spread from surfaces? Otherwise what was the point of all the handwashing/hand sanitiser advice?
The other "lab leak theory," that it was an engineered bioweapon that escaped, is for drooling morons.
It's definitely very, very unlikely it was engineered, that's hogwash. But discovered in the environment and kept to use as a potential bioweapon shouldn't be dismissed so readily. It terrifies me that the US has stores of smallpox, considering its history.
In saying that I very much doubt it was a lab leak. I think there's something inherently racist there, that ties back to the whole "chinesium" bullcrap. As if Chinese labs are worse at maintaining containment somehow.
Turns out it was hygiene theater for a while. In the early days, we just didn't know how it was transmitted, so the CDC recommended hand-washing and surface sanitizing out of an abundance of caution. I worked at a grocery store through the pandemic, where both of the owners were very community-oriented, and one was a low-key germophobe. They took the CDC recommendations seriously, and we all had to wear disposable gloves, as well as follow all sorts of protocols to sanitize surfaces.
Later on in the course of the pandemic, scientists started to question whether COVID-19 could spread on surfaces, because the evidence wasn't showing up. In fact, there was a study done back in the 1980's here at the University of Wisconsin in which volunteers who were sick with respiratory viruses (incl. coronaviruses) would read newspapers, play cards, play board games, etc. in a room, and then the researchers would bring healthy volunteers into the same room to do the same. Zero healthy volunteers got sick, so the researchers had the ill volunteers cough and sneeze directly on the shared objects before handing over the room. Again, zero healthy volunteers got sick. They were unable to demonstrate any surface-contact transmission.
This news came out, but the CDC was slow to update its recommendations. There was a period during which I was highly annoyed at having to wear the gloves, and spray surfaces with the extremely-expensive electrospray gun, when it was already scientific consensus (minus the CDC) that COVID-19 didn't spread through surface contact. Eventually, they did update their recommendations, and we were able to stop with the rigamarole. Sales of hand sanitizer and wipes dropped off (but still were high, because the new information wasn't universally known). If I understand it correctly (eh...), the virus which causes COVID-19 is relatively delicate, and its structure is supported by the water droplets which spread it. Once the droplets hit a surface, the protein structure of the virion collapses, and it's no longer capable of infecting a cell.
Anyway, yeah, it was an abundance of caution, which turned into hygiene theater.
-
That, and the fact that it's a respiratory disease, and does not spread by surface contact, makes a lab leak seem exceedingly unlikely.
Wait, I thought it could spread from surfaces? Otherwise what was the point of all the handwashing/hand sanitiser advice?
The other "lab leak theory," that it was an engineered bioweapon that escaped, is for drooling morons.
It's definitely very, very unlikely it was engineered, that's hogwash. But discovered in the environment and kept to use as a potential bioweapon shouldn't be dismissed so readily. It terrifies me that the US has stores of smallpox, considering its history.
In saying that I very much doubt it was a lab leak. I think there's something inherently racist there, that ties back to the whole "chinesium" bullcrap. As if Chinese labs are worse at maintaining containment somehow.
Oh, I'm a little drunk, so I forgot the second point. Maybe I'm not devious enough to lead a bioweapons program, but I would think that research into potential bioweapons would primarily focus on a vaccine or a treatment. Nasty disease outbreaks occur naturally, and as we saw with COVID-19, they affect everybody. Why would any nation release a bioweapon that's going to hammer itself just as much as the enemy? That would only make sense to me in maybe a Dead Hand-like scenario, in which your nation has already fallen, and you release it as vengeance from the grave.
But, that still doesn't make sense to me, because we don't have any reliable way to look at a virus and determine its potential for causing a pandemic. That might not even be possible, since there are/were lots of viruses that seem like they should cause a pandemic, but just haven't.
-
Honest question--why are so many people quick to dismiss the possibility that the coronavirus leaked from the Wuhan lab?
AFAIK the consensus is that COVID-19 originated in Wuhan. The same Wuhan that has a lab which had been studying coronaviruses for years prior to the outbreak.
Some folks vehemently dismiss the idea that the lab could be the origin point, but why? What makes them so sure that this would have been impossible?
I agree that it is ridiculous to claim that it is impossible and outright dismiss the idea. Nobody can say it doesn't come from there and proving a negative is impossible. However there are a number of reasons which make the Wuhan thing a lot less suspicious than it seems at first glance.
Wuhan is the 7th largest Chinese city, and is among the most prolific research cities in China, so of course you'd have a lot of virology labs there and that would be the most probable location for coronavirus-related research. Remember that coronaviruses were kind of a hot topic in Asia after the SARS epidemic in the early 2000s.
Respiratory viruses, obviously, thrive in high-density population centers, so it would stand to reason that a 13 million inhabitants agglomeration would be at the center of this kind of thing.
To put this into perspective : if COVID had appeared in France, near some podunk town of 30K inhabitants that just happens to have a coronavirus-related lab - OK that would be super suspicious. But most likely it would have originated near Paris which is the largest population center in the whole region. Well that's also where the Pasteur Institute is, and the Pasteur Institute being the largest virology research center in the country is the most likely place where you'd find coronavirus research. All of a sudden that would be a lot less shady.
-
Or…. It was just a pandemic and not planned
What's weird about the mental gymnastics is that a respiratory virus pandemic is the risk factor of the century. It was a probability of 100% that this would end up happening, the only question was when and where.
But people will take the numerous calls to caution that were issued in the decades prior, and use them as proofs that something shady went on. What can you do ...
-
can any country in the world make it rain? no
can any country in the world release a deadly pathogen to cause chaos and confusion? yes.
my point isn't the actual closure, it's the visibility of risk mitigation.
what's your point?
If you throw 2 million darts, eventually you get one bullseye. A coincidence is not evidence
-
If you throw 2 million darts, eventually you get one bullseye. A coincidence is not evidence
by that logic Trump won the election fair and square. there's no evidence he cheated or colluded with Russian intelligence.
also Epstein killed himself because coincidences aren't evidence. also trump wasn't friends with Epstein because it was sheer coincidence he was at all the same parties, which as you state doesn't count as evidence.
while we're at it, god exists, the tooth fairy is real, and unicorns roam the earth. just because the evidence they don't exist doesn't exist doesn't mean they don't exist.
-
by that logic Trump won the election fair and square. there's no evidence he cheated or colluded with Russian intelligence.
also Epstein killed himself because coincidences aren't evidence. also trump wasn't friends with Epstein because it was sheer coincidence he was at all the same parties, which as you state doesn't count as evidence.
while we're at it, god exists, the tooth fairy is real, and unicorns roam the earth. just because the evidence they don't exist doesn't exist doesn't mean they don't exist.
Are you implying there’s no evidence of COVID lol? It’s literally been analyzed and PROVEN that it was not a virus designed by man
-
Are you implying there’s no evidence of COVID lol? It’s literally been analyzed and PROVEN that it was not a virus designed by man
I never said it was designed by man. My theory suggests it was released in Wuhan by the Russians.
