Newly-Published Evidence Undermines China Lab-Leak Theory
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Newly-Published Evidence Undermines China Lab-Leak Theory (yahoo.com) 424
Posted by EditorDavid
on Saturday October 02, 2021 @11:34PM from the going-to-the-zoonotic dept.
In 1999 Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik won a Pulitzer Prize. Now a business columnist for the Times, he writes that "new evidence undermines the COVID lab-leak theory — but the press keeps pushing it."
A paper posted online [in September] chiefly by researchers at France's Institut Pasteur and under consideration for publication in a Nature journal...reports that three viruses were found in bats living in caves in northern Laos with features very similar to SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19. As Nature reported, those viruses are "more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than any known viruses."
Another paper, posted in late August by researchers from the Wuhan lab, reports on viruses found in rats also with features similar to those that make SARS-CoV-2 infectious in humans.
Two other papers published on the discussion forum virological.org present evidence that the virus jumped from animals to humans at more than one animal market in Wuhan, not just the Huanan seafood market. Given that these so-called wet markets have long been suspected as transmission points of viruses from animals to humans because they sell potentially infected animals, that makes the laboratory origin vastly less likely, according to a co-author of one of the papers. "That a laboratory leak would find its way to the very place where you would expect to find a zoonotic transmission is quite unlikely," Joel Wertheim, an associate professor at UC San Diego's medical school, told me. "To have it find its way to multiple markets, the exact place where you would expect to see the introduction, is unbelievably unlikely."
As virologist Robert F. Garry of Tulane, one of Wertheim's co-authors, told Nature, the finding is "a dagger into the heart" of the lab-leak hypothesis.
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Doesn't that suppose the people pushing this conspiracy have hearts to begin with...
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It's a joke. I am not even going to try to convince you or the like which is the point of the joke. No matter what evidence comes to light, you cannot be satisfied because you are certain China did this and shame on them.
Which is funny because you highlight all this circumstantial evidence while ignoring all that which doesn't fit. That's why this is always going to be debated despite the simplest conclusion being it simply spread via a wet market without ever being related to the lab. Circumstantial eviden
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I'm *more* pissed at China if it's because of the wet markets. Research on the pandemic potential of viruses is important. There's no fucking reason to allow places like those wet markets to exist, we already know how dangerous they are from a disease standpoint. Their negligence in allowing those markets is worse malfeasance than a lab accident.
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Username checks-out.
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a perfectly plausible hypotheses that is still yet to be disproved, backed by a huge amount of circumstantial evidence
Thank you Alex, and the answer is "What is a conspiracy theory?".
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even if this originated in bats, it still could have LEAKED FROM THE LAB where the bats were being collected and studied. not that i expect logic from such a low effort post
You are so focused on the source that you miss the most obvious part of the paper. The location. Conspiracy is a great word. When something is very likely and something is very unlikely it takes quite a leap of logic (or an incredibly unlikely scenario) for that very unlikely thing to look like something incredibly likely.
Example:
Viruses jump from animals to humans all time time in wet markets.
vs
A laboratory with controls and balances in place spread a virus at exactly the wet market where it was most likely for the virus to spread naturally in the first place.Another example:
Terrorists knocked down the WTC by flying planes into it.
vs
The planes can't knock down the WTC so the CIA ran a secret covert op to do controlled detonation of structural beams of the building at exactly the time paid off terrorists flew planes into it.The OP was right. The people pushing these conspiracies were largely those looking for some evil to blame and to redirect any attention from their own failings.
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It is erroneous to assume the lab was run safely. Workers at the lab told US officials of problems long before the outbreak.
"Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats.
... “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they -
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This much is correct. There's only an argument for plausibility, and the known, and warned of threat of exactly that scenario, involving the breeding ground of novel coronaviruses, going back to 2003.
So the competing hypotheses are one that has a virtual certainty of eventually arriving at this outcome (again), and one that requires cloak and dagger.
The former is obviously more attractive to a rationally minded person.No, there isn't. There's hearsay from a former President who is a known pathological lia
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"Any sufficiently advanced conspiracy theory is indistinguishable from stupidity"
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nice ad hominem against a perfectly plausible hypotheses that is still yet to be disproved, backed by a huge amount of circumstantial evidence.
also, you made a rather hilarious obvious false equivilancy. even if this originated in bats, it still could have LEAKED FROM THE LAB where the bats were being collected and studied.
not that i expect logic from such a low effort post
That's called shifting the burden of proof. If you want the fact that something hasn't been disproved to lend a hypothesis more credibility, then you first have to prove it to be true.
Huge amount of circumstantial evidence. Strawman. There's not a huge amount of circumstantial evidence. Also circumstantial evidence does not carry the same weight in science as it does in courts of law. In science you still have to compete with any alternative explanation. Especially those that make fewer assumptions.
There was also no false equivalency that you allege made by the person you replied to, so straw man.
Talking about "logic" becomes quite ironic at that point.
Thanks for playing. Nice try. Try again.
PS. As far as the lab leak hypothesis goes, I'm willing to support it even with lacking evidence if that means that idiots will start to take the situation more serious. But for some reason the double think appears pretty strong in a lot of people where it makes perfectly sense that it's both a lab leak and 'just the flu'. -
An hypothesis that cannot be proven needs not be disproven.
The people who moderated you positively are as fucking stupid as you are.
It could have come from fucking aliens, too. Prove me wrong.
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by XanC ( 644172 ) on Sunday October 03, 2021 @12:14AM (#61855243)
Whether this virus came from a wet market or from gain-of-function research in a lab, how about we shut both down?
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Did you know in Shanghai, Prada just partnered with a wet market. Buy your bats and handbags together.
The gist is, wet markets aren't going away in China.
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China doesn't need to shut down the wet markets, just ban the selling of exotic animals.
Eating bats, civet cats, and tiger penises causes diseases to spread and pushes endangered species closer to extinction.
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I agree with this and they are getting better. The problem would be black markets. With "medicinal" a lot of that is TCM folklore and it's hard to stop the demand but efforts are being made. With eating odd species, the South loves this shit like eating dog which I assume is a significant disease vector. This is a bit harder to stop. Likewise with live animals which I think is the greatest factor. Chinese love fresh food in the sense of just slaughtered - very common with seafood and poultry. All these fact
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Dogs are scavengers and city dwellers. I have never tried the meat, but my bias would lead me to believe it's much easier to snatch a dog off the streets and serve it for dinner. There are historical examples of culling street dogs for the very reason of disease spread but likewise pigs. In the latter, only the farmers and anyone who was sold the meat are potentially at risk. In the former, anyone on the street.
As for me, I am cat person. I am not really disgusted by people eating dog, just doesn't seem lik
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Most of what is sold isn't poached; it doesn't need to be. Wuhan is the centre of a vast empire of factory farming of exotic wildlife. Anything that can be made to breed in captivity and has some reputed value in traditional medicine is crammed into filthy cages and exploited to the maximum possible extent. Local government gets quite a lot of funding from this, and the conservation authorities are completely corrupt and complicit, having supported the development of these farms as a sort of "alternative" t
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This makes the most sense to me and I hadn't heard the argument so well sourced before. Cheers.
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They weren't eating bats in Wuhan. This is an imaginary tale the CCP fed dupes.
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What a bunch of horseshit. The Chinese did everything they could to move attention away from the wet markets.
The Leninist shitheads over in China are definitely a top-notch pile of human fucking filth, but how sad do you have to be to feel so threatened by them that you have to slander them? As if there weren't more than enough true information that could be used to shit on their heads.
You're fucking pathetic.
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Chinese don't eat bats.
If at all some bats _live_ in the wet market.While the disease spread in _two_ wet markets, chances are: they are 99% not from an animal that was sold there. after all: it is a virus from bats. So: it is nearly 100% sure the virus came from a few 100km away - from people visiting bat caves, and for some reason they slowly, probably over half a year or a full year they started the infection
And that is pretty clear since day one. Day one the day when we learned about the outbreak.
There
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You want to shut down the scientists doing research into the thing you are afraid of?
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Yeah, let's never study viruses again and never be prepared.
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Once we shutdown the wet markets in the U.S., we can start calling for China to shut them down too.
Many American grocery stores operate wet markets.
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A dagger into the heart of the lab leak theory would be if they found the wild animal reservoir mamal species harboring SARS-CoV-2 (or something only a few mutations away from SARS-CoV-2... 96 percent similar is not actually all that closely related).
I think the alternate theory, that somehow SARS-CoV-2 is linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that will remain a viable theory until and unless a wild animal reservoir is found in a species sold at the wet markets.
The idea that Chinese officials would cov
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The idea that Chinese officials would cover up a lab leak and lie about it is, unfortunately, plausible.
True, but that doesn't mean it happened. Occam's razor is the wet market.
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You think that a 4% mutation in a virus, to make it almost perfect adapt to humans with no sign of intermediate stages, that naturally occurs in a whole different country, suddenly appearing in Wuhan is MORE simple than someone mistakenly leaking the virus from a lab that has an established record of virus leaks?
Interesting...
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I think a 4% mutation means that they are totally different viruses. The virus that gave rise to SARS-CoV-2 has not yet been found in the wild, as far as I know. Closest known viruses are not that close.
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Many viruses haven't been found in the wild. The wild is a hard place to look, in case you didn't know.
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This is a meaningless statement. Of course they're totally different viruses. But they share a recent common ancestor.
Nor will it ever be if SARS-CoV-1 is any indication.
Coronaviruses move quick, and there's no reason whatsoever to think that hops through the last few hosts survived.Quit saying this. Yes they are.
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It is interesting. The high mutation jump you list is one of the great paradoxes of evolution theory, that we rarely find intermediary stages of evolution in the wild.
Here's two questions which should lead you to the correct conclusion:
How many distinct variants of COVID are out there, vs how many are actually tracking through the population? If your answer is thousands, and tens respectively you may see where I'm going with this:
Follow up question: have you sampled all the bats of China?-
You don't find intermediary stages often because fossils are a snapshot in time locked in a drawer in a dark room at the bottom of a set of slippery stairs behind a door with a sign saying "beware of geologically unstable events".
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That may be part of it, but basic statistics would suggest that's not the real reason.
Even if your sample only retrieves 1% of all samples, as long as the distribution is random, it's representative.
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Not saying it happened. Personally, I don't feel that Occam's razor is applicable here. Some of the earliest confirmed cases have no tie to the wet market (according to epidemiological report that came out very early on from China). So a non wet-market origin theory has to be entertained.
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I disagree. There is historical precedent of this. SARS-CoV-1.
You're correct, here. They were the first to point away from the wet market (which really confuses the idea that they're trying to hide that it came from the lab)
Oh, absolutely. I don't think anyone is pursuing the wet-market theory. They're more entertaining a natural-origin theory, under the assumption that the data doesn't really give any indication as to where it actually broke out.
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This would be true except... I'm sure the CPP would be happy to try and infect a bat colony, just to take the heat off themselves.
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Depends on your definition of "all that closely related"
The scientific consensus is that it is in fact, "all that closely related"
It's not it's brother or anything, but it's considered a definite progenitor. It's about as close as we got to SARS-CoV-1 as well, and it was considered the original source by the scientific community.
So let's look at the 2 hypotheses.
1) Natural origin, same route as SARS-CoV-1: Bats from somewhere around Yunnan or Laos have a disease that bounces through a few hosts, and en
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From the French article cited
"Despite the absence of the furin cleavage site, these viruses may have contributed to SARS-CoV-2’s origin
and may intrinsically pose a future risk of direct transmission to humans."The "lab leak" theory clearly denotes the Wuhan scientists took Covid which could eventually harm humans, added in gain of function via the furin cleavage site they inserted, and oops it got out.
So far, the French scientists key discovery showcased to the world is... yes Covid could have eventu
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What it doesn't prove is who/what inserted the dangerous bits at the furin cleavage site (that's also not present in any natural viruses the scientist community have studied so far).
This says otherwise:
Such a polybasic furin cleavage site is found in various proteins from many viruses, including Betacoronavirus Embecoviruses, and the Merbecovirus. However, within the betacoronaviruses of the sarbecovirus lineage B, this type of site is unique to SARS-CoV-2.
https://www.news-medical.net/n... [news-medical.net]
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It is wrong to expect infinite compensation from China over this. Otherwise Europeans would have to compensate Africa and Asia for all the crap they did in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
Why should all of China have to pay for the fuck up of a few people? Pretty sure 99.999% of China is not responsible for any of this so why should they have to pay?-
You're right that expecting compensation from the Chinese is unrealistic. However what we KNOW is that the Chinese refused to provide the data that would have enabled the lab leak hypothesis to be established, and bullied the WHO into being dishonest about their investigation's report. This behaviour continues despite Western media overwhelming the attempts to cover up.
Sadly we are back in a 'Cold War' situation; those who fantasise otherwise are merely failing, as so many of their predecessors in the Cold
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The USSR locked its dissidents up in mental hospitals. It is unwise to even hint at such ideas.
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I agree that it would be unreasonable to expect compensation or reparation from China, even if the virus really did escape from a lab (and so far we don't know where it came from). However, if it DID escape from a lab in China, cooperation with the rest of the scientific community would be beneficial for the whole world.
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I mean, you're right, but the point is tell that to the CCP. The entire investigation was not to sit there and "blame China for everything and take everything they own and bankrupt the whole place." It was to investigate where the virus began, and see if there was a way to prevent such an occurrence from happening again. Sound and logical. That the CCP has refused any and all cooperation in regards to checking if a plausible sounding hypothesis has any validity because it could harm them in some way is the
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Why should China have to pay? Because they are upholding a useless regime that funds this crap. Sure they won't pay, but we could sanction the fuck out of them, for that and other crimes.
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The fact is, whatever happened that led to this particular variant of corona virus entering the human population will never be known, because it happened in the past and there are no direct witnesses. Everything else is just lines of investigation and guesses. I doubt the actual truth of the matter will ever be known.
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Laos is like 1500km from Wuhan. There is no way that people are going into caves in Laos, capturing bats so they can ship them 1500km to Wuhan to make soup. Now it may well be that bat lady, Wuhan lab researcher got bats from Laos, and this is somehow related to COVID-19, but make no mistake, this thing escaped from Wuhan lab.
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There are those who believe this virus made the jump to humans multiple times. I don't know anything about Laos. But it very well could be that there have been small outbreaks in Wuhan for years. Historically it could have been animal-to-human, people get sick, but no pandemic. Then, at some point, the human-infecting version jumps back to an animal becomes more virulent and jumps to humans again. Now we have a pandemic version. The Chinese government clearly knew about the wet markets and the health
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Yeah, and there is "no way" that people are "going to" Africa, to harvest bananas, so people *on another continent* can eat them!
[That's the problem with discussions with the common livestock on the street: Their entire reality is based on what they want to believe, since they hardly ever made any observations for themselves in all of their lives. My dick does more independent thinking that those people.]
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It literally doesn't even qualify for being a theory.
Which is no surprise, given that its proponents reject the scientific method in the first place.
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The "lab leak hypothesis" covers many possible scenarios, some of them far-fetched, and some of them quite plausible, none of which I can see are actually ruled out by this.
The most extreme lab leak scenarios are so unlikely that it would be hard to "disprove" them further, but their conspiracy-theory robustness means evidence will never change anyone's minds. You can't debunk a conspiracy theory, because they aren't powered by evidence; they exist to affirm somebody's world view. No matter what evidence you raise, the conspiracy theorist can trump it with a hypothetical, usually someone acting in an incredibly stupid way. Authoritarian regimes are the conspiracy theorist's best friend though: they actually *do* do stupid things to hide evidence, even when that evidence would have very little impact.
The more likely lab leak scenarios involve accidents: samples that have not been characterized that are mishandled, infected animals coming in contact with unprotected lab workers, scientists in the field being infected and bringing that infection back. It's basically impossible to disprove these scenarios by any demonstration that the virus is somehow *natural*.
Evidence that the virus emerged from multiple wet markets in Wuhan, if it stands up to scrutiny, *does* tend to lend credence to an animal trade connection, but that doesn't actually disprove anything else.
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The major piece of circumstantial evidence is that the lab got a grant to create a virus exactly like the coronavirus, and infect humanized animals with it.
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In 1999 Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik won a Pulitzer Prize
Along with Times staff writer Chuck Philips, Hiltzik won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for their series on corruption and bribes in the music industry.
So that makes him an expert on virology? Interesting.
The "smoking gun" in the study discussed in this article [virological.org] deal with the Lineage A and Lineage B strains of the virus, which were both sampled from people and animals in the marketplace at the same time on December 30, 2019. The fact that two different lineages were found both in people and in animals at that time is their evidence that both must have been circulating in animals, and thus both jumped to humans from those animals.
There are numerous problems and counter-evidence that this does not discount the lab-leak (or single-source) scenario.1) Studies and evidence show that COVID originated in China in mid-November [sciencedaily.com], 2019. Additionally the NIH found evidence [washingtonpost.com] of cases in the USA in December, 2019 "A 2020 study in blood donation specimens collected among residents of 9 states between 13 December and 17 January found antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in the United States as early as mid-December 2019". This means that COVID had been spreading amongst humans for around 45 days before the samples were collected that these studies are based on.
2) Humans easily transmit COVID to animals. In fact, due to our size, how much we tend to cough and sneeze when sick, and how high our heads are above the ground, humans are vastly better virus-spreaders than the animals in those wet markets. Pet dogs and cats, and even wild animals in zoos, have all been infected with COVID from people. Not only is it realistic, but it is totally expected, that live animals stuck in cages in wet markets would be infected with COVID from the thousands of people walking by and looking at them from above.
3) The timing of two strains jumping from animals to people at the same time is suspect. Basically this study says that there are two lineages in December 30, 2019, and thus both those lineages must have jumped at the same time to people from different animals in different markets. This is extremely unlikely timing.The study and article totally ignore the following:
1) One or both lineages could have been isolated in the Wuhan laboratory and one or both strains could have leaked from that laboratory.
2) Since humans had been infected for over a month and a half before the samples were collected, humans could have infected animals in markets with one or both lineages. It is to be expected that animals susceptible to COVID kept in the market-place environment would be infected with it by humans.
3) The jump from animal reservoirs to humans is a likely point in which a virus would mutate, due to the virus replicating in a very different host. It is possible one of the two lineages was an early human mutation that was spread back to animals in the market by humans.The main issue is that none of this precludes or even reduces the possibility that someone in the Wuhan laboratory was accidentally infected with COVID. Due to the extremely unlikely timing in the study claiming that two people were infected by two different lineages of COVID at the same time in two different places, it is no more unlikely that the source of one of the strains was a laboratory leak and the source of the other strain was from animal infection.
The fact (which isn't a fact as it wasn't proven either) that one source of animal to human infection occurred does not mean that ALL
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... to allow whomever to obfuscate any facts.
It's funny: which is the misinformation the 'lab leak == True' or 'lab leak == False'? One person's 'misinformation' is another person's truth.
But in this case what does it even matter? What would or could we do to the 'perpetrator'? Sue them, throw them in jail, kill them? And the answer is... nothing.
Should you still be curious though then follow the money. Was this article 'subsidized' somewhere in the chain of its creation?
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"China" here, meaning "government of":
Should I hate China incompetently doing virology that should have been done in a Level 4 area in a Level 2 area?
Should I hate China for gross, unsafe food-handling?
Should I hate China for thinking wild animal parts are some kind of viagra (25 years after we got real viagra)?
I'm really sure that, one way or another, this came out of China, and could have been prevented. Also SARS did, and could have been a much-worse pandemic, and only foreign pandemic-fighting saved us.
That's on top of my China-hating for their hostage diplomacy, naval bullying, Uighur genociding, and generally for running a despotic, corrupt, environmental-criminal country.
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It's actually a 30 minute drive from the lab to the market. It's on the other side of the Yangtze river. Please feel free to come back to reality now.
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by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Sunday October 03, 2021 @03:11AM (#61855433)
They're on opposite sides of a river they're both near to, that is connected by bridges, and only 30 minutes during heavy traffic.
There is no need to make stuff up to pretend there is no controversy.
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It takes 30 minutes according to google maps. Unless you're suggesting that a bat escaped the lab and flew in a straight line to the market, thereby bypassing traffic, because he somehow knew it was the best place to infect people.
Because, ok, that I would have to admit is an interesting argument.-
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Um... the outbreak in the market didn't have anything to do with the market? I think it had something to do with the market...
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by DamnOregonian ( 963763 ) on Sunday October 03, 2021 @08:33AM (#61855803)
Either I'm completely crazy or this is a con job.
Stupid, more like it. No offense intended. Just an observation.
The lab-leak hypothesis has precisely zero evidential points going for it. Doesn't mean it's wrong, but demanding that evidence suggesting that the origin is natural somehow disprove the conspiracy theory is... well, like I said: stupid.-
As many people who are neither crazy nor stupid have been saying from the start, there is quite a bit of circumstantial evidence in favor for lab leak.
And what do you know, there's even circumstantial evidence pointing to the more wild version of lab leak given that many of the players involved in the denial are on record submitting research proposals to do gain of function research on coronaviruses. https://www.theatlantic.com/sc... [theatlantic.com]
Is this direct evidence? No. But it is both evidence of plausibility given
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You bet your ass there is.
But there is precedent, evidence, and mathematical certainty for a natural origin.
So when comparing the 2, thinking that the evidence supporting the statistically certain to occur eventually event is a con job? Stupidity is the only answer for the conclusion you came to.
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Because bats are known never to migrate. Or never mingle with other bats.
Really, tell me what you think is more likely? Nature constantly, every millisecond of the day, creating and mutating new viruses and spreading them all the time? Or a lab somehow got lucky and managed to spread a virus that all the Wuhan markets failed to do, with absolutely no blockchain tracking of where all the animals come from, and were somehow completely immune to all viruses?-
The bats don't migrate to the wet markets. They are captured in rural areas, transported, and sold.
There is a huge logistics chain moving animals to wet markets in China, and plenty of animals cross international borders such as that between Laos and Yunnan.
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They migrate between caves. Come into contact with animals, even other bats, spreading diseases to each other, that also get captured and sold in markets. My point is that there's tens of thousands of paths, most of them extremely transient and hard to track down. And all of them are testing the defences of humans all the time.
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There are no bats within 1000km of Wuhan, and nobody was selling bats in Wuhan markets. This is a fabrication started by the CCP to cover their tracks.
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And how do you know nobody was selling bats (or other coronavirus carrying animals) in the Wuhan markets?
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This is the flat-out stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard. Where the fuck did you read that?
Furthermore, even if it were true, it still wouldn't be a data point disproving natural origin.
SARS-CoV-1's progenitor was found in Yunnan, the initial outbreak in Guangzhou.
600 miles.
Perhaps the Guangzhou viral lab was responsible for that one.
I'm going to sit here and smirk while you google if there is one.
I wish this disease would hurry up and rid humanity of you fucking parasites.
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A lab leak is still possible - Wuhan studied many viruses and one of them escaped.
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I don't know any expert scientist on that matter but I'm sure they are questioned all the time by people with agendas, conspiracy theorists and armchair researchers and they are probably pissed off by now.
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Ya, it's a good thing they didn't find the origin of SARS-CoV-1 1000 miles from where its first outbreak was identified.
Oh wait, they did.
It's almost like diseases can spread and move around and suddenly turn virulent. Fucking magic, I tell ya.
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The Chinese economy is built off selling worthless shit to foreigners. Your literally proposing economic suicide by a country that has done everything to bolster it's economy... all while ignoring governments like the US would literally love to use this to fuel economic sanctions against China.
The level of cognitive dissonance is extreme and you are purposing a conclusion that China is economically ignorant and the bio-forensics of America is worthless... which might be easy because you know nothing about e
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by countach ( 534280 ) on Sunday October 03, 2021 @05:25AM (#61855579)
Nobody is saying this was a top down preplanned operation. But when they knew there was an outbreak, they didn't fess up so we could deal with it, instead they covered it up, and let it go around the world.
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Florida covered it up too with a president who called it a hoax. Those involved with any local cover up were sacked but unfortunately these things happen. Once it was clear there was a true epidemic at a national level, there was an unprecedented response involving a lockdown. Again cognitive dissonance.
still to this day if you talk about Chinese deaths and infected, the major talking point is a cover up. Well how well could they cover up? 2x, maybe. 5x, that's a compliment to Chinese authority regarding in
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Sounds a lot like some former President that I vaguely remember.
"We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine."
"It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear."
"A lot of people think that goes away in April, with the heat, as the heat comes in, typically that will go away in April"
"But it affects virtually nobody. It’s an amazing thing."
"This is a flu. This is lik
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Debunk the crazy version and declare that you have debunked the plausible version.
Propaganda 101.
Wouldn't be propaganda 101 if it didn't work on enough people to be useful.
And the harder you work and the more friction and strife that gets generated by people attempting to put nuanced lipstick on the propaganda pig...the easier it is to for the guilty parties to keep the heat off of themselves.
It's the equivalent of that old joke about releasing 10 pigs numbered 2-11 into a school/workplace/whatever and having a good laugh as the authorities waste time searching for number 1.
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If it's a "natural virus", it is by definition not contained to the lab. So it just doesn't matter if it leaked from the lab, it would already be circulating.
It is "proven" in that a very large percentage of the early cases trace back to the market. The only proof that would have been better is testing in October or November of 2019 that detected the virus in the market, but since it was unknown at the time there were no tests.
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Wait, what??? What the fuck do you think a virus lab does?!
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All you need is one person infected with Covid from a bat or rat to go to that wet market. They then contaminate the food and other people.
Voila, majority of infection cases can be traced to the market.
There's many ways to get that result, simply because a crowded market is a superspreader event.
That the nearest identifiable viruses are all natural and come from multiple species is strongly indicative of a single mutation event, but that event could have taken place anywhere inside of (maximum animal migrat
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Fun fact... human beings go to the market to eat. If an outbreak came from the lab, it would be astonishing if none of those infected shopped at the market.
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Also, it's baloney that "a very large percentage of early cases trace to the market". While tens of thousands were dying, China told us what they wanted to tell us. If 10000 died, China would tell you 100 died, and 80 of them were in the wet market. Meanwhile 9900 died somewhere completely unrelated that they are not talking about.
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It was China (The Wuhan Institute of Virology) that originally claimed that it didn't originate in the wet market.
Quit spreading disinformation you fucking pond scum.
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Because a virus found in animals and then brought to a lab suddenly disappears from those animals.
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It's interesting how scientist were taken seriously when they said "novichok didn't leak from our lab" yet they have to bend over backwards to be taken seriously when they say "sars-cov-2 didn't leak from our lab"
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It says more about how the mention of some country in the Far East can turn you into a rabid fucking moron.
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read the reports, we need to check and see where those involved got their money from.
The papers come with acknowledgements sections that say where the work is funded from and which institutions the authors work for.
Science and Journalism today are the best money can buy
These things ain't free.
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I believe a teapot is involved.
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[N]ow that people, including apparently this reporter and even more embarrassingly these hoping to be published researchers, have learned what the "lab leak" theory actually means, discussion of it can be rational.
It would be nice, wouldn't it? But I am afraid that people who have a desire to discuss this rationally will eventually be shouted down by people who don't.
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Conspiracy theorists are so allergic to facts that they won't even latch on to the most plausible conspiracy theory. My hypothesis has always been (and will likely continue to be) that there was a virus breakout in WuHan (probably from the wet markets) The Chinese government, in an attempt to cover it up, pushed the lab to work too fast and some of the workers ended up getting infected. Now China needs to cover up the cover-up and so they won't cooperate with the investigation. For all we know, the lab
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They did not find SARS-CoV-2 virus in bats. It is some related virus which has some of the same features, and could possibly be able to infect humans. The origin of SARS-CoV-2 has not been proven or demonstrated.
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If you knew the first thing about bats or this type of virus, you'd never have asked that.
Bats have a crazy immune system. They are immune to most things, but those things keep existing in their blood anyway. So they are nature's super-Typhoid-Mary.
And this family of viruses have been common and normal in that region since forever. They are as normal there as the common cold is here, and mostly comparably harmless. But purely statistically, it's only a question of time before a mutation makes one strain mor
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For future reference, if your post title is "Conspiracy Theory" and the cited link is telegraph.co.uk then the answer is an automatic "yes" completely irrespective of anything you write in it.
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For those not in the know the Telegraph is a British newspaper that is well known for being very biased towards one particular political party, but also for printing made-up nonsense. In fact the Telegraph has argued with the industry regulator that nothing it prints should be considered a statement of fact, but merely a hyper polemic opinion piece that any reasonable person would assume is little more than the print equivalent of clickbait.
That defence was made over an article written by our currently serving Prime Minister (a bit like our president), who had previously been fired from multiple jobs for lying and making stuff up.
In short if your source is the Telegraph you need to find a better source.
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Nice work if you can get it.
Persecute free speech, make it so that the only possible (if still unlikely to succeed) "defense" (why should you need a defense for speaking??) be that's it's just opinion and shouldn't be taken as fact, and then point at your victims and say "see!! even they say that their blather is nonsense!!"
Again, nice work if you can get it.
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It's funny that you say that, because it is documented that Wuhan lab were planning on infecting a bat colony as an experiment.
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There is no doubt that a Chinese government cover-up exists. That's been known since day one. But what we don't know is *what* they are covering-up. And the most likely conspiracy theory is the simplest one. This virus has probably been somewhat endemic in WuHan for a long time but never any large outbreaks that lead to a pandemic. The lab was trying to study it before word got out. They weren't fast enough.
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Why the fuck would evidence supporting a natural origin need to disprove the unprovable lab-leak hypothesis? What kind of seriously fucking braindead reasoning is that? Do you still do fucking rain dances? Sacrifice goats?
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