If the lab escape theory is proven to be true, it would be a bigger deal than Chernobyl.
Interesting analogy; Chernobyl vs. TMI vs. Windscale vs. Fukushima vs. Pickering vs. Chalk River (2x) vs. the many submarine reactors on the ocean floor, that is a huge topic.
I’m with @d_r on this one, though, regarding politicization; I think our leadership needs to move carefully on the forensics. One takeaway for me from the article was a sense that this could have (has?) happened anywhere. I’m left wondering if there is an “IAEA” for virology and whether we might now need one.
Sadly, the only virologist in my social circles died early last year; I have no “go to” on the topic.
I hadn’t even thought of that. There are international standards on biohazard safety, but are these actually enforced in the way that nuclear research is? Viral research is of great importance to humanity, but are there laboratories throughout the world conducting research on potentially dangerous viruses without practicing proper safety protocols? That is definitely a question that needs to be asked and addressed.
When it comes to the forensics after the fact, I doubt that we will ever truly know where or how SARS-COV-2 originated with a high degree of certainty. The question will continue to be politicized and give rise to endless conspiracy theories (just as AIDS has), but if anything positive is to come out of this pandemic, it will be to equip us with the tools to better contain the next pandemic. For that purpose, I think that it will be more useful to focus less on whether it escaped from a lab or came from poor hygiene at a seafood market, but to investigate how it spread once introduced into the human population. This will involve examining the missteps by China as well as other countries and the international community in the early stages of the pandemic…a process that will likely take years if it can happen at all, requiring cooperation and openness from the entire international community.
Probably the only good result of the Black Death in the 14th century was the labour shortage that caused wages to rise and gave the serfs at least some mobility to seek better jobs.
The situation is a bit different now, in that the serfs don’t have to die to improve their bargaining position, but that’s progress for you. Perhaps we are witnessing a similar economic shakeup.
Well, he’s right, although that’s primarily Trump’s fault, the boy who cried wolf to a T. Everything that Trump says you always have to think, how does this benefit him? Especially if he’s saying something that the scientific community (including the person who funded the reasearch using the methods which could create the weaponized virus) is saying (lying?) could not have happened.
Well, loads of handwaving and denying access to the sites and the complete lack of intermediate animals, and add in shutting down the lab and refusing to share the databases isn’t a good look for China. There’s also the possibility that the early response was look around for something else to blame, and the mid level party officials weren’t all that good at faking it (they very possibly thought they had it under control too). It’s also the case that they didn’t know much about the spread, lab technicians had fallen ill earlier, and there is a lot of shade thrown at the biohazard unreadiness of that lab, it took a while before asymptomatic transmission was confirmed too.
I don’t think that the lack of intermediate animals or bat populations is, in and of itself, suspicious (I mean, how common is it to find that kind of thing in a pandemic? The author treats it as though the Chinese should have easily found such animals or bat populations, but then he’s also arguing about the incompetence of their lab safety, so…), but the rest of the stuff is pretty shady. I would, however, like to see the author’s sources on that as well as timeline. The database is only mentioned in passing, so when was access requested and by whom? Was access subsequently granted or are they still holding out on that?
That seems to be the case, but that could just as easily be the explanation for either a lab escape scenario or the exotic seafood market scenario. However, if it was a lab escape scenario and the local, midlevel party officials screwed up and did not report the relevant lab information to the central government, then I would assume that those officials have been or will soon be executed. It’s been about 18 months since the first outbreak in Wuhan. If it was a lab safety failure, then the central government should know all about that by now, having access to all of the lab information and the ability to interrogate anyone they like. They may try to keep it secret from rest of the world, but they would definitely be cleaning house right about now if that were the case. So the question is: are they cleaning house?
When Australia called for an independent inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak, China chose their default global bully tactic by introducing trade sanctions on Australian wine, coal and barley.
Wait, and this was all still happening in year 3 of T’s presidency??? What were we doing, indeed!
Yet less than 100 days in, Biden was expected to have solved the decade+ old border crises, plus, plus, plus.
These assholes.
Well, considering they tested 80,000 animals, and managed to find the intermediate animals in both other pandemics in shorter time frames… further information would be interesting about those statements, and a few others made in the article, but the Chinese reticence to allowing researchers in definitely is not an unsubstantiated claim.
Yeah, maybe they have… I don’t get much news about the inner machinations of the CCP, and they could have re-organized (or maybe they “died” from covid) or been quietly taken away to who knows what fate? If it was the lab scenario, I do think any and everything which would give it more weight would probably be censored?
There are so many questions about what is going on in China. Are they not allowing foreign researchers in so that Chinese researchers can figure out what happened first or are they not inclined to allow anyone to research anything at all. Is the secrecy possibly the result of other, possibly biowarfare-related researching going on at the lab? Is the secrecy simply because the missteps in the earliest stages of the outbreak are embarrassing to the CCP, or is there a genuine need to cover up liability? Have they looked at cell phone and travel records to determine where the people representing the earliest known cases were in the days leading up to contracting the disease? A lot could be cleared up with this information, if it exists, but I can also see how they might be reticent to share such information with hostile foreign powers, especially since even the best-case scenario for China still does not make China look particularly good.
Oh yeah, I agree that there may be any number of underlying reasons, I think the general fear of looking bad is as valid as anything else, they certainly clamped down on anything criticizing them in many other situations.
Ok, so summarizing a few opinions, including my own:
Barring a mea culpa from the Chinese government, we will likely never know for certain if this was a lab escape/accident vs. a natural evolutionary species jump, so we are left with discussing probabilities. This article makes a compelling and well supported, but far from definitive argument for human error. One thing that is not really debatable is that so-called “gain of function” experiments being done in anything less than level 4 containment are going to lead to extremely dangerous consequences at some point. Or, as my ever-literate brother put it, “virologists are doing super irresponsible shit right now that has a non-zero probability of getting us all killed.”
In the end, whether Sars-cov-2 is natural or human made is a side issue. It’s not an extinction-level virus. We should all be reviewing The Stand, though. It may be more prescient than we might like to believe.
It’s significant that the top five states are either major tourist destinations and/or have a major airport serving tourism.
Florida completely surprises me, though. All the blathering from DeSantis tries to make us believe that the entire state is absolutely fine with no Covid restrictions.
As with nuclear weapons it also seems likely given that the technology exists for getting us all killed, there will eventually be someone who doesn’t see that as a bad thing.
one bit of this maybe worth keeping in mind is that if covid had started here, do you think our governmental agencies or private companies would be opening our doors wide? just like with the vaccine, it’d be all “trade secrets” and “patents” for private companies and classified info or “competitive edge” for the governmental ones
we rarely open our doors when international committees ask.
( i mean look at things like war crimes trials or our influence at the world bank: it’s all how can we use international agencies to further our agenda and not let’s all participate as nations made of equally valued people )
china’s government doesn’t want research into covid’s origins to be used as a backdoor for access into their institutions any more than we or any other country would. and since they’re going to be criticized for anything less than complete open book transparency - why allow any transparency at all?
