COVID almost certainly originated in a wet market, groundbreaking genetic study

boing
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Obligatory:

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I had the good fortune during the pandemic to have a neighbour who is a nurse who was studying for her Master’s in Public Health and Epidemiology [1].

She commented on the whole lab-vs-market argument, and made the following points:

  • If it was a bio-weapon, then Sinovax would’ve been a lot more effective.
  • Good bio-weapons aren’t particularly human-to-human contagious. Anthrax, for example, has almost no human-to-human transmission. So there’s very little reason to believe it was a bio-weapon.
  • The gene sequencing doesn’t look like that of a lab-grown organism.
  • Any discussion about lab outbreak can have no practical or useful public health consequences. These conversations can only be political in nature, not aimed at public health, because:
    • If it was an accident, there’s no scenario in which they haven’t learned their lesson and tightened up controls.
    • There’s no realistic scenario in which is was on purpose and ordered by the government (see “Sinovax”, above).
    • If it was on purpose by a random actor, you can’t actually fully protect against that. But if it was, we can be pretty sure they’ve already assessed how that happened and how to close that vulnerability, even if they haven’t told you.

She was a very interesting neighbour to have at that time.

[1] She started that degree in mid-2019. Amazing timing.

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Well, personally I’m not sure that I agree with that part. Most people clearly don’t think it was an accident, so in the off chance that it was, how can anyone say that everyone who runs a lab anywhere on the planet with potentially dangerous pathogens has definitely learned their lesson? The relevant lessons wouldn’t apply exclusively to the Wuhan lab, after all.

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" * The gene sequencing doesn’t look like that of a lab-grown organism."

That was also my understanding of things, from reading various reports.

Nature in the raw produces messy DNA compared to an engineered gene-splice.

Unless we’re already entered the hellscape where scientists deliberately create new diseases for bio-weapons with enough random crap in the sequencing to make it look like they weren’t created by scientists.

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I can’t read that without thinking of this:

image

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And that’s just the thing — no matter how much well-researched evidence there is, it’s always easier to just move the goal posts rather than change your mind on something. It helps that it’s very difficult to “prove” a negative.

If it was a bio weapon I have no doubt it would be way deadlier and more contagious.

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