:He’s basically relying on the Wade article as his “evidence”. He also makes the mistake of thinking of hundreds (his italicization) of coranaviruses in a lab as upsetting as that’s a lot of coronaviruses. There’s 400 that have been found in the wild in bats in China, with no containment system there at all. They’re literally flying around. We are still discovering new bat species, it will be unsurprising to find new viruses in the new bats. There will eventually be significantly more than 400 coronavirus species discovered in the wild in China. Zoonotic viruses exist. We have more and more humans every year, encroaching on what was previously wild territory exposes more and more humans to more and more zoonotic reservoirs. We will tap more, give it a couple decades. That is not news, or conjecture, that is a natural process that we have been observing. That is what SARS and MERS were, two other bat viruses that managed to make the jump to humans. So two made the jump this century, but for some reason a third is a surprise? NOT funding a lab to monitor and catalog viruses puts us at risk for having a virus that moves faster than Covid-19 wipe out more people next time.
My main takeaways from the Robinson article was that (1) no meaningful audit of the Wuhan lab had been carried out, and that (2) Peter Daszak, who has clear conflicts of interest, was both on the investigatory team and has been instrumental in dismissing a lab leak as a reasonable scenario in the media. Again, not by themselves incriminating, but certainly fishy, and not at all relevant to the amount of bats/coronaviruses in the wild or at the lab.
What’s wrong with the Wade article?
The GOP is controlled by its base, and the base is filled with crude morons. Is it intelligent to allow yourself to be manipulated by idiots? Even if this is really all about retaining power its a stupid move because as Jan 6th showed Mike Pence the morons can turn on you very easily.
Fair question. Political reasons: At the time of the start of the pandemic, there were significant missteps by both the US and China, and hardliners in both countries were blaming the opposite country. Both countries had an individual in charge who would not be honest if there was any political benefit, and who had a cult of personality surrounding them that caused significant missteps early in the pandemic. While I would hope science would rise above this, I would understand the Chinese gov’t not trusting a scientist contingent from the US. If I had an important lab tied into my national interests that diverged from Trump, I would not trust a Trump representative to honest about results in my lab. See the resent “audit” of the elections. And I’m American. So I could see Chinese gov’t being hesitant about allowing the “West” access to the lab. I have seething rage about the lack of an international response from the richest nation on earth when faced with a pandemic that threatened the human race. If I was an average Chinese person, listening to Trump and Trump supporters laugh over “kung flu” while my countrymen were dying and he was doing nothing, and Trump blamed the escape on the Wuhan lab, I would have a hard time collaborating with the American Gov’t. I hope this changes, and there’s a better working relationship going forward. At some point, there will hopefully be a better audit, but while I would like a better communication, I understand it. This should have been better discussed in the Wade article.
Science reasons: Much much much more DNA manipulation happens outside the lab than inside. How much? Several orders of magnitude more. Hundreds of thousands of bats of different species spend cramped time in a single cave. Wild bats are often full of different strains of coronavirus. While nature does enough mutation on it’s own, but humans also like to dump mutagenic agents. In movies, DNA mutation only happens in labs. That’s movies. More biological and viral diversity is found in the real world. Bats are an effective vector. They migrate, fly miles in a single night, and hide from humans. As noted, novel bat viruses gaining function to be able to infect humans is not novel. SARS, MERS. Two major ones this century. Those are likely not the only ones, but those are the “successful” ones, that left a mark. You or I could have had a mild cold or an asymptomatic virus that started in bats and we were patient zero and don’t know about it. Life is a gain of function experiment, the more contagious virus “wins”. As several people have mentioned in the thread, not weird that a virus that possibly evolved to spread in caves can spread indoors. The amount of animals that would need to be infected with a virus before spreading it to a human? One would be enough. The expectation that we’ll find it in the wild is just an expectation. We have a pandemic going on, and everything has been disrupted, including science. While it’s important to try to find the animals that started it, to expect, well it’s not shown up, so it must have been Fauci and Shi? If it started in a subspecies of bat that was not well known, and is now wiped out, how would we ever find them? Or if there were an intervening animal, say, a subspecies of Shansei vole? Bats live in caves, abandoned structures and quiet parts of structures in use. Some species live in trees. I’ve encountered two bats, accidentally touched them, when they came into my place. It’s not that weird to have bats in your house. If you have an attic, overhanging eaves or just a small hole in the ventilation system, you might have them and not know. I would never have known I was breathing the same air as my two bats if they hadn’t both decided to hangout on light switches. Also, about 30 million Chinese people live in caves. In China More Than 30 Million People Live in Eco-Friendly Caves And this is just bats. Any mammal could have been the vector between bats and humans. So, yeah, we could probably rule out zebra, as they’re not that common in China outside zoos, but that still leaves a lot of pets, foods, and wild critters that could have passed it along. Lions, tigers, pumas, cougars, snow leopards and gorillas have caught covid 19, from zoo handlers. Not from eating zoo handlers, or from intimate contact. Likely from just sharing the same air. It spreads fast. So, the expectation that the Chinese version of the CDC will have DNA swabs of every bat population in all Chinese attics, garages, eaves of every house, tree, and hole in the ground is bizarre. It would take one instance of nonhuman to human to get the ball rolling. As noted, Covid 19 doesn’t spread easily in bats. So, it might not be that prevalent in populations. Nightmare viruses exist. Ebola, Black death, 1918 H1N1, HIV. As far as we know, they don’t seem like they came from labs. Saying “this virus is a nightmare, therefore must have happened in a lab” is simply unwarranted. But to say, well the two possibilities are nature and this lab, and there’s no proof of nature, so we have to weigh these two possibilities equally is nonsense.
And they need to be asked “why are they treating the Republican Party like a sports team?” It’s not even that, if you follow sports closely. There are a group of ex-Manchester United fans who got so sick of how their club was being run that they started their own team, FC United of Manchester. Loyal sports fans are less tolerant of bullshit than Republicans are, apparently.
At what point will too much be too much for these unhappy Republicans? Are they still more scared of a Democratic party government than they are of Fascism? As things currently stand, they are supporting fascism even as they claim to oppose it. They need to take action, and be prepared for the consequences from the Trumpist hardcore.
Personally I don’t think the Republican party can be saved. They are at the point where they will cheer on as a child of a Republican sings Tomorrow Belongs To Me. This is the end point of the last 60 years of the road that the Republican Party took, and they have no one to blame but themselves.
They won’t listen to me though. I am a far left independent, who cannot vote in US elections but would vote Democratic Party under protest if I could
I hate Republicans.
If this thing did escape from a lab, it means some poor researcher made a horrible mistake and probably paid for it with his or her life and the lives of their friends and families.
And that lab doesn’t make new viruses. They just study them. Which means it was already out there, just waiting to find a human to jump to. It would have found one eventually anyway.
And if you aren’t an idiot, you’ll understand that even with the risks involved, this study is important and worth the risk. COVID-19 would have happened anyway, and if it would have caught us exceptionally flat footed we wouldn’t have had a vaccine in under a year.
But Republicans either pander to idiots or are idiots.
(And no, I bet it probably escaped at the wet market. I also don’t think it matters one bit because it would have happened eventually anyway.)
Whether or not this virus was man-made, your statement is certainly not true, Shi’s lab does create new viruses as part of their research, and has done so for years:
https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debate-over-risky-research-1.18787
At this point, I think they’ve gone full Dunning–Kruger and believe they are smarter than everyone else.
The thing that I can’t quite figure out about this logic is, if China cultivated, bio-weaponized, and deliberately released the virus, then why the hell did they do so in the middle of their own country? Why would China attack it’s own people (and not one of the minority groups they persecute, but their main-stream citizens) How does that make any sort of sense? If it was “deliberately released” in China, then that means their enemy would have had to release it. Which would have to mean Trump personally arranged to released it there. No other explanation for it being “on purpose” could possibly make sense. So, that means the pandemic is all Trumps fault right from the start.
Well, that’s just how diabolical they really are! </s>
(a hypothetical, if likely, answer to a real question I once had)
Meanwhile, the Chinese media (which, of course, serves at the pleasure of the Party) is pushing their own conspiracy theories about the origins of the coronavirus, emphasizing that the seafood market also traded in imported meat and seafood products.
Not again this stuff. This is a highly dangerous longread written by someone who does either not understand the scientific process and is having a political agenda or who has an agenda including to undermine understanding and trust in science in general.
Even @anon29537550 was hesitant to call this bullshit. I am not. This is bullshit.
The pee value.
Given who was asking in the briefing room, might be more accurate to go with #2, as in, “full of.” 
pish posh.
Oh gawd. Another longread which I can spend time eyerolling on?
I whish this kind of reporting would be replication-incompetent, but sadly is highly transmissible, contagious, infectious, and replicates itself even in unspecific hosts.
There is so much FUD-inducing language there, an unwind and takedown would take ages. As would the argument about a takedown.
The general premise of Wade seems to be that experimental virology is inherently unsafe and done by a financially motivates cabal. Robinson buys into that? Ok. That’s conspiracy stuff, and the answer to that is right there in the OP. Smile, and refuse to engage further.
[Edit for spelling and grammar.]
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