I wonder if the people making these claims can point to any research papers that came out of the lab in the years leading up to the pandemic? You would think that somebody would have published something, unless the research itself was top secret, which would point to something a bit more sinister…
I think that it is likely that they were engaged in GoF research, but I just don’t know.
I tried a look through pubmed, but it is not my field, and I could not disentangle gof research from anything else. For example, there’s this one, but I don’t know the difference between gof and recombinant DNA procedures from that paper.
[ETA: I just wish we could have discussions about this without all the political baggage. The Biden administration’s cautious approach seems to be fairly careful and reasoned.]
I know what you mean, but the lab leak theory, if proven true (and it will probably never be fully proven one way or another), would have enormous geopolitical implications, whether we like it or not. It would be the difference between a natural disaster and a manmade disaster on the scale of Chernobyl in the eyes of many around the world.
We hear a lot about diseases starting in China (from the likes of Fox at least), implying the China is the primary source of most diseases.
1st question: Is that true? Statistically speaking, is there actually evidence that a disproportionate number of new disease strains pop up there? Or is it just that we hear loads about any disease strains that are found in China (whether or not they originated there) and not so much about disease strains originating from elsewhere? Diseases have historically been miss-labeled in that regard (example, “Spanish Flu”, which originated in Kansas US)
2nd: If it is true that there is a disproportionate number of diseases that originate there, what is is about China that causes that to be the case? I hear “wet markets” a lot. Do those not occur in other parts of the world? And what steps could China take to reduce the risks of disease strains coming in to being (assuming that is actually a problem specific to China)
Or is it just that with 17.9% of the worlds population, you expect, and get, statistically speaking, 17.9% (more than 1/10) of new diseases to show up there first.
Lab leaks can happen anywhere. They do happen anywhere. Anyone who draws geopolitical conclusions from this is part of the problem. I expect Biden to be more careful about this than his predecessor, or than the GOP t****s in the Senate or the Qanon rabble to whom they cater.
Or Three Mile Island, or Windscale, or Fukushima. The fact that Chernobyl’s mess crossed geographical borders doesn’t mean that the Soviet energy program was more evil than the ones in Japan or US or UK.
Of course. But a lot of people are going to draw those conclusions, and not just in America.
ETA: I really hope that it wasn’t a lab leak because, in spite of all the horrible things that the Chinese government has done and still does, the country does not deserve the shit storm that they will get if it turns out to have been a screwups in the lab. I still remember the flak that we got here in Japan for Fukushima, and that didn’t kill millions of people…
Tell it not in Gath. But in the genteel obscurity of the bottom of the BoingBoing chat list, I will concede to someone of an enquiring disposition that all science is basically finding something you don’t understand and poking it with a stick. People may well be studying how coronaviruses may get into human cells. They may have done it. If they did, I would imagine they would be very careful with the result. But there is a chance that the disease existed in the lab, and there is a finite chance it may have got out and flourished. I would rather doubt it, as lab people can’t do experiments unless they keep things clean, but shit happens.
I am not qualified to answer any of these. Your answers all sound reasonable. If we discovered the last few flu strains in China, we would look for the next one there too, whether they actually start there or not. The pigs and ducks thing may be real - birds have a lot of lung diseases, and do not normally live close to mammals - but it would be hard to prove cause and effect. And they have a large population.
Peter Doocy wants us to blame the Chinese because they are lots of them, they are ‘not like us’, they eat weird animals, and they cause diseases. This is worryingly close to the ideas we are
tossing around, but I trust there is a world of difference between us and him.
My father studied how influenza, and other viruses modified their DNA to make the leap from animals to humans, as would be expected of a professor of microbiology and immunology. Scientists also study other known, often deadly diseases, and unfortunately there have been escapes and accidental releases, for example things like smallpox, it’s a risk when you are dealing with organisms that small. Consider also that they had a large amount of laboratory animals who could have acted as reservoirs, or intermediate steps for the virus to make the leap from bats to humans.
I’m not sure how much is hearsay, but there were several complaints that the WIV was not always compliant with procedures for ensuring escapes couldn’t happen, and now the lab has now been passed to the control of a high ranking Chinese general, I’m assuming they want someone who will be a real stickler for procedure in charge (and no, I don’t think it’s because they were running military experiments on biological weapons there).
For sure the loudest, most obnoxious people in politics and media who were pushing this theory did have an axe to grind and had their own agendas, but there have also been serious, qualified people proposing this theory from the very beginning.
I think this article in the Times sums it up pretty well. Consider that two Chinese researchers from South China University wrote a paper proposing this 15 months ago, and a molecular biologist with MIT was raising this over a year ago.
I also thought this article gives some good background on the theory:
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