> The viral outbreak could have been stopped in December in Wuhan had we had the foresight and financial support to develop antiviral drugs or vaccines.
It’s quite possible the pandemic started with a virology lab in Wuhan doing exactly that.
It’s quite possible the pandemic started with a virology lab in Wuhan doing exactly that.
Labs in the USA and elsewhere have had problems. Not hard to believe it happened in China too.
Interesting fact - so called "gain-of-function" studies were banned in the US in 2014 and then the ban lifted in 2017.
October 2014 - https://www.the-scientist.com/the-nutshell/moratorium-on-gai...
February 2018 - Ban ends. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
He also said it's "possible". Notice the lack of certainty. From what i know, the wet market theory also lacks evidence. All we know is that this evolved naturally and was not designed in a lab. It could still evolve in a lab, or evolve elsewhere and studied in the lab.
The spy agencies have a number of jobs. The obvious one is to spy (not just on foreign powers, but on everybody, as we now know without a doubt). Lying to and manipulating the public is another big job. And they have other more heinous jobs (torture, assassinations, etc). To do their jobs requires constant obfuscation. So why on earth does anyone ever give any credence to anything a spook says?
The US intelligence agencies haven't said anything to my knowledge about accidental release. They said it didn't appear to be an engineered virus (true) and that there was no evidence that it did come from the lab (true).
But what that misses, is that there's a ton of circumstantial evidence that exactly this class of disease was being studied (bat coronaviruses, research on animal to human transmission, including forced mutation to encourage this) a few hundred yards from the wet market in question, and this lab had explicitly been called out for sloppy handling of dangerous biological materials.
(and to be clear, this isn't some dark secret research -- it's public albeit controversial research on preventing pandemics, funded by the NIH.)
Also as I understand it. Bats acts as a repository for corona virus but the virus has to mutate in order to infect a human, so it infects another animal, where the mutated strain grow, before it reaches a human.
This is (weak) evidence that the virus was not engineered. It says absolutely nothing about the possibility -- which I outlined clearly, and which is outlined clearly in the linked doc -- that this is a natural virus accidentally released from a lab.
> Studies proving the virus was not "engineered" do not prove the spillover event occured outside of a laboratory. We are not claiming the virus was engineered. They also do not prove that the spillover event did not involve an animal or organism sourced from one of these labs.
> To start with, we will once again state that we are not claiming SARS-CoV-2 has been engineered.
> Editors’ note, March 2020: We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.
I'd like to engage on this, but it's pretty clear you aren't discussing this in good faith, or even reading the content you're talking about, so I'm going to have to step out.
Project evidence hasn't claimed the thing was engineered; only that a lab was involved in it in some shape or form.
They also address the articles you've linked if I recall. It's not a bunch of conspiracy theories. It is a vast collection of circumstances that make it very difficult to discount a lab origin out of hand.
Even if not, there are risks associated with continuing to research new viruses. I live five minutes away from where the lab was that nearly released Ebola into the us 30 years ago.