Snopes Disputes 'Shakiness' of COVID-19 Origin Story Claimed By Washington Post OpEd (snopes.com) 238
Thursday an Opinion piece in the Washington Post touted what the paper's own health policy reporter has described as "a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts." That conspiracy theory argues that instead of originating in the wild, the COVID-19 virus somehow escaped from a research lab.
Now the fact-checking web site Snopes has also weighed in this week, pointing out that the lab nearest the Wuhan market hadn't even published any coronavirus-related research prior to the outbreak. Instead the nearest coronavirus-researching lab was about 7 miles away, a maximum security "biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory certified to handle the world's most deadly pathogens." A February 2020 document erroneously described by several media outlets as a "scientific study" provides the supposedly science-based evidence of a virus escaping from a lab. This paper, such as it is, merely highlights the close distance between the seafood market and the labs and falsely claimed to have identified instances in which viral agents had escaped from Wuhan biological laboratories in the past... While SARS viruses have escaped from a Beijing lab on at least four occasions, no such event has been documented in Wuhan.
The purported instances of pathogens leaking from Wuhan laboratories, according to this "study," came from a Chinese news report (that we believe, based on the similarity of the research described and people involved, to be reproduced here) that profiled a Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention researcher named Tian Junhua. In 2012 and 2013, he captured and sampled nearly 10,000 bats in an effort to decode the evolutionary history of the hantavirus. In two instances, this researcher properly self-quarantined either after being bitten or urinated on by a potentially infected bat, he told reporters. These events, according to the 2013 study his research produced, occurred in the field and have nothing to do with either lab's ability to contain infective agents...
In sum, this paper -- which was first posted on and later deleted from the academic social networking website ResearchGate -- adds nothing but misinformation to the debate regarding the origins of the novel coronavirus and is not a real scientific study.
In February the Washington Post had quoted Vipin Narang, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as saying that it's "highly unlikely" the general population was exposed to a virus through an accident at a lab. "We don't have any evidence for that," said Narang, a political science professor with a background in chemical engineering.
UPDATE: On Twitter Snopes' reporter has identified what he sees as major errors in the Post's recently-published op-ed.
Now the fact-checking web site Snopes has also weighed in this week, pointing out that the lab nearest the Wuhan market hadn't even published any coronavirus-related research prior to the outbreak. Instead the nearest coronavirus-researching lab was about 7 miles away, a maximum security "biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory certified to handle the world's most deadly pathogens." A February 2020 document erroneously described by several media outlets as a "scientific study" provides the supposedly science-based evidence of a virus escaping from a lab. This paper, such as it is, merely highlights the close distance between the seafood market and the labs and falsely claimed to have identified instances in which viral agents had escaped from Wuhan biological laboratories in the past... While SARS viruses have escaped from a Beijing lab on at least four occasions, no such event has been documented in Wuhan.
The purported instances of pathogens leaking from Wuhan laboratories, according to this "study," came from a Chinese news report (that we believe, based on the similarity of the research described and people involved, to be reproduced here) that profiled a Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention researcher named Tian Junhua. In 2012 and 2013, he captured and sampled nearly 10,000 bats in an effort to decode the evolutionary history of the hantavirus. In two instances, this researcher properly self-quarantined either after being bitten or urinated on by a potentially infected bat, he told reporters. These events, according to the 2013 study his research produced, occurred in the field and have nothing to do with either lab's ability to contain infective agents...
In sum, this paper -- which was first posted on and later deleted from the academic social networking website ResearchGate -- adds nothing but misinformation to the debate regarding the origins of the novel coronavirus and is not a real scientific study.
In February the Washington Post had quoted Vipin Narang, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as saying that it's "highly unlikely" the general population was exposed to a virus through an accident at a lab. "We don't have any evidence for that," said Narang, a political science professor with a background in chemical engineering.
UPDATE: On Twitter Snopes' reporter has identified what he sees as major errors in the Post's recently-published op-ed.
Accidents at labs unlikely? Unlikely. (Score:5, Interesting)
There have been about 400 accidents in US labs reported between 2003-2009.
So accidents aren't as unlikely as you would expect. And that's in the US, that presumably has a stronger safety culture than China.
https://blogs.scientificameric... [scientificamerican.com]
Re:Accidents at labs unlikely? Unlikely. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I've found a video on YouTube which seems to present some information which they claim gives credence to the lab origins theory. Given I don't speak/read Chinese I cannot verify the video myself but it seems less tinfoil hat than other videos I've seen in my lifetime
https://youtu.be/bpQFCcSI0pU [youtu.be]
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I've followed this YouTuber for many years, and I believe his reporting to be in good faith. Perhaps he's wrong, but until a final determination is made, it's at least a theory worth keeping in mind.
Re:Accidents at labs unlikely? Unlikely. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think people get "worked up" because there are a lot of crazy rumors and misinformation flying around, such as the recent insanity of those who believe that this is all caused by 5G transmissions. Combating misinformation is difficult to do in the best of times, and now when people are nervous and many have lots of free time on their hands, it's vastly more so.
I'm not necessarily calling China a reliable narrator by any means (initial denials, coverups, downplaying, and then even shifting blame to the US in some isolated cases), but given the fact that there are wet markets that slaughter and sell bats to the public in unsanitary conditions, this just seems far too likely an originating vector to easily dismiss. It's not the first instance of this occurring either.
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Re: Accidents at labs unlikely? Unlikely. (Score:2)
China won't close the markets, if you're nearing a famine or in some regions actually get food shortages almost every year, and you're a dictator, closing the few sources for cheap protein isn't going to help the undercurrent of dissent in rural China.
Re: Accidents at labs unlikely? Unlikely. (Score:4, Interesting)
China won't close the markets,
they already did so in january iirc. moreover, trading in any wildlife species is banned except for research. (oh, wait, this is slashdot and that's china, so everything is a lie ... sigh).
if you're nearing a famine or in some regions actually get food shortages almost every year, and you're a dictator, closing the few sources for cheap protein isn't going to help the undercurrent of dissent in rural China.
wild animals aren't a staple food in china but a delicacy and a relatively recent fad, actually quite expensive. as such it will likely continue in the shadow, but at a considerably higher price and lower rate, and at least crowded markets in the open and large accumulations of animals can be avoided.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/opin... [bloomberg.com]
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is there any report of wild animals being sold there now?
wet markets as such aren't the problem and aren't going away anytime soon, not in china and not in most part of the world. really don't know what fauci is about, he should really be more specific.
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Fish are not what is sold at a wet market, even if, as in Wuhan, they name the illegal wet market a "fish market."
Don't be a dumb ass.
Re: Accidents at labs unlikely? Unlikely. (Score:4, Informative)
A wet market is a place where they keep live animals to be slaughtered on site, when the customer is ready to make a purchase.
They're called "wet" markets because they have a sewer trough that runs down the middle of the market. That's where the blood goes from the slaughter. It is a disgusting and barbaric practice that is outlawed almost everywhere, including China, but the Chinese people continue to embrace this practice even though they "banned" it. It is "illegal," but somehow that doesn't mean it isn't allowed; merely that you're not allowed to ask questions about it!
You can't hide behind cultural relativism because for one thing, until recently most Chinese couldn't afford meat (the economics of their population density doesn't allowed for common meat consumption without and until recent modern, industrial farming and refrigeration was introduced, so it isn't traditional) and they don't actually even try to defend the practice; they merely lie about if it is happening, or where, or who is doing it.
Bacon was not slaughtered in the back of the store. Don't be a moron who pretends they don't understand what is being discussed.
You're not a vegan, either. Stop lying so much.
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you don't really get to redefine what a wet market is just because you can't properly interpret sensationalist/generalist media outbursts, but whatever floats your boat.
i live in one of europe's biggest capitals and there are several wet markets in every quarter, they all open daily (even now, with strong restrictions). some of them sell living animals (mostly fish and seafood) and, guess what, they're a tourist attraction too. seems people abroad love this 'barbaric' custom.
you would be far more convincing
Re: Accidents at labs unlikely? Unlikely. (Score:5, Informative)
China won't close the markets, if you're nearing a famine or in some regions actually get food shortages almost every year, and you're a dictator, closing the few sources for cheap protein isn't going to help the undercurrent of dissent in rural China.
What are you on about guruevi?
Just how nutritious do you think bats are? You don't think Chinese are smart enough to just farm ducks and chickens, but go straight for bats of all things.
Wuhan, a city of 11 million people is hardly rural China.
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It seems like an innocent alien virus, only a little worse than an Earth flu, until it receives the 5G transmission.
You know what, I don't care how long you quarantine me, I would never want to sit through that movie. My goodness, we're living it!
Thanks Obama.
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Re: 5G transmissions (Score:4)
So that, at least, seems a little more plausible?
No, it's fucking bat-virus crazy.
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they used to use microwaves.... and everyone would feel an odd sensation of their bodies getting really warm
Microwaves heat up meat? You don't say...
Re:Accidents at labs unlikely? Unlikely. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Follow your own links (Score:4, Informative)
The citation for the Wikipedia statement is a video interview with David, in a page that says "David Mikkelson is the founder of Snopes.com". In the interview, David says that after several months of him doing everything for the site, Barbara started doing some writing.
So according to the trail of links you are citing, both links say David started it.
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Follow those links too (Score:2)
I would suggest you actually READ the first article that you linked.
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Hmm. Guess I'd trust him more than LynwoodRooster, whom you have just proven to be a liar*.
* Note: "Liar" is stated here because that is the current term of art for anyone who makes any mistake, misspeaks or misunderstands in any way, etc. I have come to agree with our political and journalistical classes that condensing nuance to its simplest term, to even where the lowest commoners can understand, is the double-plus good way to communicate going forward.
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> To be clear, Snopes is just one guy and his wife.
To be fair to them, that was a while ago. They had a rather acrimonious divorce with various allegations involving misconduct with company funds that I won't repeat and a fight over finances after one side sold out to some company. I think there are a few more people doing it rather than just the couple from Usenet who started it.
Anyhow, back on point, anyone who looks at the graphs knows that China is lying their ass off to us by now and the theory t
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Exactly. Snopes OpEd disputes Washington Post OpEd. To be clear, Snopes is just one guy and his wife.
Odd. I count 15 people on their staff [snopes.com], none of whom are Barbara Mikkelson who parted ways with her former husband, and Snopes, in 2014.
So your opinions about Snopes seems to be rooted in the 1990s, and no worth anything at all AC.
(The misogynistic assumption that Barbara could not possibly have been site co-creator is also noted.)
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Accident does NOT equal release to public.
Accidents include things like dropping a beaker of sterile water and having it break. The US likes to report things like that because it indicates potential problems, not actual problems.
The labs themselves count something as a serious risk only if a single worker was put at risk of exposure, and in the US, every time that has happened, they take extreme measures to protect the public.
Try again when you have the number of times an accident resulted in public risk,
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Try again when you have the number of times an accident resulted in public risk, which I bet is 0 in the US.
And you would be wrong. The US has had multiple accidents that resulted in public risk. We even have a national fund to pay victim claims, both past and future.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Accidents at labs unlikely? Unlikely. (Score:5, Interesting)
The Chinese government would much prefer it to have been released by the lab. Then they have someone to blame and execute and a lab to shut down.
As it stands they have an on-going problem with "wet markets" that will be harder to deal with. No individual to blame, it's a failure of the leadership to not shut them down.
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It's weird to me that you think their wet markets that can be found all over are somehow more important than their one lab for this kind of stuff.
They have no qualms about shutting markets like that down and could do so if there was any political will for it.
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The Chinese government is well known to keep failures under the wraps. Why would they document such critical failure to contain a virus with the ability to cause a world-wide pandemic?
There's a difference between the Chinese government controlling a narrative for the people and the international audience and an independently certified BSL-4 laboratory that is inspected by external international certifiers. Lying to the public and to another country is trivial. Lying to a certifier is a great way to end your certification.
Re:Accidents at labs unlikely? Unlikely. (Score:5, Interesting)
There have been about 400 accidents in US labs reported between 2003-2009.
So accidents aren't as unlikely as you would expect. And that's in the US, that presumably has a stronger safety culture than China.
https://blogs.scientificameric... [scientificamerican.com]
I don't have an opinion either way because I'm uninformed, but why would we presume any such thing?
Yes there's a history of using cheap or even toxic materials in manufacturing random crap to sell to consumers worldwide. But when it comes to precision matters, I don't know if there's evidence that China cuts corners. Their space program for instance is doing pretty well overall. So I just question the assumption that biomedical research wouldn't be treated as the life-or-death topic that it is. Shoddy USB 3 cables don't imply lack of due diligence in handling infectious diseases.
Again, I'm not disputing if one country or another has stronger safety culture... I'm not equipped to. I'm just asking on what tangible, objective basis such a presumption would be made in either direction.
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China has a long history of devastating accidents caused by Communist rule. The most deadly "natural" disaster of modern times was when multiple dams failed in succession in China due to poor engineering and difficulty of getting emergency measures approved quickly in a culture of bureaucracy and coverup. There's a constant problem of mid- and high-rise buildings spontaneously collapsing due to reckless corner cutting with blatant disregard for human life combined with thoroughly corrupt regulators. The
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That's exactly what I thought when I read one of the articles about a building collapse; the whole thing is suspicious, but there are too many different potential corrupt causes that all seem reasonably likely to be happening.
And it isn't like a hurricane; the photos showed an apparently-modern steel-framed building. It doesn't fall down without some corrupt cause.
Re:Accidents at labs unlikely? Unlikely. (Score:5, Interesting)
> I don't have an opinion either way because I'm uninformed, but why would we presume any such thing?
This is a country where fake *eggs* have been sold. Or there was the poisonous Sanlu baby forumula. Or that warehouse that exploded and took out half a city. Sorry, but China has a combination of sufficient technical skill to do big things and sufficient carelessness/hubris/whatever to make those big things fail in shocking ways. Suffice it to say, their culture of hiding things under the rug has burnt a lot of people over the years.
Read some ChinaSMACK [chinasmack.com] if you want to get more of a sense about what's actually trending on the Chinese side of things. That site is not political and mostly covers random trendy things on the Chinese internet, so it's a pretty good window into daily life.
Occam's Razor (Score:5, Insightful)
There have been about 400 accidents in US labs reported between 2003-2009.
How many of those incidents resulted in the release of a new, never-before-seen virus into the general population? Yes, it is theoretically possible that a research lab could have engineered a new virus and then, despite all precautions, accidentally released it 10 km away from the lab. However, it is also possible that the virus could be the result of a natural mutation. We know a similar virus exists in the wild in bats, we know viruses cross species boundaries regularly (it happens so often there is a word for it: zoonosis) and we have seen this happen numerous times before: SARS, MERS, Spanish flu, swine flu etc.
So, applying Occam's razor: which explanation is the simplest? The one we know happens on a regular basis in nature or the one which requires a whole series of unlikely events to happen? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all I have seen so far is extraordinary conjecture.
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"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all I have seen so far is extraordinary conjecture."
Great line. Extraordinary, even.
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Nobody sensible is saying that a research lab accidentally released an *engineered* virus. That has been disproven by DNA analysis of the virus. Some sensible people, however, are claiming that a lab studying bat viruses accidentally released one of those natural bat viruses. That is more reasonable.
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Also factor in -- if it *was* a lab accident, the person making the mistake wouldn't necessarily have known he had something this dangerous.
This whole thing has me rethinking some of the work I used to do. I worked with a veterinarian/primatologist who was concerned that ecotourists would carry infections between remote chimpanzee populations. So she built a solar-powered field-packable mobile diagonistics lab that could be packed into the bush by bearers -- just like in those old Tarzan movies. I helpe
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Well, and how many of these accidents have lead to a global pandemic? Exactly.
People that believe in conspiracy theories will accept any indicator that they may be right as gospel, no matter how weak. At the same time they will discount proof to the contrary, no matter how solid. The claim that such a lab escape happened here needs proof, not "it would be possible". There is no proof.
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There have been about 400 accidents in US labs reported between 2003-2009.
So accidents aren't as unlikely as you would expect. And that's in the US, that presumably has a stronger safety culture than China.
https://blogs.scientificameric... [scientificamerican.com]
But what constitutes an accident? According the the article, "Most (196) were an unspecified 'loss of containment.' There were also 77 reported spills and 46 accidental needle sticks or other 'sharps' injuries .... With all of these incidents, however, only seven lab-acquired infections were reported". And of those seven, it's not reported if any of them were associated with exposure to the general public.
So, it's possible that accidents at such labs will cause infections outside of the lab, but this rep
Re:Accidents at labs unlikely? Unlikely. (Score:5, Informative)
Take a general claim, boil it down to a specific (strawman) claim, say there is no evidence (because absence of evidence)..., and call it false/debunked.
Look at any political item.
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Ukraine probably interfered in the 2016 US election, but in the opposite direction and on a smaller scale than Russia did.
Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 US election.
Or burn down the strawman they just built - "We have solid proof of Russian interference! Lolz"
Snopes: DEBUNKED! [snopes.com] Suck it, Trump cultists! ... What do you mean nob
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Was on the BSL labs website (Score:4, Interesting)
I have been following this thing somewhat obsessively since early january and I was sceptical about this at first, but when I saw the lab's website mentioning research with horseshoe bats and the coronaviruses they carry I was not so sure anymore.
It's not impossible that one of the workers got infected and proceeded to infect others. It *is* quite a coincedence that there's a BSL4 lab directly in the epicenter.
I don't know if the website is still live, but I saw the page with the bat research with my own eyes.
Escaping from a lab does not necessarily imply bioweapons or designer viruses. There are very valid reasons to research bat coronaviruses as we have now found out.
Re:Was on the BSL labs website (Score:5, Informative)
Found the webpage, it's still online:
http://english.whiov.cas.cn/Ab... [whiov.cas.cn]
Re: Was on the BSL labs website (Score:5, Informative)
But in reality it is based on papers that report work on how a bat corona virus might spread to humans and that have authors from Wuhan. For example: https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
Excellent information (Score:3)
First sentence of the linked scientific paper, published in the Dec. 2015 edition:
"The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV underscores the threat of cross-species transmission events leading to outbreaks in humans."
More information, from the CDC: "Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) is viral respiratory illness that is new to humans. It was first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and has since
People want someone to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
That is pretty much exactly what it implies. The surface area of contact at a genuine research lab is tiny compared to the surface area of contact between the general population and wild animals. If you don't believe it was deliberately introduced or they were working on engineering deadly human bioweapons, then the odds of transmission via an accident at a lab is millions if not trillions of times smaller than the odds of transmission via incidental contact between a random person and a wild animal. You're talking about a deadly virus in a population of a few thousand lab animals mutating the ability to cross into humans and incidental contact to a few hundred employees allowing it to jump; versus such a mutation occurring among a population of tens of billions of animals and incidental contact with over a billion humans.
Movie plots choose the lab accident route because it's much more satisfying (see first paragraph) than random transmission from wild animals. And your mind magnifies the probability of a lab accident for the same reason (thus making this conspiracy theory so alluring). The raw probability that this was due to a lab accident, and not from a wild animal, are so low that you could call it almost impossible.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:People want someone to blame (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong. Almost every disease humanity knows about is stored, in its natural state, in a lab somewhere. This is done so researchers can investigate it, with absolutely no connection to bioweapons or deliberately changing the virus at all. The point is to understand what currently exists. And where there are samples in labs, there can be accidents.
As for denying that accidents can't happen because "surface contact area is tiny", remember that we've already seen SARS be accidentally released from a research lab. Not a bioweapon, just an accident. It happened in 2003 [who.int] - and the CDC estimates the likelihood of an accidental release from a BSL 3 or 4 lab is 0.3% per lab per year [nih.gov]. All of your "trillions of times less likely" rhetoric is nice and dramatic, but not upheld by the formal estimates of the professionals.
In other words, an accidental release is something that needs to be considered just because it is a possible cause, but because it is one that has happened in the past.
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Those labs study animal diseases, including bats, which are the primary suspect carriers. Pangolins are another animal that naturally has similar viruses, and is also studied in labs in Wuhan.
That's where they would get the virus from, to do research on, and then possibly have an accident with.
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Infectious agents have escaped from labs in multiple countries over the decades. Your risk estimates are comical. It has happened with smallpox in the UK, anthrax in the USSR (which was covered-up as a naturally occurring outbreak).
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Infectious agents have escaped from labs in multiple countries over the decades. Your risk estimates are comical. It has happened with smallpox in the UK, anthrax in the USSR (which was covered-up as a naturally occurring outbreak).
And how many pandemics has that caused? Right...
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Slaughtering animals in the market in proximity to customers isn't a random roll of the dice, it is a disgusting and harmful practice that has been known to be disgusting and dangerous for thousands of years.
There is no need to hunt for a shadowy villain when the mainstream explanation already has clear villains, clear parties at fault.
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Indeed. Thanks for the voice of sanity. Unfortunately you will not reach any of the demented conspiracy mongers, because they cannot even do basic fact-checking and they have no common sense. They just look for somebody to blame and do not care at all about plausibility or probability. In fact, they do not understand these ideas, because obviously they are right.
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When a massive human calamity like this happens, people want someone to blame. The idea that it was just a random roll of the dice which caused a bug to jump from animals to people isn't a satisfying for all the dead and wide scale disruption to our lives. We want to believe that there's some guiding force behind this, whether a deliberate nefarious actor, or mere incompetence. We don't want to believe that "It just happened."
That is pretty much exactly what it implies. The surface area of contact at a genuine research lab is tiny compared to the surface area of contact between the general population and wild animals. If you don't believe it was deliberately introduced or they were working on engineering deadly human bioweapons, then the odds of transmission via an accident at a lab is millions if not trillions of times smaller than the odds of transmission via incidental contact between a random person and a wild animal. You're talking about a deadly virus in a population of a few thousand lab animals mutating the ability to cross into humans and incidental contact to a few hundred employees allowing it to jump; versus such a mutation occurring among a population of tens of billions of animals and incidental contact with over a billion humans.
Movie plots choose the lab accident route because it's much more satisfying (see first paragraph) than random transmission from wild animals. And your mind magnifies the probability of a lab accident for the same reason (thus making this conspiracy theory so alluring). The raw probability that this was due to a lab accident, and not from a wild animal, are so low that you could call it almost impossible.
Um ... yeah, except in a lab they are deliberately isolating, concentrating, and working with virus. Which is very different and lots more dangerous than incidental contact with animals.
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China deliberately let it out of the country and suppressed vital information to let it spread to the rest of the world.
Are you insane or just very, very stupid? Because that has only happened in your deranged fantasy.
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That particular BSL lab is well-known to foreign researchers. The whole point of the BSL-4 lab is to make this kind of event unlikely.
Now if it were true, as the Post article claims, that some random BSL-2 lab in Wuhan was collecting bat coronavirus samples, it'd be worth looking for an index patient there. While it's acceptable to handle SARS-COV-2 in a BSL-2 facility for *certain* operations, remember at the time they were supposedly doing this they would have had no idea they were handling a strain of
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Well...if you were going to research coronaviruses that occur naturally in bats and wild animals, that's where you put your lab. So it may not be a coincidence that the lab exists where the bats also exist.
Snopes/Ministry of Truth (Score:2, Insightful)
Snopes Not Credible for Anything Political (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides maliciously attacking satire outlets like the Babylon Bee (which they never did to the Onion), sometimes they simply leave questions with inconvenient verdicts [snopes.com] unanswered forever.
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Re:Snopes Not Credible for Anything Political (Score:5, Insightful)
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You consider this a political question?
Um anyone fucking for real here? (Score:3, Insightful)
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https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
I can't find the link at the moment, but I read another paper a couple weeks ago which gave probable estimates of how long ago Sars-Cov-2 split off from the other coronaviruses, it's been around for a very long time in bats, just the jump to humans which is 'new'.
That’d be a demeaning way to die (Score:2)
Get sick after getting peed on by a bat.
In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Chinese Researchers Sell Lab Animals (Score:2, Interesting)
This little tidbit [nypost.com] is what makes me think the virus could have escaped that way:
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A lab worker selling bats as meat for extra cash? Not that it couldn't happen, but something is missing in that story...
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Just some mindless incompetent morons looking for a villain. They would use word-association if it pointed to somebody "guilty".
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Wrong. (Score:3)
They knew about it. Was it developed as a weapon? No. But it was an attempted cover up and they tried to keep it dark as long as possible costing LOTS OF LIVES both foreign an domestic.
Watch the video. [youtube.com] Take it from someone who speaks Chinese and found the derelict job postings.
How can you tell if China is lying? (Score:2)
Since when are newspaper articles definitive? (Score:3)
You can find some kind of published prose to support any conspiracy theory you choose.
However, actual virologists and epidemiologists who have studied the genome of the coronavirus, say that the genetic makeup of the virus makes it highly unlikely, if not impossible, that it was somehow manufactured in a lab.
Of course, that makes it even scarier. If this was a natural mutation/transmission, then it means that even if the "authorities" successfully control the lab experiments, Mother Nature will continue on her own merry way.
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I note that the /. QOTD below is quite apropo:
"There is no opinion so absurd that some philosopher will not express it. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero, "Ad familiares""
Oh, well then (Score:2)
Instead the nearest coronavirus-researching lab was about 7 miles away
Oh well then ... that's just crazy talk! How could it possibly get so far without popping up somewhere else first?? Stupid xenophobic rubes will believe anything, haha!
Snopes is a Joke (Score:3)
Show us Huang Yan Ling! (Score:2)
Re:This is an extinction level event (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone over the age of 50 will die...sorry, but true
It's even worse than that. It turns out that we're all going to die.
Re:This is an extinction level event (Score:5, Funny)
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Logically tax evasion then would allow you to put off death for as long as you could manage it.
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Everyone over the age of 50 will die...sorry, but true
It's even worse than that. It turns out that we're all going to die.
Damn. And here I was planning to live forever...
Re:This is an extinction level event (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure you understand what "extinction" means.
You're in good company though. All the Slashdotters who like the throw around the term "existential" also don't understand what it means.
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I'm not sure you understand what "extinction" means.
No no, you aren't getting this. Donald Trump is going to catch this and get properly ill. Suddenly he realises that he's killed himself through his own stupidity but he still hasn't relinquished the presidency yet. In a fit of pique he launches all the bombs, causing the Russians to do the same. This actually killls everyone.
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This is an extinction level event
Everyone over the age of 50 will die...sorry, but true
Everyone over the age of 50 dying has zero relevance to the biological future of the human race. The death rate from the Chinese Corona virus seems to be below 1% for those under 50, and isn't particularly scary for those under 70. The average age of those that died in Italy was 79.5 from what I've seen.
Thus far the Corona virus has killed fewer people than the 2017-18 flu season. Let's hope it stays that way.
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Thus far the Corona virus has killed fewer people than the 2017-18 flu season. Let's hope it stays that way.
That is pretty unlikely. Too many countries, including the US, have screwed up too badly already for that.
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Mod parent down and nuke the identity that posted it.
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Everyone over the age of 50 will die...sorry, but true
Even leaving other considerations aside, how would killing everyone over reproductive age be an extinction level event?
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Confimed it was created in a lab. Snopes says it probably wasn't.
There is exceptionally solid evidence this was not _created_ in a lab. There is no good reason to believe it was not created in a lab but escaped from there. There is a tiny probability this did happen, compared to a large probability that the transfer was entirely in the wild. That is, unless you believe China has genetic engineering half a century or so in advance of everybody else?
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Anything is possible when somebody insane speculates....