WHO Report Says Animals Likely Source of COVID (apnews.com) 287
A joint WHO-China study on the origins of COVID-19 says that transmission of the virus from bats to humans through another animal is the most likely scenario and that a lab leak is "extremely unlikely," The Associated Press reported Monday, citing a draft copy. From the report: The findings offer little new insight into how the virus began to spread around the globe and many questions remain unanswered, though that was as expected. But the report did provide more detail on the reasoning behind the researchers' conclusions. The team proposed further research in every area except the lab leak hypothesis. The report's release has been repeatedly delayed, raising questions about whether the Chinese side was trying to skew the conclusions to prevent blame for the pandemic falling on China. A World Health Organization official said late last week that he expected it would be ready for release "in the next few days."
The AP received a copy on Monday from a Geneva-based diplomat from a WHO-member country. It wasn't clear whether the report might still be changed prior to release, though the diplomat said it was the final version. A second diplomat confirmed getting the report too. Both refused to be identified because they were not authorized to release it ahead of publication. The researchers listed four scenarios in order of likelihood for the emergence of the coronavirus named SARS-CoV-2. Topping the list was transmission from bats through another animal, which they said was likely to very likely. They evaluated direct spread from bats to humans as likely, and said that spread through "cold-chain" food products was possible but not likely. Bats are known to carry coronaviruses and, in fact, the closest relative of the virus that causes COVID-19 has been found in bats. However, the report says that "the evolutionary distance between these bat viruses and SARS-CoV-2 is estimated to be several decades, suggesting a missing link."
The AP received a copy on Monday from a Geneva-based diplomat from a WHO-member country. It wasn't clear whether the report might still be changed prior to release, though the diplomat said it was the final version. A second diplomat confirmed getting the report too. Both refused to be identified because they were not authorized to release it ahead of publication. The researchers listed four scenarios in order of likelihood for the emergence of the coronavirus named SARS-CoV-2. Topping the list was transmission from bats through another animal, which they said was likely to very likely. They evaluated direct spread from bats to humans as likely, and said that spread through "cold-chain" food products was possible but not likely. Bats are known to carry coronaviruses and, in fact, the closest relative of the virus that causes COVID-19 has been found in bats. However, the report says that "the evolutionary distance between these bat viruses and SARS-CoV-2 is estimated to be several decades, suggesting a missing link."
Like this report is going to change anyone's mind? (Score:3)
Re:Like this report is going to change anyone's mi (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the perfect storm of bullshit.
Authoritarian, secretive regime disinclined to accept any blame for mistakes. Maybe add in a touch of cultural predisposition to "saving face" and avoiding public embarrassment and an oppositional attitude to foreign invesitgation. Add in an invisible enemy, a virus, which is challenging to trace to a source of origin on a good day. Now make it a *novel* virus that nobody knew much about.
And this is before we get into international posturing and competition and various levels of domestic politicization of the pandemic, including a major world leader openly engaging in racist demagoguery with regard to the virus' geographic origin.
Even if this thing had popped up in France instead of China, you'd still have a baseline of conspiracy theories which are only made worse by the politicization and nature of the government of its apparent country of origin.
Anyone bought into a theory before this can't possibly find enough new evidence that will sway them from other narratives.
Even the general narrative of bat -> human can have the lab inserted.
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Authoritarian, secretive regime disinclined to accept any blame for mistakes.
Us or them?
Both.
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If the report has good evidence, it will definitely change my mind (or give me more confidence in my current mind). Right now I have the source of coronavirus in my mind listed as "I don't know."
If it's just a bunch of people's opinions without convincing evidence, it won't change my mind.
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Occam's Razor says it's probably not a lab leak. Why one would start with that assumption makes no sense, other than fitting their preconceived boogeyman notions. "But the gov't is secretive and evasive" doesn't say much because most despots are secretive and evasive out of habit.
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I like the Bronx panther analogy.
Let's say you hear reports of a Florida Panther wandering around the streets of the Bronx. Is your first thought that the panther came on it's own all the way from Florida? Probably not. You might then ask, what is the largest concentration of Florida Panthers in the Bronx? Maybe there is a facility in the Bronx that is known to have a population of panthers, maybe even a panther breeding program? The zoo! Maybe it came from the Bronx zoo?
The Wuhan lab was basically a corona
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So let me ask you this. When the Florida Panthers were found in... let's say Maine, 16 years earlier, was that also the Bronx zoo?
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I'm not even sure why it matters.
Besides may be the more even minded people who wanted to answer the question of where the virus originated? No, you are not going to convince conspiracy nuts who will try to link something as trivial as a misspelling in the report as a code from the "real investigators" that it was all China's doing.
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The totality of all factors involved can only blame the Chinese government if you first assume that they actually had a clue about the severity of the illness long before they announced it to the world.
I'm going to leave this [wikipedia.org] right here.
The coverup started on day 0. We can debate how much, but SOME blame accrues to the Chinese government as a result
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Of course, because doctors are infallible.
Before mid December China had very good reason to believe that the virus was *not* as serious as this doctor was saying.
Yes, it turned out they were wrong to keep it hidden, but this is knowledge only in HINDSIGHT. If they had let him go public a month or two before they actually did, then the superspreader events in Wuhan would likelly not have occurred, and China would have been blamed for starting an international panic over nothing, possibly making the wor
Fine print (Score:2, Insightful)
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Just to be precise, a lab leak would not probably involve an intermediary *animal*. It would be bat->lab->people.
Technology Review has a (possibly paywalled) article with some interesting information here: https://www.technologyreview.c... [technologyreview.com]
It seems awfully hard to ignore that the Wuhan lab was definitely working with coronaviruses from bats prior to the outbreak, but guts and anecdotes are not data and hard analysis.
That said, your point needs amplification that a leak from a lab does not mean an engin
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China really does not have that kind of control you think it does. Stories thoughout the years seem to imply that on the contrary, China is very loosely controlled, decentralized, and inept.
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Re:Fine print (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not hard to travel hundreds of miles.
It's very hard to find a virus when
1. There was no test for it.
2. It can spread without symptoms.
3. Even with symptoms they can take days to present.
4. Symptoms are very similar to other much more common viruses.
5. But mostly, Nobody was looking for it because we didn't even know it existed yet.
It's not at all surprising nobody found a trail of infected people in a straight line from where the virus first jumped to humans.
We don't even know where that was anyway.
We don't even know if it came from a bat or some other animal that caught it from a bat.
We do know it could have been circulating for up to two months [ucsd.edu] before the first detected cases in Wuhan.
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According to the lab leak conspiracy theory, passing through human cell cultures explains how it became so well adapted to us so quickly without getting any of the telltale signs of genetic engineering. So its more like:
lab bat -> human culture -> (another lab bat?) -> people
I think China would like very much (Score:4, Insightful)
The scientific consensus has been the virus was caused by deforestation and wet markets drastically increasing interspecies contact and increasing the opportunities coronavirus has had to jump from one species to another and mutate.
China's slash & burn policies have been very profitable, and needed to maintain the 5% growth they want/need. In particular they need the wet markets & deforestation to prop up the rural economies.
Blaming it on a lab blames individuals rather than systems. This keeps anyone from questioning those systems and calling for reform. That works out well for American politics too, since it makes blame shifting much easier (it's tough to get angry enough about a complex system to be willing to blame it, you're more likely to just want the system fixed).
It's a win-win for both China and US Politics... and a lose-lose for anyone who catches the next disease that comes out of these systems....
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Blaming it on a lab blames individuals rather than systems. This keeps anyone from questioning those systems and calling for reform.
This is the result of a failure of the population to engage in critical thinking, and the sensationalist media spreading spin to enhance profits. What happens when you have several highly legitimate related problems, which are rampant because the world is a complex place? Accept a 100% failure rate at addressing the entire problem because too many people can’t focus past the two sentences of addressing the first part? News flash, just because something is less important or less likely does not me
Re:I think China would like very much (Score:4)
While "consensus" may be a bit presumptuous there has been quite a bit of study and prediction that deforestation would lead to increased risk of pandemics:
Why deforestation and extinctions make pandemics more likely [nature.com]
Emerging threats linking tropical deforestation and the COVID-19 pandemic [nih.gov]
How Deforestation Increases the Risk of Disease Outbreaks Like COVID-19 [globalcitizen.org]
Denying that environmental destruction could have negative feedback effects on human populations without evidence is really political hackery of the same order of fingers in ears climate change denial. Screwing with the natural environment is always going to have unintended consequences.
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Sure but we already know through the studies and research so far that everything we are seeing can be explained *without* a lab leak. it's not like the science has run into a wall where the gaps do not make sense without it leaking from a lab. We have a perfectly good, very reasonable hypothesis of how this happened and the science has been pointing us to this scenario for some time. If we start to run into unexplained gaps in the chain that only a lab leak could make up for it should be investigated th
Science Fiction is not study (Score:2)
No matter how much you "study" Science Fiction, Science Fiction is not a study.
The most secure safe location on earth is probably a government bio-weapons lab; more than a nuclear weapons facility.
China owns WHO (Score:2, Interesting)
The Hans Reiser defense writ large (Score:2)
There's no evidence of her body.
There's bleach all over the truck and a stack of books about forensic investigations, but there's no credible evidence that her body was ever in the truck.
Re:I guess the real point of the latest reports is (Score:4, Insightful)
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Parameter A
Parameter B
A = True
B = True
So C Conspiracy of Pure Evil Needs to be true.
If you had someone from the FBI, NSA, USDA, Private Consulting Firm, enter your company to check something. Wouldn't you be escorting them around, making sure they are accessing what they are saying they are looking for, and blocking them from going into spots that they don't need to go, and still be fully cooperative and open for the investigation.
China is a Communist Country, nearly all organizations are owned by the Chin
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"We know COVID-19 started in China. China Knows that and the WHO knows that."
Knowing something and admitting that same thing are two different beasts.
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We know that COVID19 started in China. China does not deny this. We do *NOT* know that the Chinese government orchestrated it, nor have any rationally sustainable basis to conclude that it originated in a lab when entirely there are entirely natural causes involved that can far more readily explain its origins.
Shit happens, and sometimes it isn't anybody's fault. China might have technically dropped the ball on keeping the doctor who was wanting to raise the alarm about the novel coronavirus sooner, bu
Re: I guess the real point of the latest reports i (Score:2)
> We know that COVID19 started in China. China does not deny this.
Wow. Not denying something is not the same as admitting or agreeing with it.
You do not know. I doubt China knows either.
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You know what would be great (Score:2)
The good news is we don't have to rely on the WHO. We can look at the make up of the virus and determine where it came from. Which was done [slashdot.org]. The conclusion was the virus transmitted from bats to pangolins to humans.
Note that it did not transmit "naturally" (e.g. as a result of natural processes), it transmitted because China is slash and burning forests and running unsafe we
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China isn't a race. The "You're a racist!" card is beyond played out as a shield against criticism.
"China virus" is being used as a shield for Trumps incompetence. Still plenty of mileage left in that one.
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Trump is gone. May he have a long and quiet retirement, and stay there.
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Yeppers. Note that there isn't a legal way of keeping a US citizen out of the USA.
Now, you can arrest him on entry if he's violated any laws, but you can't keep him out of the country....
Re: I guess the real point of the latest reports i (Score:2)
Iirc, they arranged a flight specifically to fly Americans back from Wuhan - against the wishes of the Chinese too, since other flights were banned. They did it to the UK too, as I recall, except they insisted on 2 weeks quarantine on arrival. I heard there was no such safeguards for the Americans...perhaps that is wrong? Perhaps it was already too late, or they knew it was already there somehow.
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What was Trump supposed to do?
He was supposed to go play golf and let the grownups handle this one.
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How about the doctors and scientists?
The real ones, not the clueless yes men telling Trump what he wanted to hear.
Re: I guess the real point of the latest reports i (Score:2)
How did China repeatedly lie?
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Well, you won. What is President Biden doing differently? What would President Hillary have done differently?
Compare and contrast. How many times have the doctors and scientists had to contradict the current President? Because with Trump it was an almost daily occurrence.
Biden would have worn a mask...or three :)
Trump was in the middle of being impeached
There was never any serious chance Republicans would go against their King. If Trump let a little bit of theater get in the was of saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Well at least we know where his priorities li
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Rant? That's not a rant, it's a single phrase. With your UID you should have seen some outstanding rants on SlashDot by now, did you purchase that account?
Re: I guess the real point of the latest reports i (Score:2)
> Sometimes I wonder if I should set up a business making money out of the stupidity of people like yourself. It'd be a billion dollar idea.
I suspect you have not. How's the stupid one again?
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4. China is not afraid to use police and/or military force to keep people in their homes (or other quarantined locations) so they can't spread the virus.
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4. China is not afraid to use police and/or military force to keep people in their homes
And welders. Let us not forget the welders.
Those fuckers are truly hardcore.
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China stopped reporting accurate COVID19 cases last summer.
It raises cause for concern, but objectively, it is simply not a reason to conclude that they actively created the virus in the first place.
I mean, when the rubber hits the road, something that was man--made would generally be expected to be far more efficient at killing than COVID19 is anyways.
Also, if the virus were man-made, there ought to be some kind of markers in its genetic sequencing that would give rise to validate this suspicion. S
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I mean, when the rubber hits the road, something that was man--made would generally be expected to be far more efficient at killing than COVID19 is anyways.
Not if it was only released due to carelessness, a test case, or dress rehearsal. Not that I'm particularly invested in those possibilities, but there they are.
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One of these causes is founded entirely on baseless speculation. The other is based on something that we categorically *KNOW* can
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China locked the country down to an extent not seen anywhere else in the world, they lost almost half their GDP in the first quarter of last year. You can do that when the profit motive is not the only priority of your society.
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Or your facts are bogus.
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This is why I imagine you're also a fan of UFO and Bigfoot stories.
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They DID look for evidence. (Score:5, Insightful)
The origins of the virus have been examined in detail and the scientific consensus is that it was caused by deforestation increasing interspecies contact along with high risk wet markets. Like the epidemiologists have been warning us about for 30 years.
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Of course there's a "consensus" of the Chinese scientists who haven't been imprisoned.
Nobody was using the professional opinion of "Chinese scientists" (in the way that you're using it, anyway) to come to that conclusion.
The only hack here is you. Take a fucking xanax, or go back to looking for bigfoot.
Re:I guess the real point of the latest reports is (Score:5, Insightful)
Viruses have been jumping from other species into humans for as long as there has been humans, taking a notch up with agriculture a few millennia ago and again more recently with increased populations encroaching on habitats. It's happened millions of times in the lifespan of our species - many, many thousands of times in recorded history - and will continue to happen.
It is of course theoretically possible that this was a lab escape, but an extraordinary level of proof is required overturn an assumption that this is just another natural transmission event in a very, very, long line of natural transmission events in a area of the world where many such events have occurred before. I see absolutely nothing in the least that indicates that this is anything otherwise - indeed the genetics indicate the reverse. The origin of SARS-1 has still not been tied down to an exact transmission chain, but no-one is suggesting that has a lab origin, indeed the only real difference between SARS-1 and SARS-2 is that the lower transmission efficiency of SARS-1 gave a greater opportunity to trace the animal source. We know, because we've seen it many times now, that a SARS-2 positive individual can carry the virus a great distance and for considerable time before seeding a cluster.
I do however see an awful lot of evidence that points to the irrationalist human tendency to look for a cause and something to blame. The probability that the lab theory of origin is derives from human psychology over the true sequence of events is simply overwhelming to the point of being vanishingly different from 1.0
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No one is saying that's not 'possible', but if you consider your priors properly it's obvious that exceptionally strong evidence is required to support the lab escape theory, and that's just not forthcoming. The genome shows no sign of genetic manipulation, there's no other signs of unusual adaption, and there's no convincing epidemiological pattern - in short nothing that shifts the probabilities anywhere near to the degree required to overturn the assumption that what we've seen is *exactly* the same spe
Re:Let's be logical: No live animals in a marketpl (Score:4, Informative)
Amazingly out of touch with logic: The BIG issue is not whether Covid-19 came from a lab or a market. The big issue is that the Chinese must stop bringing live or recently killed animals into a marketplace, before those animals have been cooked.
Uh, speaking of people being out of touch with logic, you do know there is a large and fundamental difference between a marketplace and a restaurant, right?
Nothing has alraedy "been cooked" when you visit your local butcher. Not disagreeing that sanitization is key no matter where a raw meat market resides in the world, but raw meat markets serve a purpose, and that's usually not serving cooked food.
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Yeah, it was an odd post about the cooked meat - but the point still stands about contaminated blood getting everywhere with open-air slaughter.
But it's equally silly to say that poor people shouldn't gather for trade without heavy regulation. The root problem is one of poverty.
2 stories about unclean animal products (Score:2)
There must be rules about the cleanliness of animals brought into a marketplace. Two stories:
Consumers are buying contaminated meat, doctors' group says in lawsuit [washingtonpost.com]
Occurrence of pathogens in raw and ready-to-eat meat and poultry products collected from the retail marketplace in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada [nih.gov]
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Part of the problem is that these aren't domesticated animals and they aren't going through a normal regulatory inspection. Well, not sure how much regulation they have in China for domesticated animals, given various scandals some provinces have had over lax inspections (making me seriously doubt that the central government has any effective control over them). But anyway, wild animals from wilderness areas, no inspections, it's a very likely source of some novel diseases.
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Note: it was a seafood market. It wasn't the source of the virus.
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Why the Chinese? There's a shitload of raw meat at Costco too. Some raw wild animals at the good ones as well. And farmer's markets... whew!
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You want to prevent people in another from doing what they’ve been doing for millennia. Does that only apply to China? I mean no more fresh seafood/fish at my local supermarket/restaurant. Also farmers and ranchers can never sell anything ever again. My farmer friends wanted more chickens this year; they will just have to raise them from eggs.
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No live animals in a marketplace
You haven't been to a Chinese marketplace, have you?
Re:Blame? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not China's fault that nobody else tried to contain the virus either. Completely disingenuous to blame China for a pandemic and equally not support drastic measures domestically to curb it. China locked everything down and slowed the spread of the virus way better than we did. We blocked air travel from China in the US, sure, but still let Americans repatriate from there or anywhere with no mitigation protocol. This could have been nearly a non-event if we even tried or took it seriously. Too many in leadership did not understand exponential growth and how important it is to contain it before the numbers look bad.
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The president of the U.S. doesn't have the authority to lock down the entire nation.
Even if the entire government has no authority over it, that just shifts the blame to individual citizens and not China. They did not cause the spread here no matter how much you want to shift the blame off yourself.
US Citizens could come back into the country and follow a CDC-led quarantine protocol. This was not done. The CDC has federal power to enforce a quarantine over people coming into the country.
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Not according to the con artist. He said he had total authority to do whatever he wanted. He said it on several occasions. His exact words were [cnn.com]:
"When somebody's the President of the United States, the authority is total, and that's the way it's got to be,"
"The authority of the President of the United States having to do with the subject we're talking about is total." And after speaking about local governments, he said, "They can't do anything without the approval of the President of the United States."
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No, that would be true of the federal government as a whole. The executive branch is not a dictatorship and is meant to be held in check by two other branches.
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There is certainly a point between January of 2020 and March that the initial recommendation is no longer valid. When the facts of the situation change, the recommendations go with it. If you're basing recommendations on science, your recommendations will change over time as new information comes in. Their later recommendations were still against restricting international travel but strongly in favor of quarantine protocols upon returning.
The US restrictions were weak and politically motivated. They wer
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your own analysis lacks an understanding of it. By March it was already too late.
I don't think you know what "point between" means.
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Re:Blame? (Score:5, Informative)
Why isn’t China being blamed more for this?
Maybe the people in power aren't as clueless as you?
Most of the early cases in the US came from Europe anyway.
Countries that took the WHO warnings seriously ended up with a lot fewer dead people than those who didn't. Maybe look at more local sources of blame.
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So it's all about finding someone to blame? Why not blame the US government for not taking it seriously, or have having a lax preventative approach, or for openly mocking mask wearing? You think sending a bill to China makes a difference, or that they'd pay? Finding someone to blame doesn't make the problem go away, and you can't sue, so blaming China does nothing other than let off steam.
China certainly managed to contain the outbreak there more effectively than Europe or the US. Should we send the bil
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Is your comment intended to address the criminal and incompetent behaviour of various American state governments, and the federal government itself under the last administration, with respect to COVID?
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Thank you for your interest. In general, Baric is very advanced on that topic, so citations to him are usually about creating coronaviruses.
Use that Google Scholar search above, filter to before 2020, and adding "serial", "transfer", "pathogenesis" can help narrow down very much.
Here is the third one I saw: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915... [mdpi.com]
From the Wuhan lab.
"Here, we rationally designed a novel fusion inhibitor named MERS-five-helix bundle (MERS-5HB) derived from the six-helix bundle (MERS-6HB) which was f
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It's really not (Score:5, Insightful)
So you've got a virus that can be contained by hand washing in a BH4 lab. It's vanishingly unlikely that it came from there. Forget Hitchen's Razor, Occam's comes in.
This is classic "Just asking Questions" line of arguments. It relies on the difficulty of proving a negative to keep a pointless thread going for political and economic reasons. China doesn't want anyone looking into the actual cause (deforestation and the wet markets) because that would cut into profits made from those activities. America would like to blame a lab since that would shift blame to individuals instead of systems, and America would like it very much if we didn't talk about fixing those systems.
It's money and politics, as usual, and we all dance to that tune on command like a monkey with COVID-19.
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"COVID finds it very difficult to spread by touch"
Could you please elaborate? The WHO website [who.int] itself says that infection can be due to "viruses that may be on your hands and avoid infection that could occur by then touching your eyes, mouth, and nose. " (March 26 2021)
Difficult does not mean impossible (Score:4, Informative)
But in the context of a bio lab, even a badly run one, it's ridiculous to think they wouldn't wash their hands. It's even more insane to think that after 30+ years of being warned about deforestation & the wet markets that the cause wouldn't be traced back to there.
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Thinking in terms of what can *possibly* happen and what *can't possibly* happen is not very productive in this situation, because there are so many things that are physically possible but are also extremely unlikely. What you need to do is think about what are the *next marginal* things you might do that would reduce your exposure over time the most significantly. Some of those next things probably involve hand washing.
For example it's physically possible to pick up infection through touching groceries, b
That's not how science works (Score:5, Insightful)
This forces anyone trying to push the "It came from a lab" narrative to fall back on "well, you can't prove a negative", like you just did. That doesn't change the fact that our evidence points to the exact opposite.
Normally it wouldn't matter, but there's a *lot* of money being spent pushing the lab narrative, so instead of just stopping at "it's been researched, here's the research that indicates the virus came from the wild" people like me pushing back against the false lab narrative have to spend time and effort debunking the talking points around it or those points (which have been expertly crafted by professionals to have Truthiness) will take off.
So the next talking point is "well the lab was poorly run!".
So we then have to point out, as I did, that it's extremely unlikely to have come from even a poorly run lab because of how difficult it would be for the virus to spread in a lab setting. And again, the lab narrative folks fall back on "You can't prove a narrative!"
And we keep playing whack-a-mole with your talking points, hoping we can keep the misinformation under control. Why do we do it? Because a) we want the people who screwed up the pandemic response held responsible so they can't do it again and b) we want useful action taken so there isn't an "again".
Why do you do it? Shits and giggles? Paid troll? Misinformed? I don't know, but please stop. You're getting people killed. Maybe eventually yourself.
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Public health recommendations are science informed, but are not science per se. They're meant to be usable guidielins.
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Occam's comes in and you settle on it not coming from the lab, really?
Unless there is solid evidence that this virus broke out first somewhere besides Wuhan, or that Wuhan just happens to have a huge population of a specific bat species that spreads coronaviruses, then Occam's Razor actually points to the lab. Wet markets and deforestation are not exclusive to Wuhan, they're all over fucking China and many parts of South East Asia.
It'd be on the level of winning the Power Ball lottery if it just happened th
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Apparently you have no clue what a Bio-Hazard Level 4 site actually is. Please educate yourself before you embarrass yourself further.
To my mind . . .
This is why people listen to the CDC and WHO over random posters on the Internet who apparently aren't even aware that the amount of variation between that "closest relative" and the initial human-contagious version of the virus entailed living in some other animal for an extended period between bats and humans. The University of Toronto did an in-depth anal
You know I've got Wikipedia (Score:2)
So no, it's still vanishingly unlikely given what we know about COVID that it came out of a lab. Is it possible? Can you prove a negative?
So why do I bring it up? Because it's a talking point that has to
Re:Humans are animals (Score:5, Insightful)
So with no evidence you have debunked the WHO's team who went and looked at the evidence?
It's a weird religion, but we still have religious freedom, so you're welcome to your made-up beliefs. I just don't see why you've chosen this one - what's in it for you?
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No, it's not. There would be evidence for a lab grown variety in all the samples taken. None have shown any manipulation other than the virus' own mutations.
But thank you for continuing the lies of the Fox tabloid. Have to keep the pot stirred to deflect from all the criminal cases piled up against the con artist and his seditious minions.
Re: Humans are animals (Score:2)
The virus needs a host to survive, right? Or can it be stored independently? Does it only mutate when it is in a host, or can that happen while stored?
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The lab leak is the same idea for a world that is less superstitious i
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It depends on what you mean by a "lab leak". There are many scenarios that could be called that, some of which are extremely unlikely, some of which might be plausible but for which there is no evidence.
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Yes, I don't understand why they keep doing this. The possibility they are ignoring is:
CAUSE = "lab leak" AND ("bats through another animal" OR "direct spread from bats to humans")
Guiding the evolution through selection pressure to produce a biological weapon and intentionally leak it or a naturally evolved mutation that has been kept in the lab for potential future use as a biological weapon are all possibilities and in no way reduced by evidence supporting the idea of mutation via bat.
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No, they're not possibilities. The virus went from bats to some other animal for many generations before becoming contagious to humans. Well, maybe they're possibilities in Conservatopia or Libertardia, but not for those of us who live in the real world.
Re: Humans are animals (Score:3)
Could those "many generations" not have been in a lab? They have animals there, right?
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But I suppose conspiracy theorists are notoriously bad at critically thinking about the probability of their pet hypothesis.
You're asserting that they must prove your negative. That should be a big red flag for any semblance of intellectual honesty left in you that you're a kook.
Your hypothesis, like the God of the Gaps, exists only where a lack of evidence cannot effectively disprove your arbitrary claim, regar
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Let me guess, your pet pangolin has.
Inconclusive (Score:3)
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Why should I care what WHO says, given their track record?
Because they're like MULTINATIONAL and obviously impartial because doctors are impartial and stuff. Or Something.
Or maybe this is just more propaganda about the virus. People pushing a narrative. It's freaking news. Just about the only thing you can say about the media in 2021 is that it's probably false. All of it is probably false.
Opinion pieces pretending to be facts is becoming the norm.