cite please
I still can’t tell if you’re claiming that the coronavirus that’s currently causing this pandemic was engineered, or if you’re saying that this lab does to coronavirus engineering, but that’s unrelated to this specific virus, but this virus just happened to leak from this lab due to bad handling or something.
You seem to constantly mesh these two claims together: This lab does CV science, and this lab was the source of this virus, but I can’t tell if you’re claiming that the genetic work the lab does is what caused the outbreak. Because, if that’s what you’re claiming, you’re gonna need a cite – the cites I’ve seen have said that this virus does not appear to be engineered.
post 302
- The lab engineered viruses that can infect humans. This was part of their research.
- All evidence was deliberately destroyed.
- The medical records of Lab workers who became ill have not been released.
- The Chinese govt threatened anyone who discussed it which delayed getting the word out.
We can’t know if anything they were working on escaped the lab. We just know they engineered corona viruses that affected humans (for study) and all evidence has been destroyed.
Right, but geneticists have looked at this particular virus and say it’s unlikely to have been engineered. So, we don’t need their evidence, we can look at the virus itself for evidence.
If you have something more than just insinuation, please provide it. Otherwise, I’m out.
The thing is, any of these circumstantial arguments for the lab, work just as well for natural zoonotic transmission.
- These animals are full of corona virus which randomly mutates all of the time, and occasionally jump species. This is just something these viruses do. Species which can be infected by SARS-CoV-2 were known to be at the markets.
- Evidence may have been destroyed to cover up dangerous animal handling practices (or just general CYA).
- Any lab worker who may have gotten infected with SARS-CoV-2, and then spread the infection to the markets, could just as well have picked up the infection from a market. Either way, it requires lab workers (or infected intermediates) to form a connection between the lab and the markets. If the lab was the source of the SARS-CoV-2, then the virus had to get to the market for the first big Covid-19 outbreak. If the markets were the source (in Wuhan), and the lab workers were sick with Covid-19 (which isn’t known), then it requires that it spread to the lab workers.
- Coverups and threats can occur regardless of the origin.
I’ve already cited that the lab specifically engineered viruses that would infect humans.
It’s not even up for discussion.
I can’t cite what was in the lab because it was deliberately destroyed. But that’s the type of work they were doing. That a geneticist says it probably wasn’t engineered ignores what the lab was specifically on record of doing as well as hundreds of years of humans doing it naturally.
If it was truly something that originated in bats and they were specifically working with bats to create a crossover virus than it stands to reason they were successful.
I don’t understand why something that is claimed to have occurred naturally is somehow unlikely in a lab dedicated to the process.
If you are talking about the paragraph you copied from wikipedia, that’s not an appropriate cite. The actual citation is a study in which the spike protein of a bat virus is spliced into a SARS that is adapted to grow in mice. They weren’t trying to make a bat virus grow in humans. They were trying to determine whether an existing bat virus could bind to human cells. So the “engineering” was not a gain of function. It was discovering a function that was already there.
Here’s the real cite.
So? What does that have to do with anything? “Gain of function” is a bullshit phrase used to hand wave away the fact they were engineering viruses.
Again, somehow a virus found in nature is suppose to magically mutate into a killer pandemic but a lab specifically collecting variants of the virus for research and manipulating them is somehow immune from doing the same thing because… magic.
Ignoring covid, that’s exactly how every other human pandemic started.
And fwiw, i believe the Chinese government also destroyed all the sample that had been collected from that market.
I doubt we’ll even know the source.
You truncated the sentence and left out my point. If it happens in nature why wouldn’t it happen in a lab focused on collecting variants of the virus for research and manipulating them.
I find the “gain of function” mantra a smoke screen designed to dismiss a deliberate collection and manipulation of covid viruses using the reasoning that if it wasn’t specifically militarized, it didn’t happen.
I have never claimed that the virus couldn’t have come from the lab. I think that the two most likely scenarios, by far, are:
- accidental release from the lab
- accidental infection from a wild animal used for food
But I think “it was modified to be more dangerous by the lab” is extremely unlikely. I think this because literally hundreds of labs, probably thousands, have sequenced covid viruses and haven’t found evidence of human manipulation. Evidence that, the the best of my knowledge, current genetic engineering techniques all leave in their wake.
So I think your dismissing a virus naturally developing the ability to infect humans as “magical” is completely absurd, and I wanted to point that out in no uncertain terms.
As a standalone statement I agree but I stated it that way because somehow a virus mutating in nature is the going theory versus a lab collecting them for study and modifying them isn’t.
I would think that the more viruses of a similar type that are brought together in one location represent a higher likelihood of a mutation.
Uh, i don’t think they are mixing them all in a blender and injecting the mix into monkeys. I honestly don’t think that having a lot of viruses in the building has anything to do with the odds one will mutate.
I don’t think so either. Is that how it spreads from bats? are they biting monkeys in the wild? What makes it more likely to mutate it in the wild vs when it’s collected and sent to a laboratory? Are the monkeys doing experiments on it to make it more transmissible in humans?
According to Wiki the Wuhan Institute of Virology is considered a world leader in the study of bat coronaviruses. This is thought to be the source of COVID-19 but somehow the collection and research at the lab can’t be the source.
Do we ignore the fact that there have been multiple escapes of SARS from other Chinese labs in the past? What is special about this lab that makes it’s samples and research immune from mutating and spreading to humans?
And Fauci needs to correct the Wiki page on the Wuhan lab because it specifically says researchers from the WIV have also collaborated in gain of function research on coronaviruses with American colleagues.
It seems logical this kind of research is conducted if the goal is to understand the mechanisms of the virus and how to combat it. It also seems logical that a lab that specializes in viruses found in bats has accumulated a significant catalog of samples to work with.
As I’ve said several times, i think it’s reasonably likely that one of the wild viruses collected by the Wuhan institute accidentally escaped. What i think is unlikely is that it was created by the Wuhan institute, because i believe that some of the many many people who have sequenced it would have noticed if it were a man-modified virus.
It’s clear by their actions that the Chinese government would absolutely not allow this to be made public.
So on a scale of “conspiracy theory to Occam’s Razor” I think the scale tips toward Occam’s Razor…
The virus has been sequenced, independently, by labs all around the world. There’s really no way for the Chinese government to suppress that information.
China blocked all attempts for outside investigations of the lab. If they are serious about world-wide cooperation, they would have been more cooperative. It certainly seems like they had something to hide. And then all the lies, from China and the WHO reps. Then again, looking at the text mails that were sent out from the lab workers themselves to their friends and family, they are warning them to stay away from the wet market down the road…
They blocked all attempts at investigation of the lab, they removed information about what the lab had from places where outsiders could review that, and they ALSO destroyed all the sample they had collected from the wet market, so that outside investigators couldn’t independently review them.
China was certainly conducting a cover-up. From the nature of the cover-up, they may not have known when they executed that cover-up what the source of the virus was. Remember, at the time, they were suggesting it might have originated outside of China.