Chinese Virologist post report claiming virus made in Wuhan lab

Bat Coronaviruses do get transferred to humans. Something like 4% of the Chinese population in villages are infected with bat coronaviruses.

That's why the lab leak theory isn't the most likely. You have millions of humans already infected.

 

I think a lab made is the most far fetched but I certainly think it is plausible COVID-19 could've been a manipulated virus and have not dismissed this possibility. I just don't find the evidence presented as saying it's the most likely.

And you're basing this on what? I agree that the PRC has a lot to blame for. I think the state of PRC wet markets and the wildlife trade is a a major problem and whether COVID-19 came from this it's pretty clear SARS came from poor animal management by the PRC.

Having seen these type of markets first hand where many different animals are held in poor conditions and knowing that that previous diseases have made the jump because of those conditions that seems more likely than it was a lab leak. True there is no direct evidence in terms of an animal found with COVID-19 but there is no direct evidence of a lab leak either. The most likely situation is the situation that we've seen before.

Either way I support investigation of both lab leak and continued investigation into a zoonotic source.

 

I'm not going to claim expertise on this but a quick google search shows that bats are key reservoirs of many diseases that infect humans and that there has been direct human to bat infection of many diseases.
https://www.livescience.com/26898-bats-host-human-infecting-viruses.html
http://conditions.health.qld.gov.au...savirus (ABLV) (,humans that is usually fatal.

The problem with this line of argument is that it is predicated on the assumption that the virus had to be in humans for a long time. The facts are we know very little about the history of this virus. As been shown above bats already harbor many diseases that can infect humans directly. or with little changes. Also given that we are talking about many different species of animals, including some that are rare, in the PRC that humans are in close contact with there are many possibilities for another animal as the original zoonotic source of COVID-19 or the intermediary species.

Even accepting that the virus needed to be in a human population the PRC has 1.4 billion people and many of those still live in rural villages that are in areas with bats and other endemic species. I know from first hand knowledge that there still are rural people that hunt, consume and trade endemic species. From that it's possible that the virus might've been in humans for much longer than we known of.

My main point of this is I agree it was wrong, especially for political or ideological reasons, to dismiss the lab leak theory early on but it's also wrong to say because of political or ideology to say that this means the lab leak theory is right. Both these theories should be investigated and the PRC should come clean about them. To deal with the next pandemic we need to know how this one started.

 

the real story has always been the media failure

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americ...inas-repression-11623085417?mod=hp_opin_pos_2

America’s Covid Groupthink Functioned Like China’s Repression
Marching in ideological lockstep is less forgivable in a society where one has a choice in the matter.

By Gerard Baker
June 7, 2021 1:03 pm ET

What we eventually learn about the origins of Covid-19 may implicate China’s government in failure and falsehood on a grand scale. But before we get too carried away with the endemic failures of the communist order, we should ponder that the episode has exposed layers of rottenness in critical institutions of American civil society that are similarly damning.

China’s officials may well be culpable of a combination of incompetence, recklessness and deceit. But in an authoritarian regime, they might not have had much individual agency in the matter. In this country, scientists, bureaucrats, journalists and executives of Big Tech companies suppressed the story not out of fear of imprisonment or death, but of their own volition, out of ideological or even venal motives. You may well ask: Whose culpability is greater?

It’s not simply that the lab-leak theory was “debunked,” as news organizations repeatedly told us when anyone tried to raise it a year ago. It wasn’t even permitted to be considered. Discussion of the topic was deliberately extinguished on tech platforms, in the respectable scientific journals and in newsrooms.

Some highly influential figures in the “scientific community” were the first to block serious consideration of the thesis that the viral pathogens escaped from a Chinese government laboratory.

Letters in the Lancet and Nature in the early days of the pandemic from an impressive constellation of experts dismissed the lab-leak idea, and in the case of the former, denounced it as a conspiracy theory.

Thanks to a recent release of emails under the Freedom of Information Act, we now know that some of the scientists dismissing the idea had themselves expressed concerns that the zoonotic explanation they were publicly championing might not be right. We also know that in the case of the Lancet letter, some of the correspondents were involved in similar research and had a strong professional interest in denying the possibility of an engineered virus.

Scientists differ in their methods and conclusions—and do so in good faith. It’s possible some believed there was a genuine scientific basis for rejecting challenges to the official Chinese version of events. But this dismissal of the lab-leak idea is of a piece with the politicization of science that’s been a feature of the last few years. The obsession with debunking anything Donald Trump said and the fear of being accused of racism undoubtedly colored the judgment of many whose job is to consider only the empirical evidence.

Last year, many scientists beclowned themselves by bowing to the prevailing political pieties with their absurd assertion that taking part in protests on behalf of Black Lives Matter was literally salubrious, whereas taking part in protests against lockdowns was lethally reckless.

If too many American scientists failed to help us get a proper understanding of the origins of Covid, they seem to have been abetted by like-minded people in the permanent bureaucracy. Emails to and from Anthony Fauci uncovered last week show that while there were some genuinely diligent officials determined to get to the truth, too many in positions of power seemed keen to stamp out a proper investigation.

As Katherine Eban reported in Vanity Fair last week, officials from two separate bureaus in the State Department warned against a proper investigation for fear of opening a “can of worms.”

Again we have good grounds to suspect that officials in a bureaucracy that had already undermined Donald Trump’s presidency with baseless allegations about Russian collusion seemed intent on suppressing any suggestion, however well-supported it might be, that Trump officials might be right about a critical issue of state.

Yet the largest responsibility for the failure to consider in a timely fashion the lab-leak theory lies with the media.

Journalists were once marked by their curiosity. Now the only thing that’s curious about many of them is their lack of curiosity when a story doesn’t fit their priors.

Instead of pursuing the tantalizing suggestion that the official Chinese and World Health Organization account might not be true, they simply signed onto it and dismissed anyone who didn’t as a kook or a xenophobe. Their ideological cousins in Silicon Valley then firmly shut the door on the story by blocking access to articles that didn’t fit the approved version.

In each field—science, government, media and tech—there were surely independent-minded people who did seek the truth. But they were no match for the groupthink and coverup.

It seems increasingly likely that Chinese officials mishandled research and misrepresented and misinformed the public. But they did so under pain of punishment, even death, in a system designed to suppress that kind of information.

In this country, constitutionally protected, free and independent scientists, bureaucrats, journalists and others did the same. What’s their excuse?

Appeared in the June 8, 2021, print edition.
​

 

Word on The Street is that the Jewish Space Lasers were blasting WIV in early November 2019. Coincidence?

 

So the real story is less about finding the real origins of this virus so we can prevent the next pandemic and more about criticizing the press?

 

More about criticizing Biden because reasons.

 

yes

 

Its like the right has nothing but three talking points even in their 1000 word opinion pieces it’s the same damn three talking points:

-Crooked liberal media
-but her/his emails
-Dem Russia hoax

When you read this opinion piece it’s the same GD Trump rant just rinse and repeated. Of all the pieces you like to post here this was the best thing you could find today? Is Turley or Dershowitz on vacation or something?

 

Lets not forget why there was a dismissal of the lab leak theory in the first place - because people were pushing without any evidence whatsoever that China intentionally leaked the virus to protect Trump's absolute failure of a response. Had the right not politicized the whole thing, people wouldn't have to push back against it and we could have just had a normal investigative process.

Too many people (here and there) have an agenda.

 

Now you believe what China says about the virus... maybe it was produced by the US military that's what China has indicated.

 

The WSJ op/ed bleats and pleads that Libruhl Media bayyyyuuud. Bayyyyuuud as Jina!!!

Most of these lab cons were claiming not only did it leak from a lab, but China did it on purpose and that it fit in their grand plans to destroy the US...Nay! THE WORLD!!!

Without proof, social media platforms acted swiftly.

I don't love Twitter or FB, but cons love forgetting context just like 8 years of Bush disappeared into their vapid heads whenever they parrot how their values "just work".

The fact that they're still waiting for their psychopathic and pathological lying shitbag of a turd to return, you know...because "IT was stolen. THEY stoles IT", makes you instantly question and reject anything that comes from that source.

 

This is absurd.