I haven't read these latest investigations and kept up with this (and so I could be corrected). But from what I read they genetically mapped the virus, pointing to a natural, not man made origin. Coronaviruses have been studied, collected for decades. There are also man made coronaviruses. So I'm not saying that a lab release couldn't happen. I just don't think it's the case here (unless they: collected a naturally occurring (novel, not previously documented) virus, which infected them, and was released into the general public). https://www.google.com/amp/s/directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/03/26/genomic-research-points-to-natural-origin-of-covid-19/amp/
Yeah... it's also entirely possible that a lab was studying this very virus which they obtained from "the wild". That's what most bio-labs do; they find and isolate viruses in nature and then study them, often looking for a cure/treatment.
From everything I've read, there is still no evidence that this happened. All the news stories that have been popping up stress that it is <i>possible</i>, but there is remarkably scant evidence for it.
To be fair to the 'from a lab' theory . . . China has a long history of suppressing information that might be damaging/embarrassing to their country. Causing a global pandemic would certainly fall into this category. Assuming that it's true, at this point it would be shocking if China has not already destroyed most of the evidence that would point to any sort of culpability.
We know that the Wuhan lab had previous security problems and had accidentally released live viruses that they were investigating in the past. We know that they were investigating coronaviruses. We know that several researchers from the lab became sick immediately before the Wuhan outbreak. We know that the Chinese government tried to hush up the disease when it first got out. We know that the WHO investigation into the source of coronavirus pandemic effectively discounted the theory of lab leak out of hand and spent no time/effort investigating it. There was much later a token 'independent' investigation that was fully monitored and controlled by Chinese authorities that found nothing.
There is no solid evidence that the virus came from a Chinese lab. But we also have no evidence at all that the virus came from zoonotic transfer either (no transfer animal has been identified, which is a bit unusual). I think that demanding an impartial investigation of the Wuhan labs is a reasonable request, but hold little hope that it will uncover anything at this point.
I try to reverse the situations to see how I would view the strength of the evidence from a different perspective. The Chinese government floated the idea the it was actually the US military that released the virus to attack and undermine China. There is a zero percent chance that the US would allow access to any of our national labs to the Chinese to conduct an investigation of this sort. I bet you could even find some labs in the US that had 3 people get sick at the same time.
I agree that it is possible that it escaped from a lab in China, but I maintain that the evidence that it actually happened is extremely thin. The same reporters in our national press pushing this theory are literally the same ones who pushed the aluminum tubes for nuclear bombs in Iraq.
Lab leaks
do happen, and people
do die from them. In 1978 there was a lab leak of smallpox from the Birmingham Medical School in the UK which caused the death of a woman, and a frenzied immediate quarantine to prevent spread of the disease. In 2014, the FDA moved labs . . . and left a box full of test tubes with viruses in the corner of their own lab. Including some pretty deadly ones (smallpox again).
https://www.fda.gov/media/101811/download The CDC has accidentally released live anthrax through simple human error -
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2014/p0711-lab-safety.html.
My point being . . . mistakes happen in labs, no matter how good the lab is. But I'm not sure that I agree about your assessment. In the US, Canada, and the UK there is no ingrained culture of hiding these mistakes. They're reported and analyzed to prevent future problems. China on the other hand has a long standing paranoid history of lying about it's mistakes and suppressing information out of political fears. You can even look at the reports out of Wuhan during the beginning of the pandemic - suppression and censorship of information, muzzling of scientists who were speaking out (
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55355401), suppressing the release of the covid-19 genome until Chinese labs had finished decoding it (
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-china-blocked-who-chinese-scientists-early-coronavirus-outbreak-n1222246), suppressing private citizens from discussing the spread of the pandemic on media (
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/08/803766743/critics-say-china-has-suppressed-and-censored-information-in-coronavirus-outbrea). This is
not at all the same reaction that non-Chinese labs have. Lying about mistakes and suppressing truth is very much ingrained in how the Chinese government approaches problems - to a degree that is not mirrored in many other countries.
So sure, I agree with you completely . . . evidence for the lab leak theory is almost entirely circumstantial and very thin. But there is no stronger evidence for the zoonotic transmission theory at the moment. To me, that's very troubling.
Topic: Trump outrage of the day (Read 838484 times)
