It didn’t. This is just Trump’s blathering bullshit, yet again.
Really? I truly thought that’s where it came from. Years before the orange bafoon came along.
Now I have to go down a rabbit hole to find out more.
How did you think it was from a lab years before we even knew about the virus?
Aaahhh you’re right. The twat was president then.
Theory 1, a conspiracy: it was designed in a lab as a bio-weapon
Theory 2, plausible but: accidental transmission to a human during a study
What?
Honest question–why are so many people quick to dismiss the possibility that the coronavirus leaked from the Wuhan lab?
AFAIK the consensus is that COVID-19 originated in Wuhan. The same Wuhan that has a lab which had been studying coronaviruses for years prior to the outbreak.
Some folks vehemently dismiss the idea that the lab could be the origin point, but why? What makes them so sure that this would have been impossible?
It borders on a conspiracy. I will never stop repeating this:
Theory 1, a conspiracy: it was designed in a lab as a bio-weapon. this is the one the GOP usually pushes
Theory 2, plausible theory: accidental transmission to a human during a study
More importantly it was a racist dog whistle used to distract from the incompetence and greed of politicians handling a crisis. It directly led to violent hate crimes.
Theory 3, it was used in an attempt to distract from the war in Ukraine by the Russians and much like everything the Russians do, it blew the fuck up in their face and we were all caught in collateral damaged.
Think about it. who directly benefited the most from covid? wasn’t China, they lost trillions in trade. wasn’t the US, they lost in trade and world trust(which was accomplished by a now known Russian asset.).
that’s also a good point, who benefits by a weakened US? Russia. who was providing the most support against Russia at the time? US.
I have zero evidence of it, but I think it’s pretty clear at least who benefited the most from it.
Or…. It was just a pandemic and not planned
pandemics don’t just happen like covid happened.
three months before covid spread to the US the Trump administration closed down the CDC attache in China that would have been the first response to an outbreak. three months.
covid was first identified as a mysterious flu about 30 days after the US offices were closed.
The trump administration closed a million things. They’ve closed a million more in the past 6 months. Did FEMA cutbacks CAUSE the flooding in Texas? No. Did it make it worse? Sure.
can any country in the world make it rain? no
can any country in the world release a deadly pathogen to cause chaos and confusion? yes.
my point isn’t the actual closure, it’s the visibility of risk mitigation.
what’s your point?
If you throw 2 million darts, eventually you get one bullseye. A coincidence is not evidence
The other commenters have covered some of the points I’d make, so I’ll add: After decades of investigation into Patient Zero for AIDS/HIV, there wasn’t a single, identifiable transmission event to which the epidemic traced, but rather evidence that the virus was present here and there long before the disease was identified.
Intuitively, I think it’s the same with COVID-19, that there wasn’t a single, discrete animal-to-human transmission event. Even if my analogy to HIV is faulty, China built the lab in Wuhan to study endemic coronaviruses; that means that anything in the lab had been in the wild for years before researchers collected a sample of it. Therefore, it’s overwhelmingly likely that humans had already been exposed to some form of it, and it was present in local populations. At the very least, there would have had to be multiple exposures, because not everybody exposed to the virus got infected, not everybody infected showed symptoms, and not everybody with symptoms transmitted the virus to other people. That, and the fact that it’s a respiratory disease, and does not spread by surface contact, makes a lab leak seem exceedingly unlikely.
So, even if the Wuhan lab failed at biocontainment, and people caught a strain of virus it was studying, that wasn’t the cause of the pandemic, which could have kicked off any number of ways. I’m not going to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak outright, but on the other hand, even if it’s true, there’s little practical value to the knowing about it other than improving biocontainment procedures. It certainly doesn’t justify the Sinophobia that tends to accompany the lab leak theory, and the Sinophobia is what I think makes people reject the lab leak possibility so vehemently.
(The other “lab leak theory,” that it was an engineered bioweapon that escaped, is for drooling morons. Nobody has that technology, not even close.)
Because, it seems less likely to think that China has the technology to build artificial virus, than to think that China hat built a research lab about Coronaviruses in a region where new strain of virus may happen due to biodiversity and climate.
Then we can add the 5 years of reports saying that it’s not the case
It’s easier to fool someone than to convince them they’d been fooled.
A lot of people have stuck their neck out by saying with certainty that the virus didn’t leak from a lab in China and anyone who thought otherwise is probably a racist and a republican.
It’s next to impossible for those people to take responsibility for being incorrect, so they just double and triple-down on being wrong. It’s ironic because they like to believe they’re the voice of reason.
that’s how science works, if you want to change the discourse, then prove them wrong
What is the proof it’s a lab leak?
I agree that it is ridiculous to claim that it is impossible and outright dismiss the idea. Nobody can say it doesn’t come from there and proving a negative is impossible. However there are a number of reasons which make the Wuhan thing a lot less suspicious than it seems at first glance.
Wuhan is the 7th largest Chinese city, and is among the most prolific research cities in China, so of course you’d have a lot of virology labs there and that would be the most probable location for coronavirus-related research. Remember that coronaviruses were kind of a hot topic in Asia after the SARS epidemic in the early 2000s.
Respiratory viruses, obviously, thrive in high-density population centers, so it would stand to reason that a 13 million inhabitants agglomeration would be at the center of this kind of thing.
To put this into perspective : if COVID had appeared in France, near some podunk town of 30K inhabitants that just happens to have a coronavirus-related lab - OK that would be super suspicious. But most likely it would have originated near Paris which is the largest population center in the whole region. Well that’s also where the Pasteur Institute is, and the Pasteur Institute being the largest virology research center in the country is the most likely place where you’d find coronavirus research. All of a sudden that would be a lot less shady.
That is prejudice nonsense politics.
Release the Epstein files now!
What if it came from Justin Bieber’s perfume?
Yes yes we have low confidence and no experts think it is likely but WHAT IF?
If we’re gonna put on tinfoil hats, I’m gonna call out the poop samples in Europe that had COVID detected in them one month prior to the outbreak in Wuhan
Yeah, and as a punishment I suggest we should require that for an entire year they exclusively eat US fa(s)t food and (because I’m that cruel) that they can only get their news sources from trending US social media. That will teach them… not much, as a matter of fact.
FFS…
“Low confidence it was a lab leak but could still be wild born” is a nothingburger article for clicks.
every Nobel prize winning biologist says it did.
China needs global oversight.
every Nobel prize winning biologist says it did.
Even the dead ones? That makes it quite unquestionable, then.
ha no, but the guy who discovered HIV is still alive.
Honestly, the idea it came from eating bats, and not from scientists, is the much more racist theory.
Why would anyone eat scientists?
why not?
Because they’re much less hairy and they don’t poop everywhere. At least, some of them ;)
Biologists don’t study viruses. But I’m interested in this public released sign statement by “every Nobel prize winning biologist”.
If biologists don’t study viruses, who does?
Full disclosure: I’m a microbiologist, so I’m curious about where this will go.
Edit: it went to them ignoring my comment.
