The virus is widely believed to have originated with bats and have passed via another animal species to humans at a wildlife and seafood market in Wuhan, although a firm determination has yet to be made.
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You know Ozzy would have been naturally immune to the virus. His baseline blood alcohol level in combination with whatever else was in his body would have protected him.
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From a functional standpoint, is there a meaningful difference between growing bacteria on an artificial medium in a petri dish and allowing a virus to infect and replicate in a sample of living cells in a petri dish? The required growth medium is the major thing separating the two; it otherwise looks like the same concept.
I think the reason’s China squashed the news are very much the same as why the US did.
“The imperatives for social stability, for not rocking the boat before these important Party congresses is pretty strong,” says Daniel Mattingly, a scholar of Chinese politics at Yale. “My guess is, they wanted to let it play out a little more and see what happened.”
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poor pangolins
All of the ShitGibbon’s acolytes are desperately looking for a ScapeGoat for his bungling of the US response to this.
It doesn’t matter one whit WHERE is came from, it was inevitable, and experts have been warning about this kind of Pandemic for DECADES now.
TRUMP FUCKED UP so what the hell can we do to FIX IT NOW is what we should be focusing on, not some racist/nationalist conspiracy theory about how “Inscrutable Chinese COMMUNISTS!!!” intentionally unleashed a deadly virus upon the world specifically to hurt Trump’s re-election chances (because we all know that Chinese Communists don’t care about their own people dying, like us God-Fearing Christian Red-Blooded 'Muricans do! USA! USA! USA! Open the Malls now! GET BACK TO WORK YOU SLAVES! (wait, we are not supposed to say that part out loud are we?))
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With all due respect, you can culture any virus, and it can be done in petri dishes. You need a medium of host cells to infect, then the virus multiplies. This is a “culture”. This is standard practice in virology labs. I have inoculated chicken cell lines to make viral vaccines for the chicken farming industry. I did this kind of work for 5 years.
P.S. If it’s done on a counter, it’s a counter culture.
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It MATTERS a GREAT DEAL how the VIRUS jumped INto the human POPulation because shutting down SUCH vectors will help PROTECT US ALL IN THE future.
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It certainly does matter how this virus got into humans, as @txlawyer states. Trump and his rabid followers are playing a blaming game and trying to dodge responsibility. And they are not passing up this opportunity to be racist into the bargain. I wouldn’t want to give them any help. We need to get to the bottom of it, but should do so without backing China into a corner over it.
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See SARS. They knew exactly what they were handling when the reports came in. Sure, the doctors on the frontlines may have been confused, but the government would have been immediately aware that something went wrong at the lab.
There are only a handful of level 4 biolabs around the planet. Heckuva coincidence to believe, that out of all the wet markets in China, the one time that a virus escapes in recent history, it just happens to be at the wet market next door to one.
Note, I’m not trying to say anything nefarious like a deliberate leak, this has all the makings of an accidental release, maybe a worker pricked themselves and stayed quiet, hoping that they’d be ok and it wouldn’t get noticed.
Bats are bad, mmmkay? They have to beat their wings so fast that it literally damages their bodies and would cause them to suffer fevers and other problems if they hadn’t evolved to have a suppressed immune system to avoid it.
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We can walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s perfectly appropriate to hold Trump accountable for his horrid inaction AND take the Chinese government to account for their actions. This is quite possibly their Chernobyl moment.
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Precisely, and that should be what Dems are saying loudly and repeatedly every time there is a mic in their face.
Sigh…
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The wet market not officially selling bats has nothing to do with anything as any animal at that market could have been the intermediary between bats and the human who first contracted the virus there.
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Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said this morning that there is no evidence that the virus came from the Wuhan lab. He will be replaced by the morrow by some Faux talking head as the dotards propaganda ministry desperately seeks to place the blame on anyone and anything other than the dotard’s bungled handling of the virus threat to America. The man is definitely part of the Deep State if he ignores the daily talking points amirite?
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But that’s the crux of the issue isn’t it? There is no proof so far that the virus escaped from the scapegoated lab but more and more evidence that it originated in the wild. Question everything that comes from this maladministration grasshopper.
After all these years we’re still “Killing Commies for Christ” just as we did in the Nam man.
Those are not mutually-exclusive points. No question that it originated in the wild, the question is how it passed from some bat cave to humans. We already know from WaPo reporting that the lab there was studying coronaviruses in bats in 2018.
Remember back to the anthrax bit. It’s naturally occurring as well, but you can identify based on the strain where it came from, that’s how they tracked it back to a specific lab. Same question here-- what exact strains of coronavirus does that lab have?
I take that as the hardest evidence yet that we do have precise information on the source, that it is the lab, and the official government talking points are to protect some source we have, either in the Chinese government or in the lab itself. Of course our top leaders would deny something like that which would be super-top-secret.
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SARS can be caused by any number of pathogens. Figuring out what was causing this particular outbreak took time. And again, nobody would have had any clue how or even whether this particular coronavirus would present itself in humans because they weren’t testing it on humans in that lab. Even if there were an accidental exposure at the lab, nobody could have known there was an actual transmission until somebody started showing symptoms of something unique enough to know that it was something new, not just a common cold or the flu.
Nonsense. People screw up at work all the time and don’t tell their bosses about it.
Yes, that is quite the coincidence. Perhaps we should investigate whether the lab screwed up and started a pandemic, or whether the thoroughly disgusting trade and slaughter of exotic animals at the wet market is responsible.
