The WHO just released a report (don’t have a link yet) trashing the idea the virus came from a lab. I just heard this while out on errands. I cannot speak to this report cuz I haven’t read it yet.
@castor_troy
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The draft report says the transfer to humans most likely happened on a farm used to collect critters of various sorts and then supply the wet markets in Wuhan. The least likely they say is from a lab setting tho I like your accidental stick idea. Best link I have at the moment is this:
I just now got home and am looking for this “draft report” itself.
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It is very annoying when news reports reference a report WITHOUT the source material their news is based on. I cannot find the draft tho everybody and their brother seem to have copies.
I am not supporting the idea that there was a lab to human stick that started the ball rolling.
Myself, I’d like to see the WHO draft report.
So, you’re the scientist amongst us. If farmers collected critters of various species to feed a wet market, somehow we’re supposed to buy in to the fact that they’d transport that low-margin exotic meat 1100km away (very poor economical decision, given costs for transport and storage), and that there wouldn’t be just one genome for the jump, but multiple people would have been the feed. Each transmission with its own traceable permutations. And they’d have targeted a market 1100km from home to do so, and none of them would have passed the virus on along the way.
As opposed to a scientific effort to study coronaviruses and actively, but with full protective gear, collect specimens in the field and bring them 1100km back to the lab in isolation to study them.
If they said there were caves 5 miles out of town that had similar genomes, I’d buy it.
You’re the scientist, if you buy the thought that the local farmers took their product to a farmer’s market 1100km from home, I’m down with that.
But I generally think they sell closer to home, more economical.
Whereas a lab specializing in research of coronaviruses in bats would securely transfer those across the distance to the lab, where we all know that accidents can happen.
Also, regarding the WHO, don’t forget that they are reliant on partner countries funding them. A conclusive finding that this was not just a random event, but a lab accident, could subject China to literally trillions of dollars in liability lawsuits, given the millions of deaths and the economic impacts of world-wide shutdowns. There are a lot of interests at stake, on many sides, to make this an unidentifiable origin.
I am the scientist in this crowded sandlot of opinion and I said earlier that I like your version of how this bug got lose. It was cogently and logically presented. But, and I hate to say it like this …what you present are good suppositions. As a scientist I dealt with measurable fact. And the necessary facts are not gonna be forthcoming from the Chinese because they will never allow a besmirching of their “perfect” system. Or any revealing of internal information. The folks who did the WHO report got rebuffed from direct evidence. They were given what the Chinese wanted them to have. And they wrote a report. In the absence of hard fact I’ll go with your version for the origin of this bug.
For clarification… in my career I taught medical students and did research in ovarian cancer. And when I published something it was backed by hard data gained by experimentation. And I stood on the shoulders of scientists who came before me. My predilection is data, fact. my failing, as my students were keen to point out, was my penchant for shitty spelling.
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As a layperson analyst by background, I look at patterns and the like. Sometimes meaningful, sometimes not (correlation is not causation, etc.).
What struck me, very early on, was that different scientists equated a natural origin and absence of evidence of artificial intervention in the sequence as evidence that it could not have come from a labratory.
Which, to me, and please correct me if I’m mistaken, raises all the alarm bells of correlation/causation.
If I am bitten by a rabid raccoon while taking a walk, that animal/human transmission is natural.
Similarly (unless I’m mistaken), if I capture that raccoon in a trap, take him back to my labratory, and he bites me there, that’s a natural transmission.
That’s at the heart of what bothers me here, that so many people insist that a lack of some scientific manipulation of the genome is required, or they can rule out the lab as the place the transmission took place.
Definitely not conclusively saying I know the thing jumped in the lab, but I have yet to see anything compelling that it did not start there. Except for vehement statements from the Chinese government, who granted the WHO team a total of 3 hours in the lab, under supervision, to look at the place and talk to people, over a year after the thing had started.
The more agitated the statement of what did not happen from the Chinese authorities the more it drives the notion that it did in fact happen from an accidental mistake. Having had a lab for 40+ years I can attest to innocent fuck ups. But ours did not result in word wide medical disaster. And still the Chinese deny.
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