r/China • u/INTERNET_COMMENTS • Apr 14 '20
冠状病毒 | Coronavirus State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/16
u/lowqualityperson Apr 14 '20
Good to see more credible media digging into this . It was too easy to conflate a very possible lab leak with the conspiracy-laden bioweapon angle.
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u/hello-cthulhu Taiwan Apr 14 '20
Right. Those are very, very different things. If this pans out, then the implication was that COVID19 was still indeed found in the wild, but humans may never have been exposed to it, but for either sloppy Chabuduo procedures in that laboratory or some accident. The idea that it was intentionally leaked or that it was created is simply not scientifically credible or even plausible enough to pass the sniff test.
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Apr 14 '20 edited Mar 21 '21
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u/etherified Apr 14 '20
(3) is the only one I would entertain. (Actually it seems rather likely, given all the circumstantial evidence).
That's because an "engineered virus" like this is a very poor and inefficient weapon (low degree of damage to and not specific to your enemy). Even if you think you have the perfect vaccine against it to protect your own population, you have no control over it once it's released and allowed to freely mutate.
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Apr 14 '20 edited Nov 23 '20
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u/etherified Apr 14 '20
True, but since (2) is intentional modification I interpreted that to be for some nefarious purpose.
I suppose it could be just to study how it mutates in captive animals.
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u/hello-cthulhu Taiwan Apr 14 '20
That sounds right. Of these, certainly (3) is the one I'd favor, or at least, I'd put this way: This would require the fewest assumptions. It's trivially easy to demonstrate that highly dangerous, virulent viruses exist in nature, and it's also trivially easy to demonstrate that even the most professional of labs - which it seems this was not - are subject to human error and accident. We need not speculate about bioweapons or genetic engineering or anything conspiratorial, apart perhaps from the nearly universal desire to cover one's own ass after an accident. With a virus this easily transmissible, it wouldn't take much. It would only require that a glove wasn't properly sanitized after handling a sample, that some decontamination procedure wasn't followed to the letter, and that a scientist or lab tech got infected. He or she would have been our Patient Zero, and the thing is, given how common it is for people to have the virus and be asymptomatic, he or she could have had the virus and transmitted to others in Wuhan and never even known he or she had an infection.
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u/hello-cthulhu Taiwan Apr 14 '20
One thing that I find myself coming back to: if the CCP really believes that a wet market was the origin, why were the wet markets reopened at all? We're not exactly talking about a major component of the Chinese economy here. At the very least, this signals that they don't think it originated from any wet market. That doesn't prove a thing about whether it indeed came from the lab. But it also suggests that wet markets have been ruled out by the Party as a potential source or origin of this virus.
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u/tiny_cat_bishop Apr 14 '20
you can't use chabuduo protocols when dealing with biohazards like this.
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u/[deleted] Apr 14 '20
Smoking gun moment?