Covid 'lab leak theory': What we've learned

[Kennah]

Source: CNN

An updated intelligence assessment about the origins of the Covid-19 virus has reopened the long-simmering and unsolved debate about how the virus came to be – and will fuel a new committee House Republicans have created to investigate the issue.

While scientists still predominantly believe the virus occurred naturally in animals and spread to humans in an outbreak at a market in Wuhan, China, the US Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence is now the second tentacle of the US government intelligence apparatus, along with the FBI, that endorses the “lab leak theory” – the minority view that the virus occurred as a result of work in a Chinese lab.

The DOE office is one of 18 government agencies that make up the intelligence community, which are under the umbrella of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Most of the intelligence community remains either split or leaning toward the natural occurrence theory that scientific investigations have concluded as most likely. But without conclusive evidence, no one has been able to reject the lab leak theory entirely.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/27/politics/covid-lab-leak-what-matters/index.html

---

The intelligence community agrees it was NOT developed as a biological weapon.

[brush]

1. Why is the Energy Department, not the CDC taking the lead on this?

Seems a bit far from their purview.

[TheProle]

2. They oversee the US network of labs.

[womanofthehills]

3. The energy Dept monitors the labs for safety regulations

They also are in charge of 17 labs like the Los Alamos Labs, Oak Ridge, Sandia, Lawrence Livermore etc. Some of these labs are also doing coronavirus research.

[brush]

5. Ok, thanks.

[sinkingfeeling]

6. As stated, the DOE is one of 18 government agencies involved.

[lapfog_1]

53. you want to model a virus

down to near atomic level... you are going to need a supercomputer.

Something the DOE has a plethora of.

Lawrence Livermore (LLNL), Los Alamos (LANL), Sandia (SNL), Oak Ridge (ORNL), Argonne. Lawrence Berkeley (LBL).

Those are just the ones that I either worked at or visited at one time or another.

ORNL has the world's largest supercomputer (beating the Chinese)...

All of them were doing research during the pandemic on Covid.

[sinkingfeeling]

4. ABC News says the DOE report is a low-confidence assessment.

[womanofthehills]

57. FBI said they believe it came from a lab

They said theirs was a “middle confidence assessment “

[Ray Bruns]

7. It's really irrelevant how it got here. It's here and we have to deal with it.

let the republicans investigate and waste there time. If it was released from a chinese lab, it's not like they can subpoena or question anyone from china.

[Ray Bruns]

36. All of which Is irrelevant to whether it is from a lab or not.

The Chinese are never going to cooperate in an investigation.

[Zeitghost]

47. It's very relevent

In preparing for and dealing with the next virus pandemic.

[Walleye]

10. I agree. The sick Republicans want to twist it into a political issue

[womanofthehills]

14. It's not irrelevant because no one even knows how many labs in the world are doing dangerous researc

Probably 50 bio 4 labs and 3000 bio 3 labs!!!!! Dangerous- not only because of lab accidents but because of terrorists too

What's inside the UK's top-secret laboratory?
The international controls on centres where dangerous viruses are created and studied have been shown to be disturbingly weak.
Those working with pathogens of different kinds are graded according to their potential biohazard risk level, from 1 to 4, the highest level. Fifty or so laboratories worldwide come into category 4, among them Porton Down, near Salisbury - Britain's top-secret centre for biological and chemical research.
Porton Down is often described as the gold standard for biosafety, and Category 4 laboratories are very tightly regulated. But Category 3 laboratories with softer controls are far more common. Col de Bretton-Gordon says there are more than 3,000 Category 3 laboratories around the world.

The majority are involved in medical research, but that often involves holding and testing viruses like Covid-19. And some are in countries like Iran, Syria, and North Korea, where the motives of the ruling power are regarded with nervousness by much of the outside world.

But given that 8 million people may well have died from Covid, the possibility that a virus could escape from one of the 3,000 or more laboratories which are not thoroughly controlled makes the biological threat even more dangerous.. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-57206510

[yaesu]

33. Not really, we need to know if it's man made or a natural occurrence

Only if to understand the virus better and to prepare for other viruses doing the same in the future.

[LeftInTX]

71. It's probably not "man-made", but humans could certainly

have created mutations via research.
In 1968 or so a researcher in the UK was exposed to a virulent strain of smallpox. Although vaccinated, she contracted it. There was an outbreak and several people died.

[Warpy]

8. No one will ever be able to reject it entirely

but it has to be remembered that China was the first victim of it. A Frankenvirus developed to infect the rest of the world and released would have been released a little more strategically than sickening hundreds of people who had contact with a wet market in Wuhan and killing many of them along with the health care workers who cared for them.

Personally, I think the virus was most likely SARS Cov-1 (with which Covid shared 80% of its DNA) that had been circulating around below the radar and mutating for 8 years, becoming more transmissible and less lethal.

The lab in Wuhan had been cited by the WHO for sloppy containment, so who knows?

I don't think any of us ever will. Virologists knew coronavirus was on the move and that the human population was due for a nasty one, the original SARS and MERS viruses being proof of that.

[womanofthehills]

11. There have been many lab leaks/accidents around the world

What we need to be asking is why is this dangerous research being done. Another pandemic can happen because no one even knows where all the labs in the world are. Obama stopped this dangerous research in 2014 in the US because of accidents, but Trump reinstated it.

Wiki - list of lab accidents and lab leaks

This list of laboratory biosecurity incidents includes accidental laboratory-acquired infections and laboratory releases of lethal pathogens, containment failures in or during transport of lethal pathogens, and incidents of exposure of lethal pathogens to laboratory personnel, improper disposal of contaminated waste, and/or the escape of laboratory animals. The list is grouped by the year in which the accident or incident occurred and does not include every reported laboratory-acquired infection.

You can’t even make this stuff up -

United States From 2005 to 2015, the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground mistakenly shipped live anthrax at least 74 times to dozens of labs.[36][37]

China An accident in a laboratory at the Lanzhou Veterinary Research Institute [zh] caused 65 workers to become infected with brucellosis.[65] More than 10,000 residents of Lanzhou were infected by November 2020.[66] The outbreak was reportedly caused by incompletely sterilized waste gas from a nearby biopharmaceutical factory. The resulting bacteria-containing aerosols were carried in the wind to the Veterinary Research Institute, where the first cases were recorded in November 2019.[67]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents

[Warpy]

15. You'd be shocked to find out how much of this research is being done and how important it is

Where do you think the m-RNA technology came from to produce a vaccine at lightning speed? Virology research, much of it on bugs that would make sure you never got a good night's sleep ever again if you knew about them and what was being done with them.

Every bug that gets tweaked and studied in a virology lab teaches us something, even when it's a bug that can kill in hours. Covid was a killer, but not an efficient one, not with modern medicine available. That's why I'm putting my money on the original SARS lurking just under the radar for 8 years, mutating into Covid on its own. Virology labs want the bugs as dangerous as they can get them, they learn more from those. That's why I don't think somebody tracked it out of that lab, it just doesn't fit.

This virus is a rapid mutator and eight years is certainly sufficient to get it from the original SARS to Covid. We know the original SARS is endemic in bats and that a similar virus infects pangolins, who probably picked it up from bat feces in forest litter. In any case, coronavirus was on the move and most likely to show up in Asia.

If you want to blame somebody for the million plus deaths here and the millions of deaths worldwide, don't blame virologists and don't blame China. Blame the right wing assholes worldwide who sat on their hands because they thought a virus would make them look bad.

We know who they are.

[Tumbulu]

16. I am not shocked and I don't know who would be

I think the issue is how to prevent lab leaks, and what to do when they occur.

When I worked in fermentation biology half a century ago the DOJ paid regular visits, we had to keep all sorts of records for them. And we were just producing bio pesticides. But even back then it was taken very seriously.

Your SARS theory sounds fine to me.

Again, it really does not interest me where it came from. What I care about is what we do once a new pandemic event arrives.

[Warpy]

28. Good because there's are two particularly nasty flu strains cooking out in the environment

and while neither is capable of being transmitted person to person, people have caught both from birds with a fatality rate over 50%.

We might dodge these two bullets, but there's always another bug out there about to turn especially deadly.

All I hope is that we don't have another demagoguing half wit in the White House when it does.

[Tumbulu]

34. My hope as well

And that future pandemics are not used to further divide us.

I think everyone that I follow in public health is saying that climate change will amp up the frequency of these events.

[DENVERPOPS]

66. There are scientists who think

the 1918 flu virus was an avian virus, carried by migrating birds. Recently, they have uncovered the notes of some rural MD in Colo? who documented in great detail, patients that suddenly, and in large numbers, exhibited the exact same symptoms and death rate seen during the pandemic. The town was directly under the path of bird migration in the western U.S.

Here in the West over the last 6 months, breeders of Chickens and Turkeys have destroyed millions of their birds because of an avian flu, which has been documented to have spread to the wild bird population or vice versa....

There is a huge fear, and should be, not only of person to person spread, but the real nasty of animal (bird) to human spread.........
such as covid, bat to humans..............

A good friend works in the field of terrorists using biological or chemical weapons. I asked him what the most lethal substance is that some terrorist group or government could use, VX Nerve Gas???????? He said the number one, most deadly, is not anthrax, nerve gas, or any of the others whose names are thrown about, but the number one most lethal is Botulism, by far...........interesting.......

[Warpy]

67. The 1918 flu was an incredibly odd one

A good portion of its genome was traced to the equine flu in the 1870s that killed so many horses that it almost led to the total burning of Boston during their Great Fire. Fire trucks had to be pulled by teams of men because of the shortage of horses. It also had bits from both avian and porcine flu, so it doesn't completely abolish the Kansas pig farm theory, but it does mean that an alternative avian source could be true.

The current avian influenzas might stop with people in close contact with flocks and animals that prey on wild birds, or one of them might be the next nasty human virus.

Likely a strain with the virulence of the 1918 flu wouldn't be quite as deadly now. We have oxygen delivery (it had to be generated chemically in 1918 and there was no way to meter it), monoclonal antibody drugs to mitigate cytokine storms, and antibiotics for opportunistic bacterial infections. They barely knew the 1918 flu was a virus, and that was only toward the end of the pandemic.

I agree about botulism, but it's the refined toxin and not the bug that would be the most lethal. It's always boggled my mind that so many vain celebrities get it shot into their faces.

[DENVERPOPS]

68. check out this article

in this afternoon's Denver Post.................about avian flu in mammals found

https://www.9news.com/article/life/animals/colorado-avian-flu-mammals-cases/73-b86ab619-7dc6-47c9-8f1d-fa8c439841ce

[Warpy]

69. Thanks!

So far, what I've read has suggested it has been found mostly in predators like the weasel family. The skunk most likely got it from bird carrion, they're pretty opportunistic. That flu is definitely on the move, though. Mammals have to inhale the virus deeply into the lungs, meaning it is highly pathogenic but not contagious, it doesn't infect mammals via the receptors in the upper respiratory tract....yet.

As for eating poultry, it's safe. Birds are infected through their respiratory tracts and we don't eat that part. Just wash your hands in soap and water after handling raw poultry and cook it properly, checking internal temperature with a meat thermometer. I'd also avoid raw eggs for now, just in case.

Eating raw poultry is never a good idea.

[Warpy]

43. We're on the same page there

which is why we need to try to prevent another defiantly ignorant blowhard from getting the presidency.

[womanofthehills]

20. So why in 2014 did Obama stop gain of function research in the US

He said it was too dangerous - plus lab accidents .

Oct 17,2014 from New York Times

White House to Cut Funding for Risky Biological Study

Prompted by controversy over dangerous research and recent laboratory accidents, the White House announced Friday that it would temporarily halt all new funding for experiments that seek to study certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous.

It also encouraged scientists involved in such research on the influenza, SARS and MERS viruses to voluntarily pause their work while its risks were reassessed.[/b

Opponents of this type of research, called gain of function — for example, attempts to create a more contagious version of the lethal H5N1 avian influenza to learn which mutations made it that way — were elated.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/white-house-to-cut-funding-for-risky-biological-study.html

[ancianita]

50. The m-RNA tech came out of Berkeley scientist Jennifer Doudna

and her French biolab scientist colleague, Emmanuelle Charpentier. Both were co-Nobel Prize winners in chemistry.

It didn't come out of any state biolabs either in China or the U.S.
Doudna worked with Moderna labs to develop the vaccine and Pfizer manufactured the delivery system, since it was a bigger scale manufacturer.



Read about how Doudna was the first scientist to SEE and atomically map RNA, and how Charpentier was the developer of the CRISPR-Cas9 system that literally delivered the RNA to snip the genetic material from new covid viruses. That's the system still in use for all potential pandemic viruses.



My son was in biotech studies at the University of Technology in Sydney, AU, and said that biotech is evil, and left. He was referring to its biolab synthesizing of new viral strains. He says it's done for dubious corporate use, and I believe him.

[womanofthehills]

58. Moderna worked with NIH to develop the vaccine

As they are fighting over it and royalities

“What they're saying: NIH said in a statement that its scientists created the "stabilized coronavirus spike proteins for the development of vaccines against coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2," and the government consequently has "sought patents to preserve the government's rights to these inventions."

https://www.axios.com/2020/06/25/moderna-nih-coronavirus-vaccine-ownership-agreements


And - Vaccine-maker Moderna has forked over $400 million to the National Institutes of Health for using a molecular stabilizing technique borrowed from government and academic researchers in its mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine—which the company made roughly $36 billion selling amid the deadly pandemic, according to The New York Times.https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/moderna-forks-over-400m-to-nih-amid-dispute-over-covid-vaccine-ip/

[ancianita]

59. That's detail later in the timeline. MY point was that this mRNA didn't come out of any state lab,

but out of a university bench scientists' lab. The govt sought patents because Doudna, the mapper of RNA, wihout which a vaccine could not have been developed, turned over her patent and lab process patents using RNA for fair use. So of course it went to NIH, etc., and of course the govt sought to keep corporate pharma and biotech from gaining patent control.

We were lucky that she and Berkeley have a moral compass.

[womanofthehills]

60. Hundreds of scientists had worked on mRNA vaccines for decades

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-

w

The tangled history of mRNA vaccines
Hundreds of scientists had worked on mRNA vaccines for decades before the coronavirus pandemic brought a breakthrough.

n late 1987, Robert Malone performed a landmark experiment. He mixed strands of messenger RNA with droplets of fat, to create a kind of molecular stew.

[ancianita]

65. Not. My. Point. And NO, they trial-and-error tried RNA but until Jennifer Doudna literally SAW RNA,

which no scientist had ever been able to "see," and atomically MAPPED it. Malone could isolate it, but not see or control it; thus, the "stew" result.

What Doudna did at the Berkely lab, and what she got the Nobel for in chemistry -- THAT is how the Moderna labs finally got real ability to develop the vaccine -- when the CRISPRCas 9 delivered the RNA, with certainty -- not trial-and-error as they'd previously done -- to snip the covid genetic material, then make a vaccine, then use a lipid delivery system.

We're talking past each other. Anyway, we've got it, and lucky we had the brains and tech to do it for ourselves and the world.

[Tumbulu]

17. I agree absolutely

[DENVERPOPS]

32. You forgot to mention biological work being done at

USAMRID.............

[womanofthehills]

61. Fort Detrick had serious violations in 2019 with primates

That’s why Chinese social media told all the Chinese it came from Fort Detrick.

Army germ lab shut down by CDC in 2019 had several 'serious' protocol violations that year

FREDERICK, Md. — In 2019, an Army laboratory at Fort Detrick that studies deadly infectious material like Ebola and smallpox was shut down for a period of time after a CDC inspection, with many projects being temporarily halted.

Several of the laboratory violations the CDC noted in 2019 concerned "non-human primates" infected with a "select agent", the identity of which is unknown — it was redacted in all received documents, because disclosing the identity and location of the agent would endanger public health or safety, the agency says. In addition to Ebola, the lab works with other deadly agents like anthrax and smallpox.


https://wjla.com/news/local/cdc-shut-down-army-germ-lab-health-concerns

[Tumbulu]

13. I really don't know why it matters, unless it was genetically engineered as part of a biological

weapons program.

If the labs were researching the virus for purposes of understanding and or monitoring them, then people getting infected from the lab work is still a "natural flow"? Isn't it?

Engineered to be more infective, or anything else? Well, that is another matter.

I am not up on any of the crazy wing nut theories, not do I care to know of them. But to me, the whole things smacks of an engineered virus gone a muck.

My best guess is people were fooling around with something not easy to detect as engineering per se. It is so typical of humans these days to feel so smug about their ability and right to screw around with biological coding systems.

Regardless of how it came about, it got out and I am grateful that the entire world's scientific community worked so hard to get vaccines to all of us so very quickly.

I expect, that as time goes on, more and more biological warfare agents will be released accidentally and on purpose.

[MichMan]

24. You don't think determining the origins of a disease that killed millions is of any importance?

[Tumbulu]

27. It is of scientific importance to know

But it is not on the top of the list of what I am worrying about.

I have been horrified by how callous people have been. How infantile they have been about wearing masks and getting vaccinated once a vaccine was available.

[roamer65]

31. +100000

[womanofthehills]

62. You might want to put it higher on your list

As it’s been estimated that there are 50 bio 4 labs around the world and 3000 bio 3 labs working with who knows what. Some kind of world regulations need to be in place. With lab leaks /accidents so prevalent- the next accident could be a form of polio or smallpox that our vaccines don’t stop.

[keopeli]

19. This would not be getting play on CNN or elsewhere if the Repukes in Congress had not gained control

The report is labeled "LOW CONFIDENCE".

The Dept. of Energy, recently run by Rick Perry, is playing politics with this report.

If I were Pres. Biden, I would be speaking to the current DOE Scty. Jennifer Granholm right away to ask why she issued a report about low confidence information that not only flies in the face of current scientific knowledge and consensus with low confidence information, but they are hiding their confidence level of this hypothesis in a buried lead, acknowledging that this is not a likely scenario.

I'd have Scty. Granholm in the office pronto.

ALSO, this is an example of the "new" CNN under GQP leadership. They are promoting this when they KNOW it is pandering.

[crickets]

21. 👆👆 Thank you.

Beau of the Fifth Column had a good vid about this on YouTube today as well.

[womanofthehills]

22. The House oversight committee is requesting documents from US agencies

This doc was just released to the White House & Congress - probably because of the request from oversight committee.

[stopdiggin]

25. just guessing. but it crossed my mind that

keeping China in the cross-hairs (geo-political stuff) - - might have a good bit to do with why the 'intelligence' community is now leaning in to a 'low confidence' assessment. The scientific community, as the OP notes - has been pointing to a zoonotic pathway for a while now.

[Shrek]

37. Every agency supporting a zoonotic origin also reported "low confidence"

Only the FBI reported "moderate" confidence and they support the lab leak hypothesis.

"Low confidence" just means "more likely than not."

[keopeli]

41. Precisely. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. Without definitive proof

(which is not likely to ever materialize), we will only have speculation that is easily manipulated by political "bad actors",

[Grolph_]

23. It most likely crossed to humans because farmers in China live with their livestock

Patient one was identified as a female employee in the wet market. I believe she worked at a shrimp stand. It is my belief that patient zero was her boyfriend, who was probably a bat farmer.

US citizens don't realize that a farmer in China doesn't necessarily live out in the country. They could be your next door neighbor on the fifteenth floor of the government owned concrete apartment building you have been relegated to. There are bat farmers, snake farmers, fish farmers, rat farmers (deep fried hairless baby rat on a stick, now that's good eating) eel farmers, shrimp farmers, scorpion farmers, bug farmers, cat farmers, and dog farmers. There are more than you can imagine. They all live in the city.

So some bat farmer and their girlfriend live with thousands of bats in cages in a one bedroom apartment in Wuhan. They bring their harvest to the market along with the disease that mutated enough in one of those bats to cross over. This type of crossover has been proven, swine flu crossed from pigs to humans who were living in the same building. If you sleep with your livestock, eventually both species will share things they probably shouldn't.

The Chinese government was trying to push the wet markets out of business. They did this by buying protein (pork, beef, chicken) from the world's farmers. They can't raise enough of their own because the countryside has been denuded of almost all vegetation as people burned whatever they could drag to their village to heat their homes and cook their supper. Eventually there was nothing left to feed their livestock or heat their homes. They moved to the city.

The Chinese love pork, and they really love US grown (think Iowa) pork. It's fatty and delicious, not like their skinny starved pigs. And then our feckless president started a trade war and the pork went away. All of the sudden the pork was too expensive. The population went back to the wet market. The wet market farmers ramped up production to meet demand. So yes, TFG was responsible for a global pandemic.

For those that don't understand, at a wet market, your meat is alive until you buy it. There is no refrigeration so if it doesn't sell one day, it goes back to the farm (fifteenth floor), to be carried to the market another day.

[roamer65]

30. I still wonder if one of the lab animals was sold into the wet market.

Perhaps a lab employee making money on the side.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

26. Interesting. My mind just goes back to an NPR

interview, right after the pandemic started. It was of a supervisor at the Wuhan lab. She was scared when she heard and rushed down to lab because she feared there was a leak she didn't know about. And the relief she felt that there wasn't in her lab. I swear if she was BS, I would be shocked. So effin real and believable!

[intrepidity]

44. That was real

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/

Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”

[Laura PourMeADrink]

46. Thank you SO much for digging this up!

[orleans]

29. i've learned that the energy department is reporting this theory with "low confidence"

so... why bother?

[tornado34jh]

35. We could talk about where this began for years and people will have their own opinion about it

But I have to be blunt about this, I don't give a storm/damn how or where it happened, it doesn't change the fact that the world should not have been this unprepared for it. Even if it started in some lab somewhere, that does not give the rest of the world an excuse for why they were this unprepared. We know China, as with Russia, wants to tamp down on any negative press relating to their government. No one should have taken China at its word. Heck, there are people who believe the bio-lab in Ukraine theory for crying out loud, even though Ukraine has no BSL-4 laboratories there. Honestly, my patience with how this all began is getting thin. Sure, I would like to know where it all began, how it started and all that. But at the end of the day, has humanity learned anything from this or not? We were freaking lucky to even have a vaccine for this one, and yet people still don't want it. If the next pandemic occurs, don't think we may be as lucky, and depending on the pathogen, it could take much longer to find vaccines and all that. It likely may not even be the same pathogen. I just quite frankly am done hearing about how or where it occurred. If people don't learn from this one, then it doesn't matter where or how this virus started, all of that means nothing.

[IronLionZion]

38. China has been secretive and destroyed any evidence either way

That's the main reason our intel agencies are suspicious. China has not provided evidence to prove where it originated or to rule out the lab. They raise a lot of red flags with their shady behavior.

[intrepidity]

45. This has been my main concern, too

Some strange actions and behaviors that are very suspicious.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

40. Why does this come to mind when I read this story?

[XorXor]

42. I haven't seen any legitimate source suggest it was intentionally created

Even from those who believe the lab leak theory. What's unfortunate is that there is a large number of people who ignorantly conflate an accidental lab leak to a purposeful release. That makes the discussion of this difficult because the bad faith actors will use it to push whatever political agenda they have.

[XorXor]

51. I noticed a lot of people are very invested in their preferred theory

I've seen plenty of good faith and legitimate arguments about both. I like to observe discussions between experts acting in good faith who have different views on this. One thing I've gathered is that experts (like people who actually know this stuff) who approach it critically tend to offer a disclaimer that they can't say definitely that their theory is correct. I just wish people didn't view this with partisan lenses. Which is hard because look how a certain segment on the right is reacting to this. They act as if it's been absolutely proven. Which in turn brings about certain knee-jerk partisan reactions from the other side.

As for doing better, it's my understanding that it's hard to do better because of the nature of what they are investigating and because China isn't being 100% cooperative.

[Sympthsical]

72. "Created as a bioweapon" is meant to conflate reasonable with fringe

So the whole thing can be dismissed out of hand. It's a purposeful tactic to discredit any discussion.

Most people who are suspicious of the lab know that these viruses are researched for all kinds of reasons, including - rather ironically - understanding what would happen with a pandemic.

But if anyone who asks questions can be labeled a conspiracy theorist who believes "China WaNtS tO KiLL Us!!111!!" then they don't have to entertain any questions, even the most obvious ones.

It's a protective head-in-sand tactic.

But I think its effectiveness is kind of over at this point. It's only a matter of how long some people will cling to it. It's easier than admitting, "Maybe going along with and defending authoritarian censorship, particularly on scientific matters, was a mistake."

That'll never get admitted. Some people just dug in too deep and invested in it.

[zanana1]

54. How exactly does a lab "leak"?

[Zeitghost]

55. Workers in the lab

getting infected and then spreading it in the community.

[womanofthehills]

63. Infected mice have escaped labs, wrong vials are mailed to labs,

Primates infected with disease can compromise people by lab doors not being locked, scientists jabbed by needles, toxic waste not handled properly. Check out some reasons here: check out column on right.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents

[Zeitghost]

64. Indeed

Lots of pathways for escape.

[zanana1]

70. Thank you.

[JCMach1]

56. Spillage is a THING. Google Ebola Reston and see how we almost gave

Our own country Ebola in Washington DC in the Middle of the Cold War.

[intrepidity]

73. One line of thought that I never see discussed is this:

if this virus did *not* have any connection whatsoever to the Wuhan lab, then the whole raison d'être of that institution should be examined.

Presumably, their mission in doing the various (dangerous) collections, analysis, engineering, etc of these coronaviruses, is to understand and thus be able to predict and prevent a pandemic, right?

That's WHY they do the work they do.

And yet, this happened. Literally in their backyard.

It's like having an electrician's house burn down from faulty wiring.

It's like a fire station burning down.

It's the embodiment of the meme "You had one job..."

And it's not like this happened somewhere else, like the electrician's neighbor's house burned down, or a lightning strike burned down the fire station. Nope. The irony strains credulity.