zlacker

>>ruarai+(OP)
My understanding of the author's central thesis is this: the US, despite its world-class virology and disease study labs, regularly has lapses in procedure that regularly lead to situations in which the public might be exposed. Given that this is happening in our own backyard, we might reasonably expect countries of similar status (like China) to experience similar lapses.

That reads as reasonable to me, but raises a subsequent question: if these lapses are so common and so many countries possess the capacity for serious mistakes, why don't we see more regular outbreaks (if not full-blown pandemics) caused by labs? In other words, what makes COVID special? I didn't find a satisfactory answer to the latter question in the article.

It's my (uninformed, uneducated) opinion that the severity of the author's claims don't correspond to the reality of the last few national and international disease crises (AIDS, Ebola, Zika, COVID). Which isn't to say that we should absolutely dismiss the possibility that COVID originated in a lab, only that claims that it did amount to currently unsubstantiated claims about COVID's special status among other recent pandemics.

>>woodru+bz1
In general labs are not both a) bad at safety, and also b) doing gain of function research to make dangerous viruses more infectious to humans. The latter has been banned a few times due to the risk (see below). Both A and B were happening in Wuhan.

"In 2014, after a series of accidents involving mishandled pathogens at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the NIH announced that it would stop funding gain-of-function research into certain viruses — including influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) — that have the potential to unleash a pandemic or epidemic if they escaped from the lab. Some researchers said the broad ban threatened necessary flu-surveillance and vaccine research."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00210-5

p.s. The US NIH did ultimately stop funding that research locally, but continued funding it in Wuhan. Including the exact type of virus we're dealing with now.