zlacker

>>ruarai+(OP)
This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1]

This article points out that a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world. We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https://www.resea...

>>gregwe+pV1
An eerily prescient quote from a paper[0] published in 2015, two of the authors of which are with Wuhan Institute of Virology:

> Understanding the bat origin of human coronaviruses is helpful for the prediction and prevention of another pandemic emergence in the future.

China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I think it’s silly to presume CCP engineered a virus as part of some warfare strategy, or even to vilify/sanction them for a lab leak if it indeed was the cause (mistakes happen). However, CCP’s resistance to a proper thorough study of the origins of COVID is IMO not exactly appropriate.

Active research was taking place in the vicinity of suspected ground zero. Lab escapes happen—there are well-documented cases of the original SARS virus leaking from a lab in Beijing in 2004 (killing at least one person). Why was this time such a scenario discarded as so ridiculously impossible at first, and is still considered “extremely unlikely”? Is it politics?

[0] https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-...

>>strogo+R42
My naive reasoning on why China didn’t create COVID-19 with the intention of using it is that I suspect (unburdened by education or the thought process) that engineering a virus is as difficult as coming up with a vaccine or treatment. If you are developing some kind of super virus to shut down the world economy and then immunize your own people to take advantage of the situation, wouldn’t you have the cure ready to go?

Now, an unintentional leak would be theoretically possible with these initial intentions but then wouldn’t China still have a leg up on developing treatments? If so, wouldn’t we have seen that in their vaccine development?

Of course you this is all uneducated speculation. Quite possible that engineering a deadly and very infectious virus is easier than creating a cure or a vaccine by orders of magnitude.

>>IgorPa+ob2
I'll not conclude anything, but I will say that engineering a virus is an order of magnitude easier than a vaccine.

It's a pure mapping problem. There are thousands of known viruses that affect humans. But most viruses don't have thousands of vaccines.

Additionally, there are constraints. The only contraint on a virus is that is needs to reproduce, and cause harm. Any kind of harm will do, and any kind of spreading is fine. But the vaccine needs to not hurt the person (at least, don't hurt them worse than the virus would).

Even if both processes involved similar techniques, the constraints on virus production are more favorable to the researcher than vaccine production.

To get back to whether China or any nation would intentionally create a biological weapon, however...: most industrialized countries realized a long time ago that bioweapons tends to be a bad strategy. Most western countries stopped their bioweapons programs back in the 70s for the simple reason that there was no reasonable use-case for a bioweapon that isn't done better by simply bombing something (or more recently-hacking their infrastructure). Bioweapons are strategically useful for small nations, and terrorist groups.