zlacker

>>Flatci+(OP)
The lab leak theory is nonsense and a distraction. If you compare where the mutations of sars-cov-2 are, relative to a wild type bat coronavirus, they are distributed randomly across the genome. If you were to genetically engineer a virus, those mutations would not be random, there would be a discrete chunk of edited base pairs that had been spliced in from somewhere else but that isn’t present. It seems unlikely that in this day and age a virology lab would be doing gain of function experiments without crispr since it’s far easier than the alternative.

>>FuckBu+cZ
> The lab leak theory is nonsense and a distraction.

I strongly agree. I am not sure why, but there seems to be a terrific bias towards any explanation that requires a conspiracy.

Every pandemic and epidemic since the dawn of history was caused by humans living and working in close proximity to animals. Here is a list of epidemics [1]. None of them were caused by a lab breach. There have been plenty of leaks from biolabs in the last 120 years [2], and some pretty nasty stuff has escaped. Nothing came of those breaches, no epidemics, no global pandemics. One stands out as the worst of the lot [3], a major release of weaponized anthrax, yet it still pales in comparison to the deaths and illnesses caused by SARS-CoV-2. If anything is learned by examining a list of lab breaches, it is that any particular person is far more likely to get struck by lightning a dozen times before they'd be infected or die from a contagion inadvertently released from a biolab.

Are the conspiracy theorists banking on the law of averages? "It's never happened before, so that must be what happened this time."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak