From my understanding there appears to be some merit in the possibility that the Wuhan lab was studying a natural covid virus in bats and it leapt from a bat to another animal then to a researcher at the lab. Is this the correct understanding ?

e: Ok I understand, it’s just a theory with nothing supporting it. I don’t read the MSM but most everyone (even leftists) seemed to give some credence to this theory.

my b

  • HarryLime [any]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Addressed here:

    But maybe this gain-of-function research did not try to replicate the virus in a petri dish but, instead, used live animals to multiply and mutate the virus—using one sick animal to infect the next, and the next, and the next, until an evolved and efficient virus came out the other end.

    Following the theory down this path gets increasingly fantastical. “How complicated can this get?” Goldstein said. It would be significantly more expensive, labor-intensive, and difficult to hide. The lab would need to run a veritable petting zoo of different animals to perfect this kind of zoonotic transmission. And it still doesn’t account for the decades of necessary evolution.

    • TankieTanuki [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      When COVID-19 was first detected in December 2019, the Chinese government responded in its usual fashion: with repression and secrecy.

      When even your opinion pieces exonerating China are racist 🙄

    • TankieTanuki [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I just finished reading this article and it did a good job of compiling and addressing the best evidence that's been presented for the lab leak, namely the Wade and Baker articles, but I'm not convinced that this Goldstein guy is offering a solid rebuttal.

      It would be significantly more expensive, labor-intensive, and difficult to hide. The lab would need to run a veritable petting zoo of different animals to perfect this kind of zoonotic transmission.

      But...the Wuhan lab does have animals though. Nobody is hiding them. They have "humanized mice", which have specially engineered epithelial tissue to model people. I'm also sure American labs like Ft. Detrick also have the best research animals that money can buy at their disposal. They used to kill monkeys by the dozens during the development of the Korean War bioweapons.

      And why does he say that the lab would need to have perfected zoonotic transmission? SARS2 was, from the beginning, perfectly adapted to infect people. You only need one animal model for that, not a "petting zoo" of different animals.

      This Goldstein guy seems to be operating under the assumption that a long zoonotic pathway for SARS2 has already been identified and confirmed (as it has been for SARS) and that any lab leak theory would need to account for such a pathway, but that's just not the case here. It's less complicated that he is making it out to be.