The three scientists were engaged in “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses when they fell ill.
It looks like the Chinese lab leak conspiracy theory is slowly being revealed to be conspiracy fact?
There is a body of published research now that supports an animal to human crossover event occurring at the Wuhan wet market. The US government is going to have to provide more than circumstantial evidence if they want to be taken seriously by the scientific community. They can’t just claim that a few scientists had flu like symptoms during flu season therefore Covid-19 must have been a lab leak.
Hopefully the alleged documents that the US government plans to declassify next week regarding this revelation actually happen.
Maybe the first human infection did happen from animal crossover at the wet market-- and Patient Zero just happened to be a scientist who worked at the lab, who went back to work after lunch and infected all their colleagues.
It looks like the Chinese lab leak conspiracy theory is slowly being revealed to be conspiracy fact?
There’s two theories that often get conflated:
- Covid was engineered in a lab
- Covid was natural but escaped from a lab where it was being studied
During the pandemic, the first was widely debunked, and the second was generally considered possible but unlikely. I find the evidence for a lab leak is compelling but circumstantial, as there are alternate explanations that seem to explain covid without introducing these variables. However, consensus seems to be evolving; in researching this matter it seems there’s a lot of disagreement among geneticists and virologists about the possible origins of the Spike Furin Cleavage Site, for example. I’m interested in this, but weighing the various approaches and probabilities is beyond my knowledge set.
Ultimately, though, does it matter? Would punishing China if it was a lab leak accomplish anything, or has the dangers of viral leaks and the necessity of precaution already been made obvious to everyone? Would outlawing gain-of-function genetic engineering even be meaningful, considering the cost of generic engineering is plummeting and becoming decentralized thanks to techniques like CRISPR and PASTE?
