Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’
I believe the scientific consensus is that it originated in a wet market in Wuhan.
The “lab leak theory”, while not impossible, is also shorthand for a morass of conspiracy theories grounded in racist attitudes towards China. It somehow conflates that the pandemic is China’s fault, if not an outright attack from China, while simultaneously downplaying any efforts to mitigate such an attack.
The racist connotations about the lab I knew about, but I didn’t think it made it less true.
That being said, I just checked wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_COVID-19
and I think I remember seeing a study that showed the similarity of the sequence to other known sequences and it wasn’t that dramatic a change.
this is an absolute fuck of a sentence and seeing as how you keep JAQing off in a way that platforms conspiracy bullshit, you can just fuck off too
In the absence of any actual evidence, it does make it less true. Believing otherwise means ignoring all the obvious (but admittedly circumstantial) evidence that racism is super-fucking-popular. So Occam’s Razor says if two theories have equal levels of zero evidence and one is inherently appealing to lizard brain, that one will gain prevalence so if you want to correct for that bias you have to bias in the opposite direction. How hard? Roll dice.
Just because since bigots blame China, doesn’t prove their innocence.
But would the world Powers have said something if it was an escaped virus out of the Chinese Lab in Wuhan?
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the wet market is 20 mins from a lab working on bats and viruses.
You have a global Pandemic, but also a big part of the population wants revenge because the Chinese can’t keep their lab viruses contained and killed grandma with covid, quite a spicy meatball there.
Of course the labs location isn’t a coincidence. They built the lab that studies corona viruses near a huge natural reserve of bats infected with corona viruses.
duh, duh duh, duh, duuuuuuuuuh, yup.
Well maybe they shouldn’t have, you know, in case there’s a lab leak. Not saying there was, just saying that these virology labs scare me
A shockingly large portion of the population is dumb and refuses to listen to reality, so it’s no surprise they believe in a big bad ruining their 2020s and killing grandma rather than just dumb bad luck with a new virus.
Let’s also not forget that we also had a large amount of people who refused to do basic COVID prevention techniques like masking, so I’m betting the venn diagram here is pretty close to a circle…
I don’t understand why that’s considered racist? Why is a conspiracy theory that China has a world class biolab capable of a global pandemic racist?
A crazy conspiracy that a foreign power has biotech superiority isn’t racism.
go figure out how racism works elsewhere
Diluting the meaning of words is a huge problem for society. Labeling anything you don’t like as racist is the same tactic used by Magas when they label everything they don’t like as insurrection.
You are enabling actual systemic racism.
I guess most people aren’t up to date with this subject. There has been plenty of discussion with experts that point to the possibility of a lab leak. The wet market hypothesis has so many holes in it that it’s impossible to take seriously.
Such as?
Trust me bro! Idk lol
That kind of comment is useless. Huge claim, zero follow-through. There may well be a workable theory, but that poster has no fucking clue.
Simply, Coronavirus is airborne, not transmitted through surfaces or dead meat. While one of the first persons may have been in the wetmarket but it is highly unlikely that it’s where it originated. Chinese government also had heavy oversight over the investigation and did not allow investigations to go beyond the wetmarket. The narrative of the wetmarket was never scientifically verified, it was just something that was published in the early days of the pandemic and taken as fact. The only american allowed into the investigation had a serious conflict of interest with his stake in research in the Wuhan virology lab and was the person who pushed through the wetmarket hypothesis and politically assisnated any scientist that brought up the possibility of a lab leak (even just to discuss). There were more problematic things revolving this person including rejected research proposals in the US with DARPA related to gain of function with coronavirus (there is more there than im saying). In wuhan, the closest bats with this virus live 100s of miles away from the city, there were no cases of this virus seen in the countryside in the early days. The Wuhan lab had a library of coronavirus genomes, 3 years later they still haven’t published it. This would help pinpoint the origin of the virus.
It’s been a couple years since I dove into this, but there is way more. Especially on the side of the Wuhan virologylab. Point is, we can’t say it’s from a wetmarket any more than it’s from a lableak. The Chinese government hasn’t been cooperative in the investigation so well never be able to draw solid conclusions.
The market where it’s believed to have originated kept live animals. It’s never been claimed that the initial infection was via “dead meat” or from a contaminated surface.
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