It's depressing how lab leak gained so much traction through sheer volume. Natural origin has a couple holes in the evidence you plug with "this is how viruses have evolved every other time we've been able to see." Lab leak has more holes, plugged with incredible coincidences and wild speculation. - ThreadSky

maxkennerly.bsky.social • 5 days ago

It's depressing how lab leak gained so much traction through sheer volume.

Natural origin has a couple holes in the evidence you plug with "this is how viruses have evolved every other time we've been able to see."

Lab leak has more holes, plugged with incredible coincidences and wild speculation.

Reposted from Gregg Gonsalves

In fact, we may never know the origins of SARSCoV2, but the preponderance of the evidence suggests a natural origin. But the lab leak is now embraced by many in the mainstream media. Immerwahr gets on the bandwagon in this piece. 9/ www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Comments

paultopping.bsky.social•5 days ago

And you have otherwise fairly smart people like Bill Maher, scratching their conspiracy theory itch with it. They are so confident because it "makes sense", apparently requiring no actual proof at all. Pure vibes.

k0stra.bsky.social•5 days ago

bill maher is not smart, dude has been antivax for decades

paultopping.bsky.social•5 days ago

That's his other stupid conspiracy theory.

lilyscott.bsky.social•5 days ago

People like nice he did it explanations. It makes them feel they have some control over what happens.

buermann.bsky.social•5 days ago

It took a decade to find the origin caves of the precursor viruses to OG SARS and they've pulled the funding for those surveys, just one small part of their entire insane assault on science (because AI will replace scientists, or Jesus is about to return, or they don't like the results).

chainmailedheart.bsky.social•4 days ago

They don't like the spread of scientific knowledge.
My guess why is that such knowledge often highlights the administration's willful refusal to protect the public.

jlp2024.bsky.social•5 days ago

Nate silver a leading cause?

upine.bsky.social•5 days ago

Volume of repetition of statements is how all propaganda has worked since the beginning of humankind. And it works on pretty much anyone. No need to be depressed about this. We just need to face these facts & counteract the propaganda.

https://upine.medium.com/the-vast-reach-of-right-wing-disinformation-fbcee2715db7

upine.bsky.social•5 days ago

https://upine.medium.com/time-to-solve-our-propaganda-problems-like-the-military-does-e97eda71ba7b

bjchippindale.bsky.social•4 days ago

I DON'T CARE!

This has always struck me as an effort to fix blame instead of fixing the problem. The only reason to hunt for the transmission vector is to prevent it from easily happening again.

Without an investigative time machine, we can't know.

The question is "What do we do about it?"

bjchippindale.bsky.social•4 days ago

The correct answer is:

Better air quality and filtration in classrooms and other public places.

Masking in public enclosed spaces.

Finding a better vaccine.

Using the vaccines we have.

Isolating when ill.

Fixing blame is nowhere on that list.

hammys-howl.bsky.social•4 days ago

NYT fails its readers on many fronts. Including this one. Propaganda sheet now.

bruceediger.bsky.social•4 days ago

The whole point of "lab leak" is to give cover to Trump on his terrible handling of the pandemic. Natural origin or lab leak, the Trump admin failed the US almost completely (Operation Warp speed excepted). Crapagandists will point at lab leak to allow themselves to gloss over 2019-2020 failures.

itseasybeinggreen.bsky.social•4 days ago

It seems to me like it's not even volume but rather that some of the people pushing it have a lot of clout.

felinecannon.bsky.social•5 days ago

I’d say there’s very strong evidence in the latest papers that the disease originated at the animal market. Same as SARS1. It’s a parsimonious explanation of the available data invoking well-known mechanisms.

But at this rate we’ll close the all labs and reopen the live animal markets.🙄

paul-yoakum.bsky.social•5 days ago

People just want to be racist without admitting to themselves that they're racist.

davesrants.com•4 days ago

There's no downside to treating both scenarios as highly plausible and taking action to try and lessen the risk of either happening. Lab accidents (in general) are scarily common so we should do things to reduce them, in the immediate aftermath there was clearly an effort by virologists to downplay

helicobacterio.bsky.social•3 days ago

Both are biologically plausible, but one has sustained scientific evidence while the other only has political support and exploits the few gaps in the other. There are already strict policies for research in labs, you do not need a fake theory to increase awareness.

davesrants.com•3 days ago

Apparently you do given people in the field dispute the necessity of certain types of research and of course the multiple leaks of SARS-1 etc

helicobacterio.bsky.social•3 days ago

The lab leak conspiracy needs of muddying the waters, the GoF is another factor your kind use to that extent. GoF and a potential lab leak are not factors dependent on each other. Even if GoF was done at Wuhan that doesn’t prove a leak, it just serves the purpose of criminalising Wuhan unfairly.

sdemetri.bsky.social•4 days ago

Natural origin has some very strong evidence in the fact two distinct strains were circulating very early on obviating the unlikely case of two strains being “developed” and released in a lab leak scenario. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/origin-sars-cov-2-animal-transmission-or-lab-leak

labelsoren.bsky.social•4 days ago

The lab leak myth gave "the red hats" someone to blame that wasn't trump - when, in fact, viruses evolve and spread naturally fairly regularly over time. Disbanding the pandemic team was a fatal error that trump made.

katenobriga.bsky.social•4 days ago

A lab leak at Ft Detrick happened in 1989. It was an airborne form of Ebola, Ebola Reston, that turned out to be only harmful to monkeys.

helicobacterio.bsky.social•3 days ago

A MAGA once told me the lab leak had to be true since most Americans believed so. They never considered the world out there outside USA or the fact that many people also believe a guy converted water into wine at a wedding 2000 years ago. That’s the level…

shadysullivan.bsky.social•5 days ago

Don’t know why people prefer the lab leak theory

derpgently.bsky.social•4 days ago

Because it allows a certain segment of the public to blame China, absolve Trump, and do nothing to prevent a future outbreak.

helicobacterio.bsky.social•3 days ago

Because it is simple and easy to understand. It does not require of an understanding of biology, ecology, epidemiology…and people like these easy answers to complex problems. That’s why far right embraced it and it got traction from there.

bike2beer.bsky.social•5 days ago

So many other bad things are man made lately (A.I., climate change, Trump’s presidency) it’s tempting to conclude COVID is just one more thing we screwed up.

helicobacterio.bsky.social•3 days ago

Part of the problem is that people “believe” one thing or the other while this is a matter if scientific evidence, and so far, all the available evidence points towards a zoonotic origin. That said, this theory relies on man intervention at various levels like most instances of zoonotic spillover.

nomnomnomdeplumb.bsky.social•5 days ago

I wonder how much if a boost john Stewart gave it woth his bullshit

marshray.bsky.social•5 days ago

Except that it's not actually particularly uncommon for pathogens to escape a lab. It is a semi-regular occurrence.
This is how a virus endemic to a region in Africa came to be named after Marburg, a town in West Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents
(I'm not attached to either interpretation)

surfingthepast.bsky.social•5 days ago

You say not uncommon and give one example. How many other serious diseases or global pandemics were caused by lab leaks?

marshray.bsky.social•2 days ago

The post includs a link to the list maintained on Wikipedia.

surfingthepast.bsky.social•2 days ago

Leaving aside the old Soviet Union, hardly a model for anything most are not “lab leaks” but accidental infections of workers. I other words industrial/medical accidents that were constrained to the worker who was infected. Far cry from lab borne global pandemic.

helicobacterio.bsky.social•3 days ago

Lab leaks have occurred and have been identified because we have the means to do that. Spillover occurs much more often and we have the means to identify these cases. There is zero evidence that COVID was a lab leak and substantial evidence that was a zoonotic spillover.

tattooed-thornback.bsky.social•5 days ago

We know the name of the man who was the first person to get the virus that kicked off the 1918 pandemic. We know covid wasn't a GD lab leak

chainmailedheart.bsky.social•4 days ago

Tangential to this, COVID displayed something for the world to see:

Our country would be exquisitely vulnerable to any attempts at biowarfare.

Just noting.

chainmailedheart.bsky.social•4 days ago

So, if it was a lab leak (not endorsing this), IMO, the proper response would be to beef up the WHO.
We'd want to push for an international agreement on containment protocol for any biological labs working on contagious diseases.
We could do that anyway.

loumeka.bsky.social•4 days ago

The origin or covid needs cooperation and openness from China - never ever going to happen

soonergrunt.bsky.social•5 days ago

From a practical standpoint the question of the source of COVID-19 is utterly irrelevant to the fact that Donald Trump failed in his first and principle duty, to protect the American people.

nukularbiskits.bsky.social•5 days ago

labelsoren.bsky.social•4 days ago

All republicans ever do is give people someone to blame. They never have actual solutions. Blame the minorities. Blame the trans kids. Blame the Chinese. Blame everyone ELSE!

chrisweedon.bsky.social•5 days ago

Regardless of origins, the spread of the virus was intentionality mis-managed resulting in over 750 thousand preventable deaths. And the culprit is still on the loose.

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply