For the honestly interested, This Week in Virology did some very thorough episodes deep diving with legit experts.
Exec summary: Definitely from a bushmeat market, not from a lab.
https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/tag/lab-leak/
Most recent:
Thanks man, I was actually under the impression that it was a lab leak until these idiots started claiming it. I just operate under the pretense that literally everything from the right is wrong.
Serves to remind us of our shared humanity.
Pre-2020 my social circle consisted almost entirely of libertarians and small-government republicans. After Gulf War II (“they have WMD!”), then Snowden (“we’re not spying on you!”), we came to take it as a given that the government always lies. After all, did you not see the lying to Congress about mass surveillance?
Those same people – many of whom self-identified as “skeptics” – were easy prey for Russian bots
All they had to be told was that the government was lying to them about COVID. It matched the pattern of everything else. 95% of them disappeared into disinfo bubbles and became ring-wraith Trump-enablers. Perhaps 5% kept our eye on objective scientific sources and realized in this case actually the government isn’t lying
insanity
If it’s insane to think that it could have come from a lab in the area, that lied about performing gain-of-function research, that has had a history of leaks in the past, that was studying the exact type of bacteria that evolved into COVID-19, that hid their data and records when asked to see them by the global health community, that (if found to be true) would put the blame for the pandemic on one of the biggest totalitarian governments with a long history of avoiding blame; well then call me crazy.
I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure, but to act like the whole thing is just some crazy conspiracy that could never be true just stinks of willful ignorance.
Yeah, and the Spanish flu, and the bubonic plague, and rsv, and avian flu…
I’m not voting you down nor up, I’m not going to call you crazy or tell you to put on a tinfoil hat. I agree that there are nasty things being created in labs.
But if something was released why would they release it in their own country, if that lab was working on designing something deadly why would it have such a low mortality rate?
Virus’s have always been passively trying to kill us, isn’t the simpler explanation that a decade virus came along and we reacted more to it than we have in the past because our detection sensitivity is much higher?
I don’t think you’re crazy, but I hope you’ve considered the simpler explanation.
There’s a difference between an intentional and unintentional lab leak. Asking why they would release it in their own country doesn’t really change things if it was a fuckup they’re trying to hide.
This could have been an intentional genocide of the retired and disabled population.
