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Nearly 40% of Americans already believe Covid-19 leaked from a lab. What happens if they turn out to be right? (www.niemanlab.org)

submitted 3 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 years ago (2 children)

The condemnation comes from what people assume the researchers did with the virus after it arrived in the lab. Somehow it had to make the jump to humans and human to human transmission, which is far from trivial.

Based on what western labs commonly did in the past (see where this goes?), they might have intentionally done some virus breeding to see what it would take for it to make this jump. From a research perspective this somewhat makes sense, but given the risk of a lab leak this is relatively unethical IMHO (and at least officially western labs stopped doing that).

But personally I find this entire discussion completely useless. Even if it turns out to be a lab leak, so what? Does that change anything about the current situation and further outlook?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago

I agree with that logically it's not beneficial but the USA is openly practicing jingoism against the Chinese to the point that Asian Americans are being randomly attacked. There's a theory this leads to a demand for reparations which leads to an excuse for WW3, which some american war hawks are looking for.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 children)

Somehow it had to make the jump to humans and human to human transmission

Could the fact that it could naturally infect humans not be the reason they were studying it? I mean, we only have circumstantial evidence for a lab leak so it seems like jumping the gun to try and come up with theories on the details anyway.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

Maybe for the first part, i.e. some animal viruses have the ability to infect humans, but usually lack sufficient capabilities to then go on to infect other humans from a human host.

Edit: I am not saying this was done in a lab. It can happen naturally as well, for example this happened with the swine-flu. But it usually requires prolonged and wide-spread close contact between humans and these animals, which is unlikely in the case of cave bats.