Why a lab escape is the most plausible scenario .
- There are 2 government funded Bio labs in Wuhan, both studying bat coronavirses
- This virus has been especially infections among humans. There plenty of other bat related virsus but none this infectious.
- Labs all over the world carry out gain of function experiments.
- There have been accidental escapes of viruses in countries, the UK and Germany are 2 examples.
- The Chinese themselves have admitted the wet market in Wuhan is not the origin of the virus
- China has been extremely secretive and thwarted attempts by international scientists to explore its origin
Note : a lab escape does not imply this was a malicious release or a bio-weapon, it merely means this was a gain of function experiment that escaped containment.
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Here's what I feel happened :
One of the 2 labs was messing around with a bat coronavirus to consider hypothetical worst case scenarios. The virus escaped containement. The staff and leadership at the lab kept quiet , hiding the accident from the central government authorities. Eventually the central government found out but had to hide the truth, fearing damage to China's image, possible culpability suits , loss of face, lack of confidence in China's attempt to market itself as a modern , competent 1st world nation.
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The people suspecting this was a lab escape or at the very least considering a lab escape as very possible are not just amateur sleuths and politicisn, there are scientists in this group.
In November, however, in the journal PNAS, Dr. Relman wrote that Dr. Andersen’s argument didn’t acknowledge that unpublished viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 could have been studied in a laboratory. For more than a decade, Dr. Shi has been publishing experiments on “chimera” coronaviruses, built by inserting parts of newly found viruses into better known viruses to understand how novel viruses could infect human cells. These were used to assess the risk that such viruses could spill over into humans.
The ability to build coronavirus genomes without leaving traces of manipulation has existed for years. Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a world-leading coronavirus expert and collaborator of Dr. Shi, told an Italian television documentary last June, “In sequence databases there were sequences for a large number of bat coronaviruses that were SARS-like, reported out of China.” He added that “whether the virus existed beforehand, it would only be within the records of the Institute of Virology in Wuhan.”