State Dept cables raised safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses

washingtonpost.com

11 points·haltingproblem··6 comments

OP here. One subtle distinction - lab origin does not necessarily mean engineered. It can also just mean a lab employee got infected while handling and then was a vector for one or many human to human transmission.

Intuitively that transmission vector appears to be higher probability than zoonotic transmission (animal to human). Just my intuition.

I don't think anyone is saying China purposely bioweaponed the planet. Accidental lack of containment is almost certainly what happened.

Good point. I was most certainly not saying that China purposely bioweaponed the planet. But your point is very good. Lets look at the matrix of engineering and purpose

A - The Wuhan lab was engineering a virus and purposely bioweaponed the planet

B - The Wuhan lab was engineering a virus and accidentally bioweaponed the planet

C - The Wuhan lab was not engineering a virus but purposely released it.

D - The Wuhan lab was not engineering a virus but accidentally released it.

I hope no one believes A and C. I don't think B is a possibility since they allowed American researchers to openly access the lab.

What is also interesting is the US shutdown this research saying it was too risky. In my mind, this also raises the possibility that the Wuhan lab was not negligent and just ran the risk for too long. Doing something risky for long enough and eventually, the probability of sampling the unlikely but probable goes to 1.

E - The Wuhan lab was engineering a virus for potential bioweapon use, but it escaped into the wild.

Isn’t that B in the grandparent?

http://archive.is/N2Z1K

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