Quote:
Originally Posted by texassapper
So you think it's mere coincidence that a virus specifically being studied at the Wuhan Flu Academy happens to erupt in a fish market that doesn't sell the animals that the virus originated in?
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How was it that the ChiComs Scientists were able to release the genome so quickly? I think it's because they already had it decoded... because they were actually working on it.
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It's not the Wuhan Flu Academy, it's the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The problem with your conspiracy theory is that the genome was actually released by a completely separate group of university scientists in Shanghai. They got in trouble for it, too, because they didn't clear it with Beijing before they released it.
The ability to do this has been around ever since the Human Genome Project. Sequencing a genome rapidly is no problem these days. A company called 23 and Me can analyze yours in a few days and send you a report. You may have seen their ads on TV.
Quote:
Originally Posted by playerplano
Being accidentally released from a research facility is not an impossible scenario. It doesn’t even have to have been engineered there. All it would take is a bat in captivity for research and a human getting contaminated caring for the research animals. Then the animal handler ( probably low pay no education position ) goes shopping at the market just a block away ?
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I think this is getting close to the correct theory, except for one detail. The Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Huanan Seafood Market are not a block apart. They are more like 7 miles apart and on opposite sides of the Yangtze River. Sure you can get from one to the other pretty easily, but it's about 45 minutes by subway or taxi or even longer by bus.
Being fairly familiar with the geography of Wuhan, no theory has made much sense to me until now for several reasons. Around 50 people who shopped at the seafood market have been interviewed, and most reported that no bats were sold there. Another problem is that Dr. Li Wenliang, the ophthalmologist who noticed it, tried to alert his colleagues about it, was harassed by police for "spreading rumors", and eventually died of the disease, worked at Wuhan Central Hospital which is not near either the Virology Institute or the Seafood Market. Also, while a significant number of early cases were people who had been to the Seafood Market, some had not. All of these things seem uncorrelated to me, and so no theory has made much sense until now.
This week Bret Baier of Fox News has reported, based on multiple sources who have seen classified and unclassified documents, that the emerging theory is this. The virus is probably natural and came from bats being studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A lab worker became infected, possibly unknowingly, and took it home to her boyfriend. The two of them spread it into the community. After several hops it spread across the city until it was finally noticed at the Central Hospital and at the Seafood Market. This now makes sense because we now know that people can be infected and spread the virus without ever showing symptoms or only feeling like they had a mild cold or flu. It also means that when the virus was finally noticed it was far more widespread than anyone thought.
Of course then we get into the whole question of this being covered up by the CCP to minimize the PR damage, but that's a whole different subject. This may or may not eventually turn out to be the correct theory, but it's the first one that makes sense to me and seems to fit all the data I know about. There's a principle in science that the simplest theory that fits the data is probably the right answer, so my guess is that this will be pretty close to the final answer.
Where this stuff came from
