Can we all come to our senses please? What are the chances that you'd find out about this from some github.io pages instead of from all the intelligence services in the West who would have been on this like flies if it had a snowball's chance in hell of being true.
A large amount of evidence collected to make a certain narrative look plausible is not worth to be debated on its merits. There is evidence that Martians created our moon because gravity is real. Try refuting that.
There's basically 3 theories that have been put out:
1: The US military developed it. This theory from some CCP higher ups was quickly discredited.
2: It originated in a wet market in Wuhan
This theory does not account for a few things, such as (a) how did the bats end up there? (b) Is there any proof that there were every any bats there? (c) What about the early patients who had no connection to the market?
3: It originated from a lab in Wuhan
The report shows that there are 2 labs in Wuhan, and both of these labs dealt with bats that have a high probability of having this virus. They show this through the published research from the labs as well as other items such as job announcements, etc.
This at least puts the bats (and virus) in Wuhan, explaining how they ended up being there from so far away.
The report goes to great pains to state that no conspiracy is needed, or tie in to bio weapons, or whatever. We simply have some labs dealing with these bats and viruses, in the location where the pandemic started, and there are many possible avenues as to how the virus could have got out.
I don't see how the report delves into conspiracy theories.
4. The virus transferred from an infected animal (not necessarily a bat) to a human, either at the Wuhan South China Seafood market or somewhere else, possibly in the countryside. The market might have just been the site of the first superspreading event. In a big country like China, millions of people come into contact with infected animals all the time. There's no need to invent a Hollywood-style theory about the virus escaping from a lab to explain how it got into humans.
These are serious accusations, and you owe it to the rest of us to provide some serious proof.
I think HN needs filters to avoid conspiracy theory and hate sites, and suggest tags based on AI proofreading to if phrases, themes, or hate are present.
It's either that or create a nicer, saner HN that is vouched invite-only with almost identifiable identities and low-res face photo avatars (reduce cyberdisinhibitionism per BaseCamp's findings)... because this sort of content is as garbage as flat earth and chemtrails.
I mean, that text is trying to make it seem like they are close to each other when actually it just means that both are in the same city. 9 miles is not a small distance in a big city like wuhan.
It's like saying that Queens is next to the Statue of Liberty.
No one is really saying it was intentional; and while risky, the research into coronavirii that could trigger a future pandemic was valuable. But it was a screw-up; someone made a mistake or took a shortcut and here we are.
China is going to be under pressure regardless to either open up that research facility, or shut it down so it doesn't happen again there, or anywhere else in the world.
It's actually a big difference:
It's the scenario of accepting a statiscal misfortune from mother nature versus the scenario of a lack of duty-of-care from a public institution, closely followed by having to pay reparations to a very long list of countries.
My point is that they failed in their disclosure whether it came from the lab or not, and more likely where foreign governments would pursue them for any repatriations.
It's the same situation if there was a nuclear accident - once it has occurred the expectation is to be upfront with the facts so other nations can prepare and deal with any damage. The circumstances of why are only important as far as preventing it happening again.
At least they acknowledge this inconclusiveness at the end.
What direct evidence do we have for the 'wet market' theory that is currently most widely accepted?
Looking from a distance, it appears that the volume of circunstancial evidence for this 'laboratory accident/negligence' theory is far larger.
Didn't read all of it, but I'm not sure what a GPG key is doing there.
The key is probably to allow for people to share encrypted data with the author/contributor? Although to me it feels that github is not exactly the best medium for anonymous info leaks.
If there is some other website or paper that goes through this in more detail, it would be good if someone could post a link to that website.
It could be that next week someone discovers the intermediate host (like the civet cat was for SARS), and the whole discussion becomes moot. But for the moment I think we are still in "don't know either way" territory.
Also we may eventually come to a deeper understanding of the nature of zoonotic events, and whether it is at all possible that a scientific laboratory could accidentally become part of the chain of transfer.
For example, it might be that a coronavirus only rarely and temporarily exists in a state where it infects the source host and is capable of infecting the destination host. In which case such a transfer will only ever occur in a situation where large numbers of indidivuals from both source and destination species exist, ie in rural areas where wildlife mixes with people, or in farms, or some combination of those two.
Another thing I would note is that all the examples of laboratory accidents were of organisms already known to be dangerous human diseases. Those types of accidents can and do happen. Whether it is at all probable that such an accident could generate a _new_ dangerous human disease is not so obvious. This comes back to the question of what probabilities are involved in the events leading up to a typical zoonotic event.
It then kicked around for months in a rural location, a lower R perhaps, with better weather conditions and less networked people. People died and family's moved on.
Until someone on a trip to the city passed it on.
Perhaps selling at the markets or perhaps to family there who then took it to the market through work or just shopping.
I would not write off the Lab theory, it's better than bats at a market, but there are other logical theories as well.
They present evidence of 2 labs in Wuhan, and each lab was doing work with bats with a high degree of likelihood of having this virus.
This puts the virus at the scene of the crime, so to speak.
This is opposed to the wet market theory which has no evidence of said bats at the market, or explanation for how bats from 1000 miles away ended up there.
My hard hitting github of evidence will include the fact that wet markets exist in China and also that racists exist in the US and other western countries. QED.
