[ExI] Stranger than fiction

[John Clark]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 2:22 PM The Avantguardian via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:


> * > So you don't think that if this information is verified, then it would
> have been poor judgement on the part of the U.S. government to outsource
> viral gain-of-function research deemed too dangerous to conduct in the
> United States to another country with a reputation for poor quality control
> on their exports?*


I thought we were talking about China.

Inside the Chinese lab poised to study world's most dangerous pathogens
<https://www.nature.com/news/inside-the-chinese-lab-poised-to-study-world-s-most-dangerous-pathogens-1.21487>

The Wuhan wet market may not know how to safely work with dangerous viruses
but, according to Nature, the BLS-4 lab in Wuhan does; like all officially
certified BLS-4 labs it has the highest level of biocontainment. If great
minds at Fox News like Lou Dobbs makes a proclamation about viruses and
Nature says the opposite I would tent to side with Nature until new facts
come to light and Occam's razor makes me change my mind.

> *So we pay another country to develop potential world-killers in the lab
> so that we can have a head start fighting it if it evolved naturally?*


Yes.


> * >It sure didn't help us in this situation.*
>

It might have if we'd done it 5 years earlier.

> *Paying another country to do it for you because they are less strict
> about that sort of thing is an even worse idea. *
>

Yes that would be a bad idea, but I thought we were talking about China. In
all this the one country that has demonstrated total ineptitude in the way
they handle dangerous viruses is the USA. And by the way, the 1918 flu that
killed close to 100 million people worldwide may have been called the
"Spanish" flu but it probably started in the USA, in Haskell County Kansas.

 John K Clark
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