[ExI] Dodged the bullet maybe

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Thu, Feb 6, 2020 at 9:17 PM John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> I don't see anything to suggest this is an engineered virus, and I see no
> need to conjure up weird hypothesis to explain a new virus suddenly
> appearing in the human population. This sort of thing has been occurring for
> thousands of years. And the researchers in The Lancet article
> specifically say:
>
> *"2019-nCoV is sufficiently divergent from SARS-CoV to be considered a new
> human-infecting betacoronavirus. Although our phylogenetic analysis
> suggests that bats might be the original host of this virus, an animal sold
> at the seafood market in Wuhan might represent an intermediate host
> facilitating the emergence of the virus in humans." *
>
> ### China vloggers (ADV China, laowhy86) say that while the Wuhan market
is filthy, they don't actually sell bats there. On the other hand, bats
were reportedly used in research at the Wuhan lab. My guess is that
somebody at the lab got accidentally infected, perhaps just inhaling bat
saliva or poop, and that's how it all started, with a low likelihood that
the virus was in some way manipulated at the lab. The meat market story is
just an attempt to deflect attention and blame from a government lab.

Rafal
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200311/2dc63f04/attachment.htm>