[ExI] it's not? indeed?

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> 
Sent: Saturday, 20 January, 2024 3:02 PM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Cc: spike at rainier66.com
Subject: Re: [ExI] it's not? indeed?

>...I find the lab leak theory to be exceedingly unlikely.  The wet market origin of the spillover is much more likely to me.




Ja.  For a long time I have suspected the wet market was the conduit, the second step.  It is completely compatible with the serial passage experiment notion, where the Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers were looking to breed a less lethal corona virus by serial passage, which meant discarding and destroying the dead bats after each generation in the series.  It is far too easy to imagine a lab worker bagging the dead bats and selling them at the nearby wet market, which is an ideal place to grow up if one is a human-hosted virus: lots of people in close proximity, lots of meat everywhere, etc.

That notion partially exonerates Dr. Fauci (kinda (depending on how you look at it.))  He testified (before severe amnesia set in) that they were not doing gain-of-function research.  In later a more recent congressional hearing, he testified that he did not personally review the details of the experiments he funded.  This almost contradicts the previous testimony that they positively were not doing gain of function research.  He doesn't recall any of it now of course.  They never do, when it starts looking like they are caught.

If the researchers were doing serial passage experiments without proper documentation at the lab, that would also justify the initial testimony: they were doing it, Fauci didn't know.  OK, maybe.  

In any case, initial denial allowed the Chinese to destroy evidence and send researchers looking for proximal origins, which turned into a long, expensive and fruitless search.  Meanwhile, the Chinese were squelching the testimony of those who damn well did know what went on in the Wuhan laboratory.  Knowing that information right up front might have helped slow the spread of the virus.

A worrisome consequence of the way this all unfolded is that the Chinese might still be fooling with planet-killer viruses, perhaps even justifying themselves by pointing out that this kind of research is illegal everywhere else.  Eh... ja.  It is illegal everywhere else.  For a reason.


>...But it does not matter.

>...Keith

Keith, with that I respectfully disagree sir.  It matters. It matters a lot.

spike