[ExI] it's not? indeed?

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Jan 21, 2024 at 10:06 AM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
>
> -----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,

That makes no sense whatsoever.  What possible motivation would they
have to breed a less lethal virus?  If they were engaged in biowar
work, a more lethal virus would make sense.  Now late in the pandemic,
when vaccines had failed to stop the virus, breeding a less lethal
version might make sense, but to the best of my knowledge, the less
lethal versions emerged by straightforward evolution.

> 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.

If a lab was working on coronaviruses, they are going to be doing it
in culture, not bats. Also, China has considerable experience with the
previous coronavirus.  After that epidemic came to a halt, there was
one more infection from a lab sample.  They are not going to be
hauling infected bats to a market.

> 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.

Gain of function is biowar.  Does it make any sense that the US would
be funding biowar in China?

> 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.

Not a chance.  Once the virus started spreading, it was out of
control. China kept it at low levels by draconian measures for a long
time, but in the rest of the world, it went wild.  Eventually, there
were so many imports that a more infectious version overwhelmed the
attempts to keep it down.

> 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.

That's just nuts.  On this topic the Chinese are rational, and it is
not rational to kill off your own population.  There is no way a
planet killer virus could be kept out of China.
>
> >...But it does not matter.
>
> >...Keith
>
> Keith, with that I respectfully disagree sir.  It matters. It matters a lot.

Why?  It only matters if you assume the Chinese are utterly
irrational.  Do you have any problem with the first SARs being a
spillover without human intervention of any kind?  If you do, why a
problem with Covid-19 being the same?  How about MERS?  We know the
path from bats to camels to humans for that one and there is no claim
for human intervention.

Reality is bad enough without crazy contortions.

Keith

> spike
>