First: Please stop treating attacks not directed toward you personally as ad hominems, and reasoned discussion as unhinged.
And now, to the substance of your point #1 immediately above: There is a good reason that nation-states are very much not into bioweapons: In the modern world they wouldn’t work (with one meaningful exception I will get to, plus one scenario that is vanishingly unlikely in the world as it exists at present).
The nature of a bioweapon is that it isn’t, under normal circumstances, targetable. Once it is unleashed, it will either be pointless (because it isn’t easily transmissible) or it will bounce back and also hit the actor who used it (because it is easily transmissible). The one exception—the vanishingly unlikely one—would be a bioweapon for which the population of the actor using it has natural immunity but the targeted population does not (which is why smallpox worked as a bioweapon against Native American populations). This is, however, nearly impossible in our present-day world, because widespread global travel means that, leaving aside diseases with very high mortality that tend to burn themselves out quickly such as ebola, populations worldwide have generally been exposed to all of the same diseases. You could get around this, I suppose, by inoculating your population against a weaponized disease, but intelligence networks exist to catch that sort of thing early—it would be difficult to the point of impossible to hide that sort of activity.
The one meaningful use of a bioweapon by a modern nation-state is if you’ve already lost—sort of an “If I can’t win, nobody can” action. But that’s not at issue here, and coronaviruses would almost certainly be a bad choice for that sort of action anyway.
So can we please lay to rest the idea that what became SARS-CoV-2 was being developed as a bioweapon? It isn’t worth spending any more time on anything that even vaguely references that possibility.
@marlowe1 If you want to keep professing an unbiased ‘neutral’ position, accusing all those sharing scientifically reasoned data/background history as being unhinged and unreasonable is going about it the wrong way.
If you cannot address the information and data being shared, perhaps look at that as a sign you don’t understand the data - not that the data is wrong.
I’m very open to but not convinced it was a lab leak. Even so it seems unlikely anyone thought this could be a weapon since it is so uncontrollable. It’s quite possible that this was “gain of function “ research that was mishandled
No, your first point should be to treat others with respect. You seem incapable of doing so, which is another trait that is typical of conspiracy theorists.
That is not how biological warfare works. The point of biological warfare is to cripple the enemy’s military, NOT to attack people who are precious to them, while leaving them healthy and battle capable. You’re trying to kill or incapacitate them, not make them REALLY REALLY angry.
The biggest problem with biological warfare is that it doesn’t discriminate. Therefore, you only start weaponizing a pathogen for which you have a vaccine. There is a vaccine for smallpox, measles, and other deadly viruses, and those vaccines can be tweaked, if you know how the pathogen was tweaked. There were no vaccines against any coronavirus until the pandemic.
Are you are assuming that the Chinese are stupid and were weaponizing a virus which would kill them as well?
So, first you are claiming that China was developing biological weapons at Wuhan:
But now, when I challenged that assumption because of the placement of the lab, you flip-flop:
Every single weapon is intended to produce effects beyond the place where it was developed and manufactured. That is what being a “weapon” means. So you are essentially denying that anybody was developing a weapon in the Wuhan labs.
Decide which one you are claiming
No, movies imitate life. Conspiracy theories imitate movies.
You are disappointing me, @MWolf . How is it that you can’t see the difference between developing a weapon in the form of a virus within the lab and using the virus as a weapon outside the lab?
I suppose I must apologize to all concerned. I like colorful speech. That seems to be some sort of crime.
I’ll let @MWolf answer for themself, but please reread what I wrote—I did not call @marlowe1 unhinged, I called @marlowe1’s treatment of discussion points unhinged.
And that is a crucial distinction—the first would have been ad hominem, but the second is ad rem.
The lab hypothesis is possible, but not because anyone was trying to weaponize a virus. There’s no political agenda on my part. I’m all about Team Common Sense. WHY would any country design a weapon that will kills its own people? The virus is indiscriminate. And if everyone is dead, then there is no one left for the evil despots to control.
No part of me believes anyone was engineering a deadly virus as a weapon to kill people. How would they do this without causing total global mayhem and death? That is the plot of a James Bond villain, singular. But even Blofeld doesn’t work alone.
If indeed the lab theory is correct, which it could be, I am wondering when patient Zero him/herself will speak out about their lab experiment gone wrong. Maybe they have a relative who worked at the wet market, spreading it from there. I’m actually a bit surprised we haven’t yet heard of a Wuhan lab employee coming forward to anonymously claim their ignominy.
A lab leak is not impossible, but the spread of the virus doesn’t seem to point to that. The very first cluster was in people with links to the wet market.
The lab creation of the virus, as part of research into the natural processes of viruses recombining using pieces from other virus, is less likely that that, but not impossible. However, remember that there is a natural lab going on there, with hundreds of thousands of animals with hundreds of thousands of different virus types. In each animal there are millions of infected cells, and a large proportion of them are infected by two or even more virus types. So the type of stuff that they were trying to do in the lab, with partial success, is being done on an immense scale, in a natural lab which has already proven successful at this sort of recombining of viruses.
Remember how viruses replicate, and that a single host cell can be infected by more than one type of virus, all using the same system to create copies of themselves.
I said that if you want to develop a top secret weapon, you build a top secret lab, with top level security protocols, and I gave the Manhattan project as an example. Are you now claiming that the Chinese were developing a top secret weapon in a location with very weak security protocols, because they had not yet used their weapon?
I am puzzled now, so please clarify why you think that the Chinese chose a lab with such weak security protocols to develop their top secret biological weapons?
Could you also clarify why you think that the fact that the Chinese had not deployed this top secret weapon has anything to do with the security measures that they decided on to develop the weapon.
I mean, you don’t need secrecy after you’ve used the weapon, you need it when you are developing the weapon.
The comment that you say makes zero sense had nothing to do with what you go on to assert - that the Wuhan lab was not the logical place to conduct such a project. That may or may not be the case, but my comment was addressing your assertion that I was contradicting myself in saying that the work in question could be done inside a lab, on the one hand, and, on the other, could have had a big effect in the world. It was your failure to grasp that distinction that disappointed me.
To me the fact that there have been no information leaks or whistleblowers - even of the smallest variety - suggests the lab was not responsible. I have no doubt that an inadvertent release is/was possible - look at the last couple of smallpox cases (lab-acquired) - but I don’t think it was that in this case since absolutely no one has come forward who worked there, even secretly. Even if it was a lab leak, for all the reasons suggested above, it was almost certainly due to sloppy handling of normal research - not bioweapons research (whether leaked due to sloppy handling or on purpose). I agree the zoonotic spillover origin is most likely but I would not be entirely shocked to find out it was an inadvertent leak due to sloppy protocols.
The fact is, a lab leak hasn’t been ruled out. Many here, even those that don’t believe it was a lab leak, have said a lab leak is not outside of the realm of possibilities. I’m not sure why it seems to be such a hot button issue with some. Perhaps one day we’ll actually know the origin.
