Chap wrote: ↑Mon Mar 08, 2021 6:06 pm
ajax18 wrote: ↑Mon Mar 08, 2021 4:19 pm
We know the Chinese virus came from a lab in Wuhan.
Really? How do we know that?
I know that this was directed at Ajax, but I'm going to go ahead and comment on it, if that's ok (if it's not ok, too late, neener-neener).
Outside of the former-President’s baseless conspiratorial assertions, and his loyalists repeating it as a gospel tenet, there’s little (if any) evidence that it originated in a laboratory.
As of this post, the source is unknown. There are some likely suspects though.
So far, the leading theory is bats. This is based on two things. The first is from a coronavirus that the Wuhan Institute of Virology discovered in 2013, infecting horseshoe bats in the region. When SARS-CoV-2 (i.e. COVID) was sequenced, the Institute released the sequence of the virus they had found in the bats (RATG13), and to date it’s the closest likely relative of COVID. The genetic variation between the two suggests that the nearest common coronavirus relative the two have is about 50 years ago, so while it is the most genetically similar, there’s still plenty of room for bats to not be the intermediary between animals and humans.
The second basis for bats as the culprit is that in lab research, fruit bats have found to have susceptibility to COVID. The wind is taken out of the sales somewhat though, because it’s been shown to infect everything from tigers to hamsters outside of lab settings -- this suggest that humans are now the intermediary (
*plot twist*).