Read this carefully
https://www.the-scientist.com/newys-opinion/lab-made-coronavirus-triggers-debate-34502
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it??
But China would never try this, right???
cc: Mariner
Yeah, I know of this Ebright character. Doesn’t want to build any high level labs anywhere. Too risky he says. Even tho’ the risk of a natural pathogen, which we sure as heck can’t stop if we don’t learn more (a lot more), that will eventually come along and knock out half, 2/3, who knows, of the human race, is 100%.
Great. As the late John W. Campbell (occasionally a bit of an eye raiser, but more often spot on) put it (paraprasal), I would say to Ebright: “Fine. You can’t take the hazards of life. Might as well jump in a rocket and head for the Sun.”
Is there a finite chance that some Chinese scientist or a team of scientists secretly engineered 2019-nCoV, and then it got out? Yes. It’s just that if one understands the “soup” (hat tip to Mariner for the term) that exists in China amongst the general population, to brew zoonotic viruses, the odds of 2019-nCoV developing in the latter, rather than emanating from the former, must be in the hundreds if not thousands to one.
Personally, my guess is that those biologists (who I’ve read include a number of foreign collaborators) at that lab actually gave the Chinese gov’t a relatively early heads up as experts right on top of the developing situation. The gov’t, as most gov’ts usually do, was slow to respond, but the outbreak followed the predictions, or worse, and now the gov’t is rightfully spooked and scrambling - likely too late - to catch up.
This link is informative. Note how quickly the virus RNA was sequenced and made public.