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This thread is a wonderful case-study on the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Information here.

What if they started from the other end? I.e, What if they knew that ACE2 was vulnerable to viruses, and they tried manipulating various viruses to make them bind there?

It seems like it could possibly be a logical extension of this paper from 2011. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3094985/

They certainly already knew that ACE2 was an important target for viruses. It is the same region that Sars-Cov-1 targets, and at least one of the "common cold" viruses.

The difficulty is in constructing a virus package (from scratch) that binds to ACE2. You could just take the known answer from Sars-Cov-1 and perturb it a little bit (that is what a person would do) -- but Covid-19 looks very different than Sars-Cov-1

Numerous inventions were at one point "unlike anything science has ever seen developed by man." Many inventions are based upon mimicking nature.

Just because something hasn't been seen before doesn't make it impossible. Thomas Edison may have never seen a light bulb before he invented his.

It's the false certainty that drives me bonkers. People get so blindered by their paradigms. "I can't imagine it, so it's impossible" is illogical. Other people will know and figure out things that you're not aware of, this is true for every single person. No one knows everything.

My thinking on this whole topic is, I'm not sure either way, but if it is man made, we better for sure figure it out. If this is just a trial run or accidental release, the next manufactured virus could be something truly horrific. If it is naturally occurring, there's no human cost for doing additional research. If someone is making biological weapons and we ignore it, the human cost could be catastrophic.

It's not false certainty -- it's responding to and acting on the best available evidence that exists.

Maybe the reason that there are so many fires in the west coast is because Russia is seeding thunderstorm formation off the US coast and increasing the number of lightning strikes.

It's not impossible that somebody could make a system that triggers lightning strikes (such things have been tooled around with). There is no evidence for it -- and we know that nature makes lots of lightning. But it's certainly not impossible.

I don't think we should act on this -- or even follow it up that seriously.

But you wouldn't necessarily have to start from scratch. You'd just have to find a virus compatible with the ACE2 exploiting bit/susceptible to a similar perturbation, probably by trial and error with viruses that are readily available. While the overall virus looks different how much variation is there in the loci with the "delivery information"? I'll admit my knowledge on the relative complexity/simplicity of viruses is limited.

It's being presented as certainty in many places. It's not certain, thus there is false certainty.

People aren't saying we're sure it's a lightning machine or we're sure it's not a lightning machine. (At least not in those words, and the whole gender reveal party gone wrong explanation is there) If someone with a physics degree defected from Russia and said that was what was happening and we didn't have an ironclad alternate explanation, I'm guessing it'd be worth a look. Though with the power that would be involved, I'm guessing that'd be pretty simple to debunk.

Using another false equivalency isn't going to convince me.

You do realize that almost "nothing is impossible", right? Yet at what juncture do people try and hang on to that, while at the same time ignoring the huge amount of improbability involved? At what point do you ignore the overwhelming evidence by hanging on to the thread?

I try and ask myself the motivation behind things. You brought up inventions that had the motivation to make life better, to give someone financial gain. Those are understandable motives. I don't think that is a rational comparison based on motivation.

And I actually do not disagree with you that IF this were some new form of biological weapon we should certainly be looking into it. Although there is zero cause to believe this is so. As it pertains to some science experiment gone wrong, do you really think we can control how the entire globe conducts science? The processes and the safety standards of their experimentation? Do you think China will just let us in to supervise them?

Still yet, with all that said, there has been no indication based on science that this was man made. None. Based on that, it seems like quite the rabbit hole to be climbing down.

There is a lot of variation in the binding domain compared to the rest of the genome, which is why they are sure it is either from recombinant events in nature or the lab. You can take a virus from one species and adapt it to another species by exposing it to the ACE2 of that species. We know that WIV has found coronavirus strains that they have not made public, so they could easily use one of these viruses as a starting point. Not saying they did, just saying they could.

I don't prescribe to the weapon theory, but I think bringing light to the dangers of gain-of-function research and its dangers would lead to improved safety protocols and restrictions on research methods that would be in the public's best interest. Nobody would want this research to be done in their own backyard if they understood what was going on.

I don't know what you mean by overwhelming evidence. The evidence for a natural origin is not physical or verifiable. I am sure a lot of people are not aware of this, but the nucleotide sequence evidence is just strings of letters uploaded into a database by the Chinese. It can be modified with a text editor. These new sequences, that nobody else has been able to validate, were uploaded during the pandemic, right when it would have been in China's best interest to make a case for a natural origin. Actual physical evidence is not being made available outside of China.

I am not aware of any other evidence supporting a natural origin.

So you somehow honestly believe that we can control the globe in how they conduct research? You see, whether it's "next door" as you described, or in China, it gets here. To me what you're suggesting is that if we can stop Canada from developing nuclear weapons, we will be safe from a nuclear attack.

That's just not how any of this works. Just because someone in our backyard isn't conducting such testing does not make us safer.

As with anything else, we can't control the world. As such, the best way to combat such things is through a strong defense of it. And we can't even get people to wear a damned mask!

I understand what you're saying. And I'm not expert enough to debate the science with you on a personal level. What I do know is that this isn't a back yard issue. We can't solve this with things that are out of our control. What we can do is try to get people to try and combat these things in an efficient manner. To mitigate the damage. To unite to defend against it in the event it does happen. And it will happen again.

This feels kind of relevant to your post, look past the title of this and look around:
United Nations Biological Weapons Convention Link

Basically, this "Treaty," which the "State Parties" (which I'm assuming China is amongst as a member nation of the UN) agreed to, called for the dismantling of any biological weapons. To go along with that, countries "were to implement a number of confidence-building measures (CBM) in order to prevent or reduce the occurrence of ambiguities, doubts and suspicions and in order to improve international co-operation in the field of peaceful biological activities."

In a nutshell, China (and the other signatories) is supposed to regularly provide information on all their biological labs/research and any information "on outbreaks of infectious diseases." They're also supposed to allow UN verification measures.

It's the lack of information (UN verification?) that feels off to me. It feels like China is trying to hide something.

If that's the route you wish to take, there are many nations that break U.N. agreements on all sorts of issues. Russia has broken arms treaties. China has broken the U.N. agreement in regards to war games in the South China Sea. The Israeli settlements in Gaza. I could go on and one with examples.

Let me ask you this. What did China know about a virus when it first broke out? Did they consider it an outbreak in its earliest stages? According to the reports, we knew it was highly contagious, far more dangerous than the flu, that it was airborne and spread by touch as early as late January. Where do you think that information came from?

Even trump praised them over the handling of the virus.... until he didn't.

So I guess my point is you really have no more evidence to support that they didn't inform the world than there is evidence that they did. To what extent is the only real issue that's debatable.

(This is more in response to Pit's previous post: )

Unfortunately, if you don't want to spend the rest of your life in a Hazmat suit, the best defense against biological weapons is making sure they don't get made.

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Providing information is only one part of the UN deal. It's the appearance that China's restricting access that raises suspicion.

Letting people get away with breaking rules without repercussions encourages others to join them.

Again I'm not saying with certainty that China has broken the rules, just that there is the appearance that they could have.

https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-wuhan-lab-complicated-origins.html

I'm kind of feeling out the last possibility mentioned in there. Human error feels plausible in light of the prior concerns found at the lab. China trying to save face would potentially fit with that scenario as well. Still a little worrisome, but not nearly as much as intentional manufacture.

Well, you do have me there. Countries develop new ways of killing each other on the regular and there is not much we can do about it in the grand scheme of things.

Thanks for the debate Pit, Lyoukdea, Bull

I'm definitely going to be annoyed if we find out the "whistleblower" is actually the person that got infected and broke containment. Her running to avoid the consequences could also make some sense. Making a whistleblower disappear would raise a lot of questions, so I could see playing that angle after a screw up.

A little conspiracy theory-ish, but it might work.

The reality is we can not do that. All the bluster in the world won't change that.

We definitely can't if we don't make the attempt.

Yet that's exactly what we've been doing. You pointed that out with the U.N. agreement. Unless you somehow feel nations like China, Russia and Pakistan are simply going to open up all of their biological facilities to surprise inspections, there's no way to monitor it. There's no way to control it.

And even if there comes a point in time in the future when that does happen, other than being prepared and working together as a people to stop the spread, what other avenue do you suggest we travel?

As of this moment, trying to deflect away from the fact we can't even get our own people to wear masks and socially distance, how people are actually suing because they feel it's "their freedom" to risk infecting other Americans, we are putting the cart in front of the horse.

I'm all for striving to make it possible for all nations to be open about biological experimentation. But that isn't going to solve where we are now and will be for some time to come in regards to viruses.

We actually have the evidence of what we can do to mitigate things on the one hand. On the other we have some theory with nothing of substance with which to back it up other than suspicion.