Thread by @Coyoteblog

I never have believed this was an intentional release. If it's from a lab, I've always assumed an accident (eg first scene from the Last Stand). What I never understood until I read this article was why someone might have engineered this virus to start

nymag.com/intelligencer/…

I always associate bio-engineering of viruses with weapons research, and COVID-19 with its really low mortality under the age of 70 would be a pretty piss-poor weapon. But what I was unfamiliar with was the research to tweak existing diseases to make them more virulent.

Why? The nice answer is that by creating tougher viruses in the lab, we are (supposedly?) learning things that are useful in treating tougher viruses when and if they come along in the wild.

The more cynical answer is that corona viruses are historically not very scary, and so creating scarier ones in the lab supports the desire by labs that research corona viruses for more attention and funding

I usually tend towards the incentives-based, more cynical solution. But it would be interesting to know whether any of our response to COVID-19 was helped by this sort of work on more deadly lab-created versions. That would certainly help back the nicer answer.

Whatever the incentive or end goal, one of the very few labs at the forefront of "rewiring" or juicing corona viruses to be scarier is in Wuhan, within blocks of the first outbreaks.

I think the Chinese response is an interesting "tell." Given that Wuhan was one of the leading labs in the world for researching scarier versions of Corona viruses exactly like this one, one would think a good totalitarian regime would revel in being a savior to the world...

... by throwing its doors open and sharing its knowledge with the decadent first world. It would be a boost for Chinese prestige exactly of the sort the CCP loves, even better than their moon mission. But they did not do this, they did the opposite

They locked down the research center, have generally refused access by outside inspectors, they took their research and data offline. Perhaps this is just a Nixonian response (who ordered the coverup? Nobody suggested that there shouldn't be one.), but it is suspicious

To be clear, I am not considering this hypothesis as a way to ridicule the Chinese people. They have been victims as much as we. I don't even judge them too harshly if they did spill the virus -- the article is pretty clear that western researchers live in a glass house on this