(August 31, 2021 at 1:07 am)HappySkeptic Wrote:(August 31, 2021 at 12:51 am)Irreligious Atheist Wrote: when you start putting all of these things together, it starts looking like there's a very good chance it could have very well come from the lab.
There are suspicious things, yes.
However, the lab-leak theory does have elements of conspiracy thinking, in that the circumstantial evidence is cherry-picked and put together into a nice story, without trying to find benign explanations for elements of the story. When there isn't transparency, people make up their own stories.
A natural setting has many more chances of a species jump for such a virus, and there isn't any real evidence that WIV was doing gain-of-function research. Virologists point out it may take years to find the natural origin, and it might NOT be near Wuhan.
Yeah, I've been arguing both sides today, but that's because everyone just seems to have made up their mind and are going on emotion. I'm still going with 10:1 odds of natural origin, but that's just going with the weight of how sure the scientists seem to be (and they don't have a lot to go on).
I can respect that. Maybe everything I pointed out is just a coincidence. I'm open to that, which is why I remain agnostic on this. Many scientists are raising the alarm bells though, and they think SARS-CoV-2 appears to be altered by man when they look at the makeup of it. Who knows if they are right. I'm personally not bright enough to comprehend all of the specifics of what they are arguing. Time will tell.
The origin might not be Wuhan, true, but this is the best information we have at the moment.
The former head of the CDC, who was the head of the CDC when the outbreak happened, said he leans strongly toward a lab leak. This is a virologist in an extremely high position who likely has had access to a lot more behind the scenes information than the public has been given, as he was in charge during the outbreak. It's a big freakin deal for someone like him to come out and say pretty much that he thinks it came from the lab. Imagine the head of the CIA or FBI coming out and saying 9/11 was an inside job or some shit like that. People would take note like I do when the head of the CDC pretty much says it was a lab leak.
When even Fauci has back-tracked from his former position and has now said that he's no longer confident the virus didn't come from a lab, something looks to be up. MSM is taking the lab leak hypothesis a lot more seriously with Trump out of office. CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta is endorsing the lab leak hypothesis as a credible hypothesis. The tide is turning. Things are starting to go the other way. Why is that? Why is the establishment taking the lab leak idea more seriously now than ever?
Maybe it came from nature. Who knows? There were a heck of a lot of people in power and a heck of a lot of scientists who gave political answers from the start though, who basically went along with calling it a conspiracy theory because they didn't want to be accused of being called xenophobic, or because they were compromised or whatnot, or afraid of public backlash toward the scientific community for possibly allowing something like this to happen.
