Why do people believe Covid was made in a lab?

[Disabrie22]

I saw this on another thread about someone having a cold - where does this theory come from? I only know one person who believes this, who interestingly is in medicine. I have no strong opinion, just trying to live through this like most people. But I’m interested in why people might believe this.

@Snoozer11

It's also worth noting that "escaped from lab" does not necessarily mean "artificially manufactured".

True. But having had the virus that's the way I'd describe how it felt. Artificial.

It’s just highly coincidental that a lab that stores coronaviruses is based in Wuhan and we are told instead it was infected meat. Where did the infection cone from in the meat? It’s highly suspicious.

Hearsay warning I remember seeing an angry letter written into a big scientific journal. It may have been the New Scientist. It was in response to an article written by someone who had genetically modified a flu virus and had created something quite dangerous. The letter writer said that the researcher hadn't appreciated how dangerous and pointless this research was, considering the risks of an accidental escape and possible global pandemic. The lab where this was done? Wuhan.

Did anyone else see this or did I imagine it?

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I believe it was a lab leak.

Weird that you're interested in this but haven't read a single article about it. There are lots of reputable articles discussing where the 'theory' came from and fact checking it. In the time it took to start a thread, you could have found and read one.

It probably wasn't created in a lab, however there are scientific papers (now removed by the Chinese Govn) of Wuhan lab people going to caves in other places in China and bringing back samples after a number of people in those area caught something from the bats there.

So we have a Wuhan lab holding something v much like Covid-19 and then a breakout of Covid-19 from a wet market pretty much next door to the Wuhan lab.

So odds are not Wuhan lab created but instead samples held there that got into the wild.

The kind of research being done at the lab was gain of function research. Where you modify a virus genetically to make it more virulent or more transmissible or whatever in order to better understand the virus type / be able to develop antivirals, vaccines etc. Gain of function coronavirus research is the particular specialism of the Wuhan lab. I’m guessing we will never know 100%, but It seems to me incredibly likely that this was an escape.

@EishetChayil

Maybe the age-old stereotype about evil Chinese scientists taking over the world.

Eh? I've literally never heard this "age old" stereotype.

Anyway many of the scientists working at the Wuhan Virology lab - one of the few level 4 labs in China - were American

This long form heavily researched article is extremely persuasive as to the lab leak theory https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/06/is-china-to-blame-for-a-hypothetical-lab-leak.html

The only reason it was dismissed initially is because Trump (having been briefed on it) talked about it publicly and because the US lost its mind during Trump anything he said was automatically wrong. He could have said it was raining during a thunderstorm and the entire US press would have said it's sunny.

Once he left the media were willing to talk about the theory but by then many people had been left with the (incorrect) impression it was a conspiracy theory.

The short version of the (extremely long and excellent) article above is that in order to continue to get funding scientists needed to show that flu/SARS type illnesses posed a real threat to humanity. In order to show they posed a real threat to humanity they had to take animal (zoological) viruses that normally wouldn't crossover into humans and train them to respond to human tissue. They would then go to the funding bodies and say "see! It crossed over! It's a terrible threat! We need funding to study it".

One of those viruses effectively accidentally walked out of the lab on the bottom of someone's shoe due to inadequate safety and security measures and took hold in Wuhan, China and then the world.

It's really not a particularly far-fetched theory at all.

I've never heard of an evil Chinese scientist stereotype either.

Russian, perhaps. Cold War and all that. But not Chinese.

Fu Manchu?

The fact WHO are investigating this and Chinese government have not been that cooperative in giving info shows it’s a possibility not a far fetched scenario. I agree with the point that because Trump was so awful and racist and was also the first to raise this possibility publicly it was dismissed by media more that it should have been. I suspect any leak has been hidden beyond trace by now so would be difficult to prove.

There are not 1000's of these labs, there are 59 in the world that handle the most deadly material and Wuhan is the largest of these.

There are about 10.000 cities.

So, it's not just about being in an urban area, this is a very specific lab handling a very specific virus.

And added to this if you read this very interesting article posted just before it brings it down to three labs…

Dr. Richard Ebright, board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, said that from the very first reports of a novel bat-related coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, it took him “a nanosecond or a picosecond” to consider a link to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Only two other labs in the world, in Galveston, Texas, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were doing similar research. “It’s not a dozen cities,” he said. “It’s three places.”

www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins

I think it’s to do with the genetic code of the virus which had parts of it making it directly transmissible to humans when that only occurs naturally after it’s been in nature for a while and has mutated. Basically it was suspiciously perfectly adapted to be transmitted to humans from day one. Plus the Wuhan link.

There was a news article the other day about a sample of the smallpox virus being found in a random lab when there are only supposed to be two samples in the entire world. Now that is scary……

We want it to be true because we want to continue in the belief that we can control nature. And that infectious diseases are no longer a scourge.

The idea that nature can just throw something like this at us reminds us how vulnerable all life is. We want someone to blame instead of facing that.

SARS emerged in 2003, MERS in 2012, SARS-2 in 2019. There will be others over time.

@ShinyHappyPoster

Weird that you're interested in this but haven't read a single article about it. There are lots of reputable articles discussing where the 'theory' came from and fact checking it. In the time it took to start a thread, you could have found and read one.

Did you read the Vanity Fair article posted, it’s a very interesting (if long) read.

True. But having had the virus that's the way I'd describe how it felt. Artificial.

I agree, the only thing I can compare it feeling like is the come down off a man made/synthetic drug.

I appreciate not everyone will have that comparison to make, but my misspent youth means I do!

I'm keeping an open mind, but the people who have said on this thread that there's something "weird" and "chemical" about the virus are talking nonsense. I'm sorry, but they are and it doesn't add credibility to the debate.

If it is a man made virus it will be exactly like a natural virus. It is not made up of chemicals. It's not like each person getting cv is being injected or targeted individually. Once the virus is in the community it acts like any other virus. You would never know that it was man made or not. Of course some viruses produce different symptoms. Also many diseases produce a strange taste in the mouth. It's not chemicals from a man made virus that you're tasting because their aren't any.

I'm not trying to be mean, but this type of thing is where valid debate steps over into conspiracy and helps no one.

My area of study/qualification means I have a good grounding in this area. I think the lab release is definitely plausible. An accidental release is certainly a very reasonable assumption (a deliberate one less so, at least at the governmental level).

That the covid19 virus spent time in the Wuhan Institute of Virology is certainly most believable when you consider they were world experts in precisely this kind of bat coronavirus, have taken naturally occurring but structurally similar viruses into the lab, and we know they were doing gain of function research. China in general has a bit of a shaky history when it comes to research ethics - at the very least they are out of kilter with the rest of the world on some of their ethical boundaries for research (gene editing in human embryos as an example).

That someone could accidentally infect themselves or a colleague is really believable, having spent several years working in labs. Even the most careful scientists become complacent/sloppy at times. It’s also plausible that someone deliberately infected a colleague/close contact. Sounds Agatha Christie but it does happen. Only a decade ago was there a case at a U.K. university where a PhD student almost died after being given an incredibly high dose of the controlled chemical thallium. To my knowledge that was never solved but it’s almost certainly a deliberate act. Couldn’t be accidental.

People are saying that covid felt ‘chemical’ - I’m not sure we can distinguish in that way. But I did have what is now assumed to have been covid in 2020, and it felt like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. I remember saying to my mum (after weeks of illness and losing my smell and taste), that it felt like a ‘big’ virus (like glandular fever) but I’ve never felt my body respond to a virus in this way and it was going to take weeks to get better (it did).

@scaevola

We want it to be true because we want to continue in the belief that we can control nature. And that infectious diseases are no longer a scourge.

The idea that nature can just throw something like this at us reminds us how vulnerable all life is. We want someone to blame instead of facing that.

SARS emerged in 2003, MERS in 2012, SARS-2 in 2019. There will be others over time.

I agree with this.

I am more inclined towards this being natural and that is scarier than a mistake by humans.

@knittingaddict I do honestly appreciate what you’re saying, but it’s a personal fact that that is the only thing I can compare the feeling to, it’s just stating my own opinion, not ‘my nans next door neighbours cat said they felt like this’

I’m 43 years old and no other virus or bug has ever given me that feeling, it’s valid because it’s true, if you don’t want to believe me that’s fine but it doesn’t invalidate it being true for me.

It’s a bit of a coincidence if a random bat coronavirus appeared right next to a lab that studies bat coronaviruses.

The fact is that one single bat can contain 1 to the power of 25 (that's a 1 with 25 noughts after it)

1 to the power of 25 is still one... 10 to the 25 is a big number (sorry) but many more times that the bat would have cells in its body so this seems unlikely... source?

I think it could well have come from the lab, with a frantic cover-up afterwards.

My mum had a virus many years ago and lost her sense of smell and taste for a long time. Decades later it's not returned totally. It's a perfectly normal, if not common after effect of some viruses.

Of course it came from the lab, the number if lies told at the start proves it as far as I'm concerned. It was also here in the UK late 2019 long before it's existence was known about.