You’ve gotta spoon feed it to us laypeople with simple explanations, doc!
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Just means the guy at Wuhan had two test tubes in his hand when he slipped on a banana peel (stealing this joke from IBCK).
If it is as clear as this why are the DoE and FBI saying otherwise?
That’s the million dollar question. There’s been nothing about how they arrived at this process, what evidence they used, and etc.
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Also why they are looking at this in the first place. What the dick does this have to do with these institutions? Are we going to hear input on the origins of COVID from Housing and Urban Development or the National Endowment for the Arts next?
It seems reasonable to me that the FBI would want to stay on top of international bioweapons research and capabilities. Iirc their focus shifted much more to international after 9/11. Here’s the Wray quote:
“The origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan. Let me step back for a second. The FBI has folks — agents, professionals, analysts, virologists, microbiologists, etc. — who focus specifically on the dangers of biological threats, which include things like novel viruses like Covid. And the concerns that they’re in the wrong hands — some bad guys, a hostile nation-state a terrorist or criminal — the threats that those could pose. So here you’re talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab that killed millions of Americans and that’s precisely what that capability was designed for. I should add that our work related to this continues. And there are not a whole lot of details I can share that aren’t classified. I will just make the observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work that we’re doing.”
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Okay, I can buy that makes some sense.
what do people make of the progenitors argument? like, is the conspiracy claim now that the lab was not fully transparent with which strains it was working? and the weapons grade stuff was in a different freezer at the same facility?
Anything is possible, but a potential explanation isn’t evidence. Wake me up when they have some.
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The behavior of the Chinese government was definitely something that made me very suspicious early on. They did obfuscate, and they did appear to know something everyone else didn’t know - they reacted much more strictly.
Lab leak doesn’t have to mean it was a weaponized strain or even a modified strain. As far as I’m concerned, if we head out into the section of the range of possibilities that’s all lab leak, and lock in on it, the vast majority is some natural strain they were studying leaking out.
Genetic analysis shows two lineages very early on, making this a lot less likely
What does the two lineages thing mean, exactly? Like, there were initially two genetically different versions of COVID jumping around Wuhan? That sounds like an extremely large coincidence (multiple versions of the same virus just happened to jump from animals to humans at the exact same time?) which makes me think I probably have the wrong impression of what it means.
Two genetically similar but distinguishable versions of the virus showed up at slightly different times at the same market. This is pretty easily explained by mutations in a virus circulating in animals in the wild when those animals are being repeatedly brought to the same market, but it’s not well-explained by a single lab accident.
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So there likely were two separate instances, around the initial infections, of it jumping from animals to humans in Wuhan?
The way I understand it, and one of our science minds can give this the 
or 
is it’s kind of like the animals had a shit ton of slightly different version of OG Wuhan Covid going around. Like we’d consider them all the same variant, but maybe if you sequenced them you might get like ABCDEFG and ABCDEFH and ABCDEFI ABCDEFR ABCDEFZ or something, to put it in layman’s terms I can comprehend. And two of those jumped at approximately the same time.
Almost like if 10 of us went to a really stupid gender reveal party and a shit load of blue powder blew up in our faces. Then we went to a bar afterwards, bumped into some people, and they got blue powder on their shirts. It might be slightly different shades of blue, but it’s still blue powder from the same gender reveal party.
Probably it was kicking around on some small farm outside Wuhan long enough to split into two lineages and then animals with both were brought to the market.
With the lab leak theory it’s hard to figure how two different strains accidentally got out at the same time.
There was likely lots of instances of the virus jumping from animals to human. In that market, the virus was likely infecting humans and animals back and forth multiple times. You can think of it as two slightly different variants of the same virus competing in the market to infect people.
and one could not have been a descendant of the other, is that correct?
yeah, i buy this argument, and those two would have had a common ancestor before it was able to spread via humans. i was referring to the claim that the lab didn’t have any strains that could have been ancestors of the two market lineages. i’m assuming that’s been established or claimed but ignored by the conspiracy nuts.
It’s not definitive, but the whole idea of the lab leak is that China was doing super secret gain of function research and it released this super bug into the world. If that happened, you wouldn’t expect it to bounce around the market awhile to create two lineages and then explode, you’d expect it to just happen.
This entire series of statements by the government just reek of propaganda to me. They’re literally seeding anti chinese conspiracy theories, that’s what this is.
Buckle up guys the next decade is going to be US vs China the whole way. We woke up and realized they actually had a semi sane plan to take our position as the worlds dominant power, and had a quasi realistic road to get there if we didn’t change course. Unfortunately for them we absolutely have.
This is cold war stuff not hot war stuff thankfully.
Shit’s going to be weird worldwide though as the populations of the developed countries age. China is facing a demographic bomb of historic proportions. So are we. So is most of the planet just in different phases of the same process.