CIT wrote:Out of all the bajillion unlikely things you could've speculated about, you chose to make it about the virus being man-made in China. That raises the question, why?
I don't know, maybe because this is a thread on the subject, absolutely every facet of life has been affected by this, and the other origin stories of how this virus came about seem fairly unlikely in their own right? It could also be due to the fact that the only level 4 research facility in all of China is in, you guessed it, Wuhan.
No matter how you try to spin it, it's not unreasonable to entertain the possibility that it could have been man made given the circumstances. Obviously I am not in possession of a sample of the virus and a research facility, so I can't verify either way.
Since you like peer reviewed journals so much, you can have a look at this. Their conclusion is that the virus most likely either came from an animal other than bats, or that another animal acted as an intermediary. Also worth noting is this article from five years ago, which Nature has wasted no time in assuring us has nothing to do with what's going on right now.
My view of China before this was that they are a reckless nation hellbent on doing anything to gain power. Given that there are reports of the earliest recorded cases of the virus being as far back as November, I have a hard time chalking the incredibly slow process of informing the rest of the world to incompetence. That the CCP is running disinfo campaigns on US social media websites that they normally don't have access to is also suspect.I tend to believe that your speculation is part of your attempt to make everything that happens in the world retroactively fit into your pre-conceived political world-view — but that's just my speculation.
While I understand the value of peer reviewed journals, at a time like this, relying on them to inform your view of the situation means staying at least a step behind the news. Part of why this virus is such a big deal is because we didn't have ample time to prepare for it. Had the rest of the world known about it sooner, perhaps we'd be much further along in developing a vaccine than we currently are. As it stands, all anyone can do right now is speculate until a vaccine is developed, and even then I doubt we'll know beyond a reasonable doubt where it originated from for some time, if ever.