Typical Lax Dad wrote: ↑Tue May 18, 2021 11:12 am
old salt wrote: ↑Tue May 18, 2021 10:57 am
Hey nit picking, wordsmith trolls :
we need to determine, with greater certainty, implies (to any rational reader) a lack of certainty.
The existing conventional wisdom "certainty" narrative is bat to other mammal to human, via the Wuhan wet market.
You guys will grasp at anything to deflect or distract from the obvious & ignore the coincidence of the outbreak in Wuhan, of all places.
No....greater certainty means that there is some level of certainty that has been determined. You want more of it. You received one of the finest educations on the planet.... You know better.
come on, TLD, "coincidence" = evidence = certainty = bio-weapon research release = damn Chinese commies.
Salty, if you didn't mean what you wrote, just say so. No one is arguing against the desirability of knowing the actual answer, if that's possible, it's just that coincidence is not equivalent to
any level of certainty. And the "if that's possible" is very likely to disappoint.
You are burdened in this argument, whether you like it or not, with the speculative conspiracy theories that have been promulgated by the far right, Trumpists, and other whack jobs. So as soon as you imply that
any certainty has been achieved, you're immediately aligned, argmentatively, with those folks. And given that you've otherwise aligned with these folks on some other matters, it certainly looks intentional.
Which isn't to say that there aren't legitimate questions. Which are indeed being asked by lots of scientists with the actual expertise to ask the right questions and to evaluate the data and assess the credibility of the answers.
What most of them have said so far is that zoonotic transmission, which happens a lot and through history, is extremely difficult to prove with certainty. Pretty much never "proven", just preponderance of evidence. And they have said that unless there is direct evidence that the specific coronavirus existed in the lab, having been engineered as such, prior to the outbreak, then we have no basis for that presumption over zoonotic. And they have said that at least until the US withdrew its personnel at the lab the specific coronavirus line that could have been engineered was not among those being studied. And their Chinese counterparts say they didn't ever work with those lines. Others, yes, not that one or anything close.
Of course, that does not mean that is impossible that the Chinese did so. But unlikely.
Which is going to remain the case unless direct evidence comes forward.
Meanwhile, zoonotic transmission happens quite a bit. Viruses evolve, animal to animal and with wide scale transmission they further evolve. Sometimes with very dangerous consequences.