Posted on 02/09/2020 8:34:56 AM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
> “Occam’s Razor suggests that it began like every other epidemic - from a random virulent and adaptable disease that crossed from an animal to humans.”
China’s one and only P4 lab is right in Wuhan not far from the outbreak; the same lab has been doing research with coronaviruses. Another person applying the Razor may honestly take these facts and come up with a totally different conclusion than yours. This shows we can be influenced by preconceptions and other factors even when identifying what we think are the simplest facts.
Besides, they have not been able to pin this virus on any specific animal, even including some possible mutations. Not only that, they did not allow foreign experts (actually, only one expert from Hong Kong) to examine the market in question until after it had been cleaned out and disinfected twice – like destroying a crime scene.
> “The problem is that biology is in the Stone Age, as regards making things not seen in nature. We can cross-breed things and so on, but they are fairly close to what nature has come up with.”
Not sure I agree Biology is in the Stone Age since we definitely have evolved far beyond mere taxonomy. The simplest proof is the much better quality and greater variety of fruits we enjoy today - sweet, seedless, etc.
New species created by cross-breeding and cloned mammals like sheep are definitely not seen in nature. Only in the sense that since we can’t create life itself, all we had done is work with the raw material nature provided, can we say they are fairly close to what nature has come up with.
> “And mass-producing and packaging smallpox so it fits in a bomb that can be detonated without killing the pathogens is not anyone’s idea of a genuinely new bioweapon.”
Bioweapons are not deployed with bombs, but rather, in silence and surreptitiously, somewhat like how this current outbreak in China unfolded.
> “I don’t think anyone, including the Chinese, has the ability to come up with a useful bio-weapon that’s any more virulent than what’s available in nature.”
I read somewhere China may have been trying to create a new virus by combining parts of SARS, Ebola, and HIV through genetic recombination. Anyway, the technology is already there to do it.
The Chinese are on the record as saying North America would need to be depopulated in order to conquer it, and they would need to figure out a way to do so with biologicals without inciting us to nuke the shit out of them. In the same speech (Chi Hoisin ~2005) it was commented that they could suffer the loss of hundreds of millions as long as the party survived.
Having something with a 5-20% mortality rate get loose starting there is a pretty decent plausible deniability scenario...
Well the issue is that many of the biologicals would be latent at stages and bloom forth again in various mutations as conditions arose. The Chinese would be damaging themselves....vaccinations or not. And we would probably nuke them anyway even with a reduced population knowing that China hit us with biologicals.
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