Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’
I believe the scientific consensus is that it originated in a wet market in Wuhan.
The “lab leak theory”, while not impossible, is also shorthand for a morass of conspiracy theories grounded in racist attitudes towards China. It somehow conflates that the pandemic is China’s fault, if not an outright attack from China, while simultaneously downplaying any efforts to mitigate such an attack.
The racist connotations about the lab I knew about, but I didn’t think it made it less true.
That being said, I just checked wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_COVID-19
and I think I remember seeing a study that showed the similarity of the sequence to other known sequences and it wasn’t that dramatic a change.
this is an absolute fuck of a sentence and seeing as how you keep JAQing off in a way that platforms conspiracy bullshit, you can just fuck off too
I guess most people aren’t up to date with this subject. There has been plenty of discussion with experts that point to the possibility of a lab leak. The wet market hypothesis has so many holes in it that it’s impossible to take seriously.
I don’t understand why that’s considered racist? Why is a conspiracy theory that China has a world class biolab capable of a global pandemic racist?
A crazy conspiracy that a foreign power has biotech superiority isn’t racism.