Tuesday, February 4, 2020

The Bong of Adam

Some people find this kind of thing interesting. I do.

Plant Teachers and the Path of Eve


2 comments:

hostebbe said...

A musing that perhaps improves our understanding of current events.

Outside of the large city of Wuhan in China there is an institute of virology.

A team of researchers at the institute has been studying the processes by which bat populations can act as a reservoir of viral infection while the bats themselves remain asymptotic.

As a part of this research, the institute maintains a breeding population of bats from which bats are selected for experimental purposes.

The team determined that its research objectives would be greatly facilitated if it could in a controlled way introduce a new and distinct virus into an experimental population of bats. To this end it created a novel corona virus now known as 2019 nCoV. Bits of non-corona-virus genetic material were spliced into the virus to make the virus easier to identify and track.

Somehow during the course of the experiment, the novel virus was spread from the controlled lab population of bats to the breeding population of bats and thence to the human bat handlers and to the general population in Wuhan. Possibly there was also a sale of excess bats from the breeding population into the Wuhan seafood and live meat market. All of this happened without the knowledge of the research team as they had no reason to suspect that the novel virus had escaped the lab and infected the breeding population of bats.

Eventually sufficient cases of a somewhat atypical influenza-like infection turned up in Wuhan hospitals so that a specimen was sent to the institute of virology for identification. The staff at the institute who are tasked with identifying viral agents in such specimens determined that the fast-spreading disease was caused by an unknown corona virus. They provided a sample of the novel virus to the local experts on the research team. To the utter dismay of the research team, the specimen was identified as their very own recently created research virus.

The ensuing reactions of Chinese officials are readily understood based on the above scenario.

All that remains at issue is why the new virus appears to have a preference for hosts of Chinese ethnicity. Possible explanations are: bad luck, perversity of Mother Nature, God's vengeance on the wicked--you choose--or you can make up your own story.

Robin Morrison said...

Seems the data points to it leaking from a USA biowepaonjs facility and brought to China via USA troops dduring a war game thingie in which the troops were quartered very close to the legendary wet food market.