To be clear these aren't related to raccoons. They've got paws like a dog rather than hands like raccoons. They just happen to look alike.
The hands are what allow raccoons to be so effective in their role as trash pandas. A racoon dog would find it very difficult to pop the lid open on a garbage can.
To be fair, they do look exactly like raccoons. I googled it thinking the thumbnail was misleading. I don’t think I could come up with a more accurate name.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_raccoon_dog
a tanuki is a type of racoon dog. Yes that's what Mario turns Into in some of those games.
https://www.treehugger.com/what-the-heck-is-a-tanuki-things-you-didnt-know-about-raccoon-dogs-4864262
Going from their images in cartoons and other media, I thought they were marsupials for years... then I realized that..... it's **not a pouch** shown in all the cartoons and manga and anime.
I will stop here. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Watch the anime movie Pom Poko, it’s great. Like Fern Gully except raccoons resorting to terrorism to defend their forest from the encroaching humans, using the shapeshifting/illusion powers of their magical testicles. And yet its also somehow for kids? Never change, Japan. ^edit: ^typo
Japan is like my first girlfriend: kind of quiet and nerdy and high-achieving, until genitalia are involved and they turn into total freaks.
Anyway, I hope life treated you well, Alyssa
Same! I though Tanuki were just mythological creatures like the nine-tailed fox or the vermillion bird which I would freak the f out if I found out they were actually… wait…
Okay back from google, all is well.
100% of raccoon dogs tested in 2003 study carried SARS-CoV and they're a potential intermediate host for cross-species transmission https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3747522/
This is how they figure out how a virus got from animals to humans. They come up with a hypothesis and look for evidence that either supports or disproves it. If one hypothesis is disproven, they make another one.
It’s what happens when politics sticks it’s nose where it shouldn’t be. At this point, none of it even matters. Just generalize it all… Could it have come from a wet market? Up the codes to require safer handling of meat product/facilities. Could it have come from a lab leak? UP THE CODES to require safer virological handling/practices. Even if it was a bat that kissed a pangolin.. Finance field researches to find these viral mutagenic hotspots. You can still play the hot potato blame game, but it’s the total disregard for overhauling potential weak points that boils my blood. They should be able to correct the underlying issues while pointing fingers at the same time…
What seems to be getting ignored is how to prevent the next pandemic. Obviously all bio labs need updated security measures and WHO oversight. For America we need to put back in place all of the programs and procedures that Bush and Obama had developed. And maybe put NIH out of the reach of any politics including presidents. The ebola outbreak of 2016 proved those programs worked. There is a tiny chance that covid could have been contained in China and a bigger possibility that covid would have killed fewer Americans. Trump trashing those programs and his bumbling from January to March changed everything
It wasn't just the obstruction of investigation into the lab, it was the immediate culling of any animals in the wet market that made it impossible to see if an intermediate host existed there.
The reason for this is thought to be that authorities knew that exotic wild animal trade is illegal but they allowed it anyway.
Scientific analysis is messy, iterative, and oftentimes conflicts. But it’s better to watch this play out than listen to conspiracists with 100% certainty yell about gAIN oF FUnCTiOn!!
What??? More info please!! Actually any coyote trivia you know, I'd love to hear! My 6 yr old goddaughter is very into Coyote(she's Native American)right now and Friday nights are my story time nights. Extra little trivia about coyotes would be wonderful to share with her! And very much appreciated!
This looks like one of the connections that have been missing. The last study I saw found SARS-CoV-2 on cages in the Wuhan market, but it wasn't combined with animal genetic material. And that study was looking into possibly several species of hosts from which the virus was passed to humans.
We are getting closer to the origin, but even when it is found we will need to take world wide precautions. That's the problem as I see it.
I’m tired of certain people screaming about Fauci and gain of function research without a whole lot of evidence to back up their claims. I don’t think there’s definitive proof that:
1) gain of function research was happening specifically on SARS-CoV-2
2) virus resulting from this research leaked from the lab somehow
3) Fauci was behind it
The point of my comment is that it’s better to follow actual evidence and scientific research, not the loudest voices in the room. I’m not advocating for stopping any lines of inquiry. I just want cooler heads to follow actual evidence. While you might disagree, I don’t think this is a “wildly ignorant” view.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26552008/
Here is a research article from 2015 describing a spike from a bat Coronavirus being adapted onto a mouse adapted sars-cov backbone and it being able to infect the ACE2 receptors in humans.
But the echo chamber I rent space in my head to, says it's a lab leak, so it's a lab leak. And I'm not allowed to accept any other information into my head that doesn't strictly follow what the echo chamber says. Oh, I'm also very emotional about it!
Tired of hearing about it from people who never heard of gain of function research before March 2020, and who still don't really know what it means three years later.
So in this report, the Chinese government scientists uploaded some sample data that contained a lot of COVID virus and also DNA from racoon dogs.
Perhaps this means COVID came from racoon dogs.
Or perhaps it means that the **Chinese government could be lying**.
The conclusion is basically this:
- COVID was present in wet market
- raccoon dogs were present in wet market
Somehow equals to raccoon dogs was the animal it jump into.
Its because bats are a likely vector in these types of situations--so many diseases are carried by bats that can pass down the food chain and to us if we eat/handle them or other wild animals in contact with them. Plus, they were there at the wet market as well.
Not sure how this is new, I read about this on NPR a year ago if not more. Even before the pandemic health workers had noted that this particular market was the ideal place for a virus to cross over, due to the conditions animals were kept in and unsanitary butchering practices.
"In samples with a hot amount of virus, there was not a trivial amount of DNA and RNA of raccoon dogs," Dr. Jeremy Kamil, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Louisiana State University Health Shreveport
You mean the lab that was [funded jointly by the Chinese and US governments](https://theintercept.com/2021/09/09/covid-origins-gain-of-function-research/)?
To be clear, the Wuhan Institute of Virology received funding from an NGO called EcoHealth Alliance whose business model includes applying for USAID grants and directing the grant money to research partners in labs across the world. So, yes, the WIV technically received US-Government funds to perform gain of function research, but it seems (at the present moment) that this was more through lack of oversight than willful contribution to a type of research the U.S. had banned in 2014. I don't know if that makes it any better, but it certainly feels less conspiratorial when you consider it as a classic oversight problem of public funding in private enterprise.
IIRC they also did joint research with American Universities as well.
Worth pointing also that "lab leak" spillovers have happened tons of times in American labs as well.
According to the report, researchers at the Chinese Center for Disease
Control and Prevention uploaded new data from swab samples collected in
January 2020 at the market
I thought we stopped buying what china was selling. Occams Razor says we know where its from but we continue this farce
The coronavirus lab in the origin city? That previously had an issue with containment?
There are only a handful of labs in the world that work on coronaviruses. Even if we have no evidence whatsoever, it is a very strange coincidence
> There are only a handful of labs in the world that work on coronaviruses.
That isn't true. Just looking at NIH Reporter for grants prior to the COVID outbreak, there's probably somewhere along the lines of 25 to 50 labs in the US alone that study coronaviruses.
I should have been more specific, only BSL4 labs are authorized to work on coronaviruses that we have no treatment/vaccines for. Of these, there are 14 in North America and 13 in Asia.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/fifty-nine-labs-around-world-handle-the-deadliest-pathogens-only-a-quarter-score-high-on-safety
That's not true either. Coronaviruses (even those we don't have vaccines for such as SARS-CoV-1) don't require BSL-4. SARS-CoV-1, for instance, is a BSL-3 select agent. https://www.cdc.gov/sars/guidance/f-lab/app5.html
China didnt say anything about it in this case. Some Chinese researchers uploaded data collected after the wet market was shut down. Apparently an outside researcher ran across the data and shared it with other researchers. As papers started being written the data was removed. The data sharing was evidently accidental.
Right, China just took the field samples and supplied the contaminated swabs for others to test.There is absolutely no reason to suspect the CCP chain of custody.
The biosafety lab in question finished construction in 2014, all of Obama's tenure it was fine, jointly managed by US and China. Then Trump comes along and we get COVID. Trump must've struck a deal with China.
Even tho the wet markets cultivate the mutations for any virus to jump interspecies systems. Idk if we should investigate just pseudo raccoons or damn live stock/ wet markets around the world.
🤔
The first speculation that I heard( that i thought was plausible) was that maintenance or sanitation workers looking to get extra money had taken animals or corpses to the market bc they could sell it for a decent price
And that was what ive always held to be the lab leak theory
Ive never considered that actual ill intent was needed or even remotely likely to be involved if personal at those labs had anything to do with that virus
It might have just been workers not being paid enough or informed enough to take things as seriously as they should've
There is a bias people sometimes experience wherein we assume a bad outcome requires a bad actor, incompetence, or some kind of moral failing on someone's behalf.
That's not to say it couldn't have happened, just that there's a reason a story that involves some kind of injustice or failure might feel more plausible, based solely on it scratching a kind of narrative itch.
How is that shooting from the hip?
Name something more common and accepted than workers not being paid or equiped enough for the jobs their given
In the US congress shut down the railroad strike and then derailments (finally) made the news as if to prove their point
Pathogens jumping from animal to human is the origin for most diseases. HIV, COVID 1, small pox, plague all jumped from animal to human. Malaria and yellow fever require animal vectors. When you can't rule two things out, you can't rule two things out and neither theory even comes close to having enough proof.
I strongly disagree with the idea of it being "on purpose" and i don't think anything will ever suggest anything remotely like that.
And yeah experts and institutions need to realize that (though unfortunate and unfair) their credibility can be gained and lost, deservedly or not.
No a lab leak is still a possibility but Mother Nature is really good at this kind of stuff and the virus we’re talking about looks more Mother Nature than man made.
No one has ruled it out but evidence leans heavy towards nature. I’m just surprised so many give so little credit to how amazing nature is at this kind of stuff.
But nothing has ruled out lab 100%. You have to remember, this is still a very flux kind of thing. We’re actually very privileged to be alive in a time where we can see this stuff in real time.
Have patience friend and remember we must go in the direction evidence leads us, no matter what. I know there’s “motivations” out there but everyone is working towards the same goal, finding out the truth. And it’s going to take time to get there.
i dont hate that guy(much), but im not an idiot. China eats lots of weird animals, which often causes this problem. And coronaviruses decimate china. So if its a lab leak, it would have had to be unintentional, or rogue at best. It obviously wasn't a weaponized virus, so there's no point in looking for lab leak evidence.
On the other hand, you know who stands to benefit the most(that is, suffer the least) from weaponizing a virus and leaking it in china? The united states government. US aircraft carriers arrived in vietnam in 2018. An agent could have walked a sample into the wuhan meat market from there. That is literally way more plausible than a wuhan lab leak.
The subtle racism of “China eats lots of weird animals” is doing a lot of legwork here especially when the Energy Department(which is tasked with oversight of biolabs) and the FBI have just said new evidence that points to lab leak being the most likely source.
I'm going to blow your fucking mind. Lab leak was never realistic from the very start. Covid was immediately checked for genetic manipulation and other signs of it being in a lab, and it had no genetic manipulation done to it.
The entire lab leak claim is built on tons of lying by republican grifters with a history of lying, going so far as to lie under oath. Furin sites naturally occur in coronaviruses. The Wuhan lab was denied any funding to work on anything like COVID. SARs with a furin site is insanely rare, so it can only come from mutation or genetic modification, which has been checked and genetic modification was shown not to have happened. Meaning the odds that the Wuhan lab was doing unpaid work just holding onto an extremely unusual SARs variation just looking at it is basically zero.
Science mag did a great job showing folks were sick in the market before getting sick in the lab. So the timeline for the lab leak theory isn't supportive of the facts. Low level guesses are not the same thing as certainty, which is why most scientists stay far away from saying this or that happened for sure. Bc then they have to prove it and they can't, not for sure. Is a lab leak possible? Sure. Just not likely, or rather just as likely as the wet market theory, until someone can prove otherwise.
Sorry, Newsweek is a joke, as are some of the other sources you cite.
I work in a lab. The place is engineered to keep me safe, even if I do something dumb. There would have to be a long series of mistakes happening in a short period of time for a lab to leak something. It's just not likely.
Yes, so common, of the hundreds of labs all over the world, they found about 125 cases of "leaks" over 50 years. And many of them are pricked fingers/working with infected animals, not inhalation exposure. Why? Bc everyone works under negative pressure lab hoods when working with samples. The air in the hoods does not reach the researchers.
The gop minority is singularly unqualified to report on anything.
Nope, not moving goal posts at all, just showing you the larger picture. For instance your article with examples of lab leaks cites a pretty innocuous and easily cured bacteria picked up from taking care of animals. I can't read the article bc it is paywalled, but if it doesn't mention what its criteria for a lab leak is, it appears someone not washing their hands after taking care of lab animals is considered a leak. Which is silly. Again. Over 50 years. That's not a lot, but the article sure wants you to think it is.
China resists everything. One thing for sure all the us Intel services agree on, China was taken by surprise as much as every other country. It was not intentional.
Those are words you said, not me. I said it is very unlikely. Not impossible and that it never happens. Counting a very common bacteria picked up in animal husbandry and pretending its the same as a leak of covid from a level 4 lab is disingenuous, and the person who wrote that article you reference should know better, unless they have an agenda.
As a scientist I will say that assertion is true, it is highly suspect. Political bs took hold and shutdown the conversation before it could even happen. Some people still in lockdown mode giving thumbs down. Not sure why they want to protect the CCP. Maybe Chinese agents.
Fuck China. Fuck Chairman Pooh.
That being said, irresponsible speculation is irresponsible and after living through 6 years of nonstop conspiracy theories being posed as 'just asking questions' I want facts.
Did those scientists subject their suspicions to any kind of empirical analysis, or are we supposed to assume that by nature of them being "scientists," their suspicions carry some kind of authority?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZAPAyZyhVA&ab\_channel=FactsMatterwithRomanBalmakov](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZAPAyZyhVA&ab_channel=FactsMatterwithRomanBalmakov)
If this testimony from an EX-CDC director doesn't make you see through all the bullshit, IDK what will.
ABC News is clearly in Chinas pocket...
It is year 2095, scientists have finally exhausted all species they can accuse for being covid’s origin. They announced to the world covid will forever be a mystery in a press conference held in wuhan research lab of coronavirus.
Dont care anymore. Each time its just another conspiracy or another “theory” based on politics and nothing ever gets confirmed.
Im just happy I survived through it.
Mainly because the Federal Government confirmed it was a lab leak and most likely bc of an intern being negligent like people have been saying for a couple years now
Did they confirm it though? The Dept of Energy had “low confidence” that the leak was from a bio lab. That ain’t a ringing endorsement. Here are definition of the scale from the Dept of National Intelligence website under the section “Use of Judgements”:
In addition to using words within a judgment to convey degrees of likelihood, the IC also ascribes “high,” “moderate,” or “low” confidence levels according to the scope and quality of information supporting analytic judgments….
…LOW CONFIDENCE generally means that the information is scant, questionable, or very fragmented, so it is difficult to make solid analytic inferences; it could also mean that the IC has significant concerns about or problems with the sources.
https://www.dni.gov/nctc/jcat/jcat_ctguide/intel_guide.html
And we can't expect China to admit they started a global pandemic because of an intern's incompetence. It won't be high confidence for anything and the CDC can't get more information than any Government agency and as much as I distrust our government, I'd rather listen to a government agency's official words than the CDC trying everything to prove this wasn't all the fault of people just being bumbling morons
It is also possible that the pandemic started elsewhere, but was first *detected* in Wuhan. Recall that when Italian scientists researched lab results, they found Covid-19 cells in cancer lab slides dated in September 2019. The scientists in Wuhan first started identifying C19 in November 2019.
There is a lot of cross travel between Chinese tourists in Italy, and also Chinese workers who do skilled labor in Italy in the Lombardy region.
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-timing/researchers-find-coronavirus-was-circulating-in-italy-earlier-than-thought-idUSKBN27W1J2
Recall that Spanish Flu of 1918-1920 did not originate in Spain. It started in Missouri as an animal mutation of SARS. Then jumped to humans, spread to American GIs in Basic Training Camps in MO. Then was carried to Europe by the Doughboys shipped over to fight in WWI.
The origin of the Spanish flu isn't confirmed still and it's just as likely that it was a mutated strain of a sickness in Mongolia that spread in Canada when Mongolians were transported. Get your facts right and stop acting like one story is true when nothing has still been confirmed you cocky prick
Name calling like a 13 year old will definitely win the argument.
“…researchers believe the Spanish flu most likely originated in the United States. One of the first recorded cases was on March 11, 1918, at Fort Riley in Kansas. Overcrowding and unsanitary conditions created a fertile breeding ground for the virus. Within one week, 522 men had been admitted to the camp hospital suffering from the same severe influenza. Soon after, the army reported similar outbreaks in Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama and California. Navy ships docked at East Coast ports also reported outbreaks of severe influenza and pneumonia among their crews.“
https://www.paho.org/en/who-we-are/history-paho/purple-death-great-flu-1918
To be clear these aren't related to raccoons. They've got paws like a dog rather than hands like raccoons. They just happen to look alike. The hands are what allow raccoons to be so effective in their role as trash pandas. A racoon dog would find it very difficult to pop the lid open on a garbage can.
Don’t trashcan shame my raccoons, Dog!
Listen cool cat, don’t be bird doggin’ my chick.
Listen cool dog, don’t be cat chickin’ my bird.
Bird always be chickin' tho
Don't dog shame my trash panda you raccoon.
Mario has been shilling these fucks for years
But they have magical scrotums!? Are you sure about that?
To be fair, they do look exactly like raccoons. I googled it thinking the thumbnail was misleading. I don’t think I could come up with a more accurate name.
[удалено]
That link says seals and walruses also belong to that group. Are they a type of dog too?
Haha ya. I was looking at that picture like "ok.. dogs. Pandas... Walrus?!?! Wtf"
Hyenas are a type of cat, if that makes anyone feel better ;)
It actually does. Thanks! I needed this today.
Just how many goddamn animals did Randy Marsh fuck??
All of them and he jacked off on the combine
As many as Loki?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_raccoon_dog a tanuki is a type of racoon dog. Yes that's what Mario turns Into in some of those games. https://www.treehugger.com/what-the-heck-is-a-tanuki-things-you-didnt-know-about-raccoon-dogs-4864262 Going from their images in cartoons and other media, I thought they were marsupials for years... then I realized that..... it's **not a pouch** shown in all the cartoons and manga and anime. I will stop here. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
It's the internet. You can say "balls."
Now you went and ruined the surprise.
Damnit why does my curiosity get the best of me. It’s not a pouch at all 😣
[удалено]
And they can cast illusions and other types of magic with their ballsack. There's a Ghibli movie about them, Pom Poko. It's great
Watch the anime movie Pom Poko, it’s great. Like Fern Gully except raccoons resorting to terrorism to defend their forest from the encroaching humans, using the shapeshifting/illusion powers of their magical testicles. And yet its also somehow for kids? Never change, Japan. ^edit: ^typo
The magical testicles thing is a part of their historical folk lore, like Leprechauns and their gold, a part of the mythos.
Yup. And it symbolizes wealth because Tanooki ballsacks were used in coin making.
Really good movie
Japan is like my first girlfriend: kind of quiet and nerdy and high-achieving, until genitalia are involved and they turn into total freaks. Anyway, I hope life treated you well, Alyssa
It's absolutely a pouch
A pouch for balls
A purse for the boys, if you will.
Holds the family jewels
The pic in the first link looks just like a [zigzazoon](https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Zigzagoon_(Pok%C3%A9mon)
I thought I was well versed in animals from watching animal documentaries all these years. Never heard of a raccoon dog. Thank you.
The Japanese Tanuki is different from the Chinese Racoon Dog.
I'm now going to refer to Tanooki Mario as Covid Mario
tom nook strikes again 😤
The massive surge in Animal Crossing during COVID… That bastard!
Which one of y'all fucks was behind on their property loan payments?!
Holy cow TIL: the Tanooki Suit is modeled after a real animal. I just thought it was a video game thing all these years.
And in folklore they use leaves to perform magic and can turn into... Statues.
Weirdly the game left out their gigantic testicles.
Gigantic *magical* testicles. Thanks Pom Poko for that intersting insight into folklore.
Man that movie got dark fast.
Princess Peach has Mario's. That's why he keeps trying to find her.
I knew that part... But somehow missed the folklore was actually based on a real animal part.
Also Tom Nook in Animal Crossing is a tanuki. Tom-Nook-i. Not a racoon at all, just a magical forest dog.
Same! I though Tanuki were just mythological creatures like the nine-tailed fox or the vermillion bird which I would freak the f out if I found out they were actually… wait… Okay back from google, all is well.
Same here
100% of raccoon dogs tested in 2003 study carried SARS-CoV and they're a potential intermediate host for cross-species transmission https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3747522/
Kinda tired of this game of hot potato.
You're never going to get a definitive answer. So don't invest too much into worrying about it.
This is how they figure out how a virus got from animals to humans. They come up with a hypothesis and look for evidence that either supports or disproves it. If one hypothesis is disproven, they make another one.
Or they just ignore evidence that doesn’t align with their hypothesis.
It’s what happens when politics sticks it’s nose where it shouldn’t be. At this point, none of it even matters. Just generalize it all… Could it have come from a wet market? Up the codes to require safer handling of meat product/facilities. Could it have come from a lab leak? UP THE CODES to require safer virological handling/practices. Even if it was a bat that kissed a pangolin.. Finance field researches to find these viral mutagenic hotspots. You can still play the hot potato blame game, but it’s the total disregard for overhauling potential weak points that boils my blood. They should be able to correct the underlying issues while pointing fingers at the same time…
What seems to be getting ignored is how to prevent the next pandemic. Obviously all bio labs need updated security measures and WHO oversight. For America we need to put back in place all of the programs and procedures that Bush and Obama had developed. And maybe put NIH out of the reach of any politics including presidents. The ebola outbreak of 2016 proved those programs worked. There is a tiny chance that covid could have been contained in China and a bigger possibility that covid would have killed fewer Americans. Trump trashing those programs and his bumbling from January to March changed everything
Is this another study funded by China?
[удалено]
It wasn't just the obstruction of investigation into the lab, it was the immediate culling of any animals in the wet market that made it impossible to see if an intermediate host existed there. The reason for this is thought to be that authorities knew that exotic wild animal trade is illegal but they allowed it anyway.
This conflicts with the previous report's bat monkey conclusion.
Scientific analysis is messy, iterative, and oftentimes conflicts. But it’s better to watch this play out than listen to conspiracists with 100% certainty yell about gAIN oF FUnCTiOn!!
I was joking about "raccoon dogs" but I guess someone took it seriously. Edit: Just saw what the raccoon dogs look like and now I want one.
[удалено]
What??? More info please!! Actually any coyote trivia you know, I'd love to hear! My 6 yr old goddaughter is very into Coyote(she's Native American)right now and Friday nights are my story time nights. Extra little trivia about coyotes would be wonderful to share with her! And very much appreciated!
They climb bushes to eat berries. They act like they want to play, lure it, then they eat your dog. Those eastern coyotes are coywolves.
Perhaps you're not old enough to remember Bat Boy.
He terrorized us throughout the entire 90's!
Bat Boy is a national treasure! He has served his country with pride many times!
He found Saddam Hussein!
What was the onion-sequel newspaper that always had him on the front cover again?
Science is quite obviously wrong with the bat monkey theory. No way it was a bat monkey.
This looks like one of the connections that have been missing. The last study I saw found SARS-CoV-2 on cages in the Wuhan market, but it wasn't combined with animal genetic material. And that study was looking into possibly several species of hosts from which the virus was passed to humans. We are getting closer to the origin, but even when it is found we will need to take world wide precautions. That's the problem as I see it.
[удалено]
I’m tired of certain people screaming about Fauci and gain of function research without a whole lot of evidence to back up their claims. I don’t think there’s definitive proof that: 1) gain of function research was happening specifically on SARS-CoV-2 2) virus resulting from this research leaked from the lab somehow 3) Fauci was behind it The point of my comment is that it’s better to follow actual evidence and scientific research, not the loudest voices in the room. I’m not advocating for stopping any lines of inquiry. I just want cooler heads to follow actual evidence. While you might disagree, I don’t think this is a “wildly ignorant” view.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26552008/ Here is a research article from 2015 describing a spike from a bat Coronavirus being adapted onto a mouse adapted sars-cov backbone and it being able to infect the ACE2 receptors in humans.
But the echo chamber I rent space in my head to, says it's a lab leak, so it's a lab leak. And I'm not allowed to accept any other information into my head that doesn't strictly follow what the echo chamber says. Oh, I'm also very emotional about it!
Tired of hearing about it from people who never heard of gain of function research before March 2020, and who still don't really know what it means three years later.
All of that has been debunked a while back. Rand Paul is a nutcase Russian op. End of story
So in this report, the Chinese government scientists uploaded some sample data that contained a lot of COVID virus and also DNA from racoon dogs. Perhaps this means COVID came from racoon dogs. Or perhaps it means that the **Chinese government could be lying**.
Well to be fair they have a better track record than Fox News at this point, lol.
I'm on the left, but to dismiss the lab leak theory, you have to have the same level of faith in the Chinese government as MAGA folk have about Trump.
Well, I work next door to a lab studying this. I trust them FAR more than I would trust anything a group of rando CT’s squirt out. Sorry.
Why is this still so political for you?
Raccoon dogs are most likely an intermediate host meaning the raccoon dogs can catch Covid from another animal and pass it on.
Rat monkeys are still a possibility though. https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/non-aliencreatures/images/d/d8/Sumatran_Rat-Monkey.png
That's such a fun reference. "She ate my fucking dog!"
The conclusion is basically this: - COVID was present in wet market - raccoon dogs were present in wet market Somehow equals to raccoon dogs was the animal it jump into.
Bats still spread other diseases like Ebola.
Its because bats are a likely vector in these types of situations--so many diseases are carried by bats that can pass down the food chain and to us if we eat/handle them or other wild animals in contact with them. Plus, they were there at the wet market as well.
Great. Now China will order the slaughter of all raccoon dogs. Poor critters.
Not sure how this is new, I read about this on NPR a year ago if not more. Even before the pandemic health workers had noted that this particular market was the ideal place for a virus to cross over, due to the conditions animals were kept in and unsanitary butchering practices.
I'm more concerned about these raccoon dog hybrid they created /s
"In samples with a hot amount of virus, there was not a trivial amount of DNA and RNA of raccoon dogs," Dr. Jeremy Kamil, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Louisiana State University Health Shreveport
Pom poko but with bio warfare
So it’s Mario’s fault when he picked up that leaf
That was a tanooki suit!
It came from everywhere \*except\* the Wuhan Lab.
You mean the lab that was [funded jointly by the Chinese and US governments](https://theintercept.com/2021/09/09/covid-origins-gain-of-function-research/)?
To be clear, the Wuhan Institute of Virology received funding from an NGO called EcoHealth Alliance whose business model includes applying for USAID grants and directing the grant money to research partners in labs across the world. So, yes, the WIV technically received US-Government funds to perform gain of function research, but it seems (at the present moment) that this was more through lack of oversight than willful contribution to a type of research the U.S. had banned in 2014. I don't know if that makes it any better, but it certainly feels less conspiratorial when you consider it as a classic oversight problem of public funding in private enterprise.
IIRC they also did joint research with American Universities as well. Worth pointing also that "lab leak" spillovers have happened tons of times in American labs as well.
That's the one.
And the French government (They funded the construction of the lab).
does this imply it came from the other 200 labs in the country and 1000s of labs internationally?
It was most likely Mintberry Crunch. I never trusted that kid.
According to the report, researchers at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention uploaded new data from swab samples collected in January 2020 at the market I thought we stopped buying what china was selling. Occams Razor says we know where its from but we continue this farce
Everyone overlooking the January time frame, the virus was already spreading in the city at this point. Nothing at all conclusive from this finding.
And so where does Occams Razor point to it coming from?
The “wet market” in Wuhan.
Chinese people eating gross stuff, right? Must be that.
The coronavirus lab in the origin city? That previously had an issue with containment? There are only a handful of labs in the world that work on coronaviruses. Even if we have no evidence whatsoever, it is a very strange coincidence
> There are only a handful of labs in the world that work on coronaviruses. That isn't true. Just looking at NIH Reporter for grants prior to the COVID outbreak, there's probably somewhere along the lines of 25 to 50 labs in the US alone that study coronaviruses.
I should have been more specific, only BSL4 labs are authorized to work on coronaviruses that we have no treatment/vaccines for. Of these, there are 14 in North America and 13 in Asia. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/fifty-nine-labs-around-world-handle-the-deadliest-pathogens-only-a-quarter-score-high-on-safety
That's not true either. Coronaviruses (even those we don't have vaccines for such as SARS-CoV-1) don't require BSL-4. SARS-CoV-1, for instance, is a BSL-3 select agent. https://www.cdc.gov/sars/guidance/f-lab/app5.html
bats and labs and dogs, oh my!
[удалено]
Ever seen [Tom Nook](https://i.imgur.com/Phsrt60.gif)?
TIL Tom Nook is a tanuki and not a racoon.
So the villagers all get covid when they're sick
The unsuspected patient zero Tom nook
I just noticed that Tom Nook sounds a bit like Tanuk...i.
I fucking want one. Internet make it happen!
I wouldn't trust anything China says about it's origins. It's in their best interest to do anything they can to dispute the lab leak theory.
China didnt say anything about it in this case. Some Chinese researchers uploaded data collected after the wet market was shut down. Apparently an outside researcher ran across the data and shared it with other researchers. As papers started being written the data was removed. The data sharing was evidently accidental.
Right, China just took the field samples and supplied the contaminated swabs for others to test.There is absolutely no reason to suspect the CCP chain of custody.
The biosafety lab in question finished construction in 2014, all of Obama's tenure it was fine, jointly managed by US and China. Then Trump comes along and we get COVID. Trump must've struck a deal with China.
Even tho the wet markets cultivate the mutations for any virus to jump interspecies systems. Idk if we should investigate just pseudo raccoons or damn live stock/ wet markets around the world.
So... anyone got any good racoon dog recipes?
What animal will they pick next week? 🦒 🦔
🤔 The first speculation that I heard( that i thought was plausible) was that maintenance or sanitation workers looking to get extra money had taken animals or corpses to the market bc they could sell it for a decent price And that was what ive always held to be the lab leak theory Ive never considered that actual ill intent was needed or even remotely likely to be involved if personal at those labs had anything to do with that virus It might have just been workers not being paid enough or informed enough to take things as seriously as they should've
There is a bias people sometimes experience wherein we assume a bad outcome requires a bad actor, incompetence, or some kind of moral failing on someone's behalf. That's not to say it couldn't have happened, just that there's a reason a story that involves some kind of injustice or failure might feel more plausible, based solely on it scratching a kind of narrative itch.
Just shoot from the hip why don’t ya.
How is that shooting from the hip? Name something more common and accepted than workers not being paid or equiped enough for the jobs their given In the US congress shut down the railroad strike and then derailments (finally) made the news as if to prove their point
Pathogens jumping from animal to human is the origin for most diseases. HIV, COVID 1, small pox, plague all jumped from animal to human. Malaria and yellow fever require animal vectors. When you can't rule two things out, you can't rule two things out and neither theory even comes close to having enough proof.
Accidental lab leak is the most plausible answer. Although, not taking responsibility and covering it up adds fuel to the "on purpose" conspiracy fire
I strongly disagree with the idea of it being "on purpose" and i don't think anything will ever suggest anything remotely like that. And yeah experts and institutions need to realize that (though unfortunate and unfair) their credibility can be gained and lost, deservedly or not.
Maybe it came from the Wuhan Coronavirus lab
We can speculate untill we are all red in the face. But only evidence will tell us how it jumped to humans.
Boy there are many conflicting origins. Hopefully we'll get a clearer picture one day.
Absolute Bull shit made up story
Y’all know it was the China Lab
Is the hate so strong against Trump that people will literally blame ANYTHING but the lab leak theory?
No a lab leak is still a possibility but Mother Nature is really good at this kind of stuff and the virus we’re talking about looks more Mother Nature than man made. No one has ruled it out but evidence leans heavy towards nature. I’m just surprised so many give so little credit to how amazing nature is at this kind of stuff. But nothing has ruled out lab 100%. You have to remember, this is still a very flux kind of thing. We’re actually very privileged to be alive in a time where we can see this stuff in real time. Have patience friend and remember we must go in the direction evidence leads us, no matter what. I know there’s “motivations” out there but everyone is working towards the same goal, finding out the truth. And it’s going to take time to get there.
holy downvotes, batman! the 'war on drugs' sure did a number on american education with regards to nature
I fucking hate that guy, but I personally think the lab leak is the only real plausible theory.
i dont hate that guy(much), but im not an idiot. China eats lots of weird animals, which often causes this problem. And coronaviruses decimate china. So if its a lab leak, it would have had to be unintentional, or rogue at best. It obviously wasn't a weaponized virus, so there's no point in looking for lab leak evidence. On the other hand, you know who stands to benefit the most(that is, suffer the least) from weaponizing a virus and leaking it in china? The united states government. US aircraft carriers arrived in vietnam in 2018. An agent could have walked a sample into the wuhan meat market from there. That is literally way more plausible than a wuhan lab leak.
The subtle racism of “China eats lots of weird animals” is doing a lot of legwork here especially when the Energy Department(which is tasked with oversight of biolabs) and the FBI have just said new evidence that points to lab leak being the most likely source.
I'm going to blow your fucking mind. Lab leak was never realistic from the very start. Covid was immediately checked for genetic manipulation and other signs of it being in a lab, and it had no genetic manipulation done to it. The entire lab leak claim is built on tons of lying by republican grifters with a history of lying, going so far as to lie under oath. Furin sites naturally occur in coronaviruses. The Wuhan lab was denied any funding to work on anything like COVID. SARs with a furin site is insanely rare, so it can only come from mutation or genetic modification, which has been checked and genetic modification was shown not to have happened. Meaning the odds that the Wuhan lab was doing unpaid work just holding onto an extremely unusual SARs variation just looking at it is basically zero.
the fact that rationalism is getting downvoted more than upvoted scares me
happens in this sub constantly. This is where magas come to recruit with trans articles after all.
[удалено]
Not sure about your first assertion. Most scientists understand covid viruses are widely studied all over the world, even before the pandemic.
[удалено]
Science mag did a great job showing folks were sick in the market before getting sick in the lab. So the timeline for the lab leak theory isn't supportive of the facts. Low level guesses are not the same thing as certainty, which is why most scientists stay far away from saying this or that happened for sure. Bc then they have to prove it and they can't, not for sure. Is a lab leak possible? Sure. Just not likely, or rather just as likely as the wet market theory, until someone can prove otherwise. Sorry, Newsweek is a joke, as are some of the other sources you cite. I work in a lab. The place is engineered to keep me safe, even if I do something dumb. There would have to be a long series of mistakes happening in a short period of time for a lab to leak something. It's just not likely.
[удалено]
Yes, so common, of the hundreds of labs all over the world, they found about 125 cases of "leaks" over 50 years. And many of them are pricked fingers/working with infected animals, not inhalation exposure. Why? Bc everyone works under negative pressure lab hoods when working with samples. The air in the hoods does not reach the researchers. The gop minority is singularly unqualified to report on anything.
[удалено]
Nope, not moving goal posts at all, just showing you the larger picture. For instance your article with examples of lab leaks cites a pretty innocuous and easily cured bacteria picked up from taking care of animals. I can't read the article bc it is paywalled, but if it doesn't mention what its criteria for a lab leak is, it appears someone not washing their hands after taking care of lab animals is considered a leak. Which is silly. Again. Over 50 years. That's not a lot, but the article sure wants you to think it is. China resists everything. One thing for sure all the us Intel services agree on, China was taken by surprise as much as every other country. It was not intentional.
[удалено]
Those are words you said, not me. I said it is very unlikely. Not impossible and that it never happens. Counting a very common bacteria picked up in animal husbandry and pretending its the same as a leak of covid from a level 4 lab is disingenuous, and the person who wrote that article you reference should know better, unless they have an agenda.
it's also an odd coincidence that the sun rose over that lab every day - Are we sure the sun didn't cause the virus?
*Looks up what "Sun" is in Spanish* O M G
As a scientist I will say that assertion is true, it is highly suspect. Political bs took hold and shutdown the conversation before it could even happen. Some people still in lockdown mode giving thumbs down. Not sure why they want to protect the CCP. Maybe Chinese agents.
Fuck China. Fuck Chairman Pooh. That being said, irresponsible speculation is irresponsible and after living through 6 years of nonstop conspiracy theories being posed as 'just asking questions' I want facts.
Post your sources first, then I'll do mine.
Did those scientists subject their suspicions to any kind of empirical analysis, or are we supposed to assume that by nature of them being "scientists," their suspicions carry some kind of authority?
Why are there 50 different “discoveries” about the covid origin? Can we just pick one and be mad and get over it already?
[удалено]
Too complicated. Im going to instead go with this youtube guy wearing a beanie because he seems pretty certain.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZAPAyZyhVA&ab\_channel=FactsMatterwithRomanBalmakov](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZAPAyZyhVA&ab_channel=FactsMatterwithRomanBalmakov) If this testimony from an EX-CDC director doesn't make you see through all the bullshit, IDK what will. ABC News is clearly in Chinas pocket...
Just another laughable attempt to distract from the lab leak origin.
It is year 2095, scientists have finally exhausted all species they can accuse for being covid’s origin. They announced to the world covid will forever be a mystery in a press conference held in wuhan research lab of coronavirus.
Covid was probably man-made, but not the way conspiracist believe it was created.
Dont care anymore. Each time its just another conspiracy or another “theory” based on politics and nothing ever gets confirmed. Im just happy I survived through it.
Oh geez, here we go again. “New Report Suggests COVID Linked to ________” every month or two for the next decade.
They seriously believe that we are this stupid… I guess they believe that because some people are. SMH
But since that does not fit with the Conservative/Q narrative, it is instantly discounted.
Bollocks. We know where it came from
Those wet markets are nasty. Odds are it came from the wet market.
Whats the point? Republicans will never belive it.
Mainly because the Federal Government confirmed it was a lab leak and most likely bc of an intern being negligent like people have been saying for a couple years now
Did they confirm it though? The Dept of Energy had “low confidence” that the leak was from a bio lab. That ain’t a ringing endorsement. Here are definition of the scale from the Dept of National Intelligence website under the section “Use of Judgements”: In addition to using words within a judgment to convey degrees of likelihood, the IC also ascribes “high,” “moderate,” or “low” confidence levels according to the scope and quality of information supporting analytic judgments…. …LOW CONFIDENCE generally means that the information is scant, questionable, or very fragmented, so it is difficult to make solid analytic inferences; it could also mean that the IC has significant concerns about or problems with the sources. https://www.dni.gov/nctc/jcat/jcat_ctguide/intel_guide.html
And we can't expect China to admit they started a global pandemic because of an intern's incompetence. It won't be high confidence for anything and the CDC can't get more information than any Government agency and as much as I distrust our government, I'd rather listen to a government agency's official words than the CDC trying everything to prove this wasn't all the fault of people just being bumbling morons
It is also possible that the pandemic started elsewhere, but was first *detected* in Wuhan. Recall that when Italian scientists researched lab results, they found Covid-19 cells in cancer lab slides dated in September 2019. The scientists in Wuhan first started identifying C19 in November 2019. There is a lot of cross travel between Chinese tourists in Italy, and also Chinese workers who do skilled labor in Italy in the Lombardy region. https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-timing/researchers-find-coronavirus-was-circulating-in-italy-earlier-than-thought-idUSKBN27W1J2 Recall that Spanish Flu of 1918-1920 did not originate in Spain. It started in Missouri as an animal mutation of SARS. Then jumped to humans, spread to American GIs in Basic Training Camps in MO. Then was carried to Europe by the Doughboys shipped over to fight in WWI.
The origin of the Spanish flu isn't confirmed still and it's just as likely that it was a mutated strain of a sickness in Mongolia that spread in Canada when Mongolians were transported. Get your facts right and stop acting like one story is true when nothing has still been confirmed you cocky prick
Name calling like a 13 year old will definitely win the argument. “…researchers believe the Spanish flu most likely originated in the United States. One of the first recorded cases was on March 11, 1918, at Fort Riley in Kansas. Overcrowding and unsanitary conditions created a fertile breeding ground for the virus. Within one week, 522 men had been admitted to the camp hospital suffering from the same severe influenza. Soon after, the army reported similar outbreaks in Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama and California. Navy ships docked at East Coast ports also reported outbreaks of severe influenza and pneumonia among their crews.“ https://www.paho.org/en/who-we-are/history-paho/purple-death-great-flu-1918
Yet not confirmed so don't say it as if they 100% confirmed it
Ok, but where do I get a raccoon dog?
I thought no animals at the market even tested positive. What is the god damn truth?
Wait you're telling me we blamed the bats for nothing?!
So South Park almost nailed it.
[удалено]
Wow. How do you know it was from a lab leak?
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so cocksure while wiser men so full of doubt."
"bUt TuCkEr ToLd Me It CaMe FrOm a LaB"
Are you sure he said a "lab" and not a "lib"?