Why was the Chinese military engineering mice with “humanized” lungs in the summer of 2019? HotAir

If I understand that timeline correctly, the mice were engineered a few months before the coronavirus emerged and it s unclear when researchers began testing SARS-CoV-2 on those mice. Hmmmm.

There s an innocent possibility, a damning possibility, and a deeply sinister possibility to explain the coincidence of timing, that China s military happened to have mice with humanized lungs onhand practically at the very moment they might need to test the effect of a novel respiratory virus on human beings. The innocent explanation: There are lots of respiratory viruses out there, and lots of coronaviruses. Being able to test any virus you like on humanized lungs would be useful to scientists whether or not SARS-CoV-2 existed. The timing could be a true coincidence.

The damning possibility is that Chinese scientists were doing gain-of-function research on the humanized mice, ultimately producing what we now know as SARS-CoV-2. Maybe experiments with those mice led to the lab accident that unleashed the pandemic on the world. In this scenario the lab was negligent but basically well intended: The point of gain-of-function research, after all, is to get ahead of evolution by trying to predict how a virus might become dangerous to humans in the wild by seeing how it evolves in a lab.

The sinister possibility, per the involvement of Chinese military scientists, is that they were doing bioweapons research to see if they could cook something up that would be dangerous to humans. I read a story a few days ago quoting a U.S. scientist who s skeptical of the lab-leak theory for the simple reason that the Wuhan Institute of Virology routinely published data on which viruses they were studying. None of the viruses described in their research prior to fall 2019 look anything like SARS-CoV-2, he said. So if it came from that lab, where s the evidence that they had a virus like that onhand?

via hotair.com

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