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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 8326303" data-attributes="member: 177">I felt a bit bad for Colbert on that one.  He's there trying to quietly note reasonable possibilities, while tryong to not cheese off the guest who is viewed highly positive by his audience, and really got Colbert his start.If they came up with an animal, all you'd have to say is, "well, the virus got released from the lab, and it made its way into an animal!"One issue with Stewart's piece was his repeated "It is in the NAME!  The Wuhan Coronavirus Lab!"  In fact, the lab is the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  They do study coronaviruses at the lab, but they also study a lot of other things, and "coronavirus" does not appear in the name. If Stewart can't even get that fact straight, when it is the emotional core of his argument, the rest of his assertion ought to be thought of skeptically.The key to understanding the issue requires understanding of genetics - viruses constructed in labs wind up pretty distinctive from wild viruses in their genetic structure.  SARS-COV-2 looks like a wild virus, not a man-made one.That last is not correct.  They did not find the same strain of SARS that infects humans in the animal population.  What they found was that coronaviruses exist in the bat population, and that the reservoir of viruses found in one cave had all the genetic pieces that existed in SARS, such that the virus likely came from there, possibly with a civet as a go-between bats and humans.The other thing to note is that the cave the SARS virus likely came from is in Yunnan province.  The SARS outbreak started in Hunan province 900 miles to the to the east!  It was like having the cave in Ohio, but the epidemic starting in Connecticut!  Where we humans first notice the disease in humans, and where the virus actually comes from, can be widely separated.Ergo, there's no particular reason to think this came from the lab just because the first cases were reported nearby.Well, duh.  The SARS epidemic came up in 2002.  Researchers from the WVI, along with others, started searching for the source of the virus in 2005.  If you are going to study a virus that comes from bats, you will want bats around!  They sampled thousands of bats, and came up with over 300 strains of coronaviruses in bats from all around China.</blockquote>

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