mk has been pretty insistent on tinfoiling this one. My argument was that any decent bioweapons lab worth their salt wouldn't bother fucking around with something as dumb as SARS because its lethality isn't worth bothing with. His argument, which has slowly worn me down, is that there's ample evidence that the chinese have been fucking around with SARS on the reg because Chinese researchers are just sorta fundamentally reckless.

The argument put forth by Richard Preston in The Hot Zone is that Ebola lived into a cave until people started wandering further and further into the jungle. Jumping from animals, then, is just what viruses do. The argument put forth by Ken Alibek in Biohazard is that a few hundred people died in Sverdlovsk because a technician put up a post-it note saying "filters dirty, took out to clean, don't turn on exhaust fan" and the glue on the back of it wasn't sticky enough to keep it from falling to the floor.

Jesse Gelsinger died because the gene therapy he was testing used an adenovirus that he already had immunity to. I know a guy who wrote his Ph.D on a solution to this: use filovirus instead of adenovirus. To no one's surprise USAMRIID hired him outta college. He's told me stories of walking around Vozrozhdenia Island and scraping weapons-grade anthrax out of the dirt because when they were testing, there was an ocean between the beach and the biotoxins.

Really, I want to believe this wasn't anyone's fault. There have been so.many.examples of this shit going totally fucking wrong and virtually none of it going right.

But that desire is growing increasingly difficult to satisfy.