Did you know that we don't actually know how the coronavirus started?
We know it jumped from bats to humans but we don't actually know how or even when for sure.
Now right now I know that there are a large group of you (how large is part of 3 readers, 2 of you?) that are saying, NO! It was the wet market in Wuhan! The news reported that over and over again.
Well sure, the news reported it, people talked about it, memes were made. But it's still not a proven fact. In fact (double fact use) we can be pretty certain that it didn't come from eating a bat. One, because that's never how these sorts of viruses spread. And two because as the CDC and the WHO keep telling us ways it's transmitted, food is never one of them. You can't eat the virus and catch it. It's a respiratory virus. It comes in through breathing in the virus.
But we keep sticking with the "they ate a bat!" story. Why?
Well, one it's an easy way to other it. You would never eat a bat, right? So you would never be responsible for this sort of thing. It's a way for Western society to really other it. We don't have wet markets, we don't eat such things, we would never spread such a thing. But we do eat really weird shit, just we don't think it's weird because we are the ones eating it so it seems normal. And the one disease I can think of off the top of my head that comes from food is Mad Cow. Which isn't a virus AND we did that in the West. So...
PETA is all over it too. See how eating animals causes a pandemic? So the animal rights groups are all in helping with the othering. Because it fits their story of the world. Which still doesn't make it true. Good intentions still doesn't mean you should skip the facts. Though PETA has never felt tied to facts before and I can't really expect them to start now.
Odds are, and I don't know, because again we don't know yet. Odds are this came from the lab in Wuhan that was studying coronaviruses in bats. The one where one of their researchers had already been on record not following proper safety protocols. That's also, probably, where the first conspiracy theories of it being lab created came from. It wasn't. It jumped from bats to humans, and it might have happened in a lab, but it wasn't lab created.
Just a bit of common sense here can help to see reason. Where did bird flu come from? Birds. Eating them? No. Living with them. The dander and the feces and the urine. All of that. People who lived with the birds in their houses and on their houses and in their yards eventually caught it. Hantavirus? For those of us who grew up in the Southwest we can tell you, do not get near the droppings of mice and rats, that shit will kill you. Literally. It's not from eating them, it's from their droppings. Swine Flu? Not from eating them. It's in the poop. It's in the urine. It's in the dander from their saliva. It gets in our lungs and then takes off from there. And even then with bird flu and swine flu it's rare that it makes the jump. But when it does it can be devastating, because it's rare that it makes the jump and we don't have the antibodies to fight it.
Like this version from bats.
It's new.
We are all facing something we haven't ever had before.
But we didn't get it from eating bats.
Right now we are being bombarded with news about this strain of coronavirus constantly. And what we thought we knew at one point can shift. And when it does we need to make sure we are shifting what we are doing with it (like don't wear a mask vs. wear a mask). Facts are going to be what gets us through this. So we need to make sure we aren't spreading disinformation. No matter how trivial.
This didn't come from people in Wuhan eating bats.
Stop saying it.
Even if you really want it to be true so you can other that shit away.
Stop it.
No comments:
Post a Comment