[ceejayoz]

> look at how it's impossible to publish anything exploring a lab-origin hypothesis for Covid-19 in a peer-reviewed journal...

How do we "look at" that?

An absence of peer-reviewed articles in reputable journals could be an indicator that this is impossible due to a big conspiracy to hide the truth, but it's also exactly what you'd hope for if there is no good evidence for that hypothesis.

[eloff]

Yes, that could be the reason. The authors of the paper I linked specifically call out censorship by journals, but maybe it's just them left with that impression. They did give citations[1],[2] to backup that claim.

I don't think there is some grand conspiracy going on, just that the experts early on decided it's a natural origin and completely unrelated to the lab, without any evidence I might point out, and now there's a very real and all too human tendency to dismiss anything else as quackery. Whether or not this is actually the case here is debatable, but we know know it's all too common in science and elsewhere.

[1] Segreto, R. & Deigin, Y. Is considering a genetic manipulation origin for SARS CoV 2 a conspiracy theory that must be censored? Preprint (Researchgate)

[2] Robinson, C. Journals censor lab origin theory for SARS CoV 2: https://www.gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/19475-journals-c...

[ceejayoz]

> the experts early on decided it's a natural origin and completely unrelated to the lab, without any evidence I might point out

No, that's BS. There is evidence, a quick Google search away, published in Nature back in March.

https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/03/26/genomic-research-po...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

[eloff]

You misunderstand me. Lab origin does not imply engineered. That's a possibility, of course, but far more likely is it is a natural virus, possibly altered in experiments, where the mechanism can be a form of selection, not necessarily engineering of any kind.

Lab origin, to define the term clearly here, means a virus, natural or otherwise, that escaped a lab, likely by accident.

This is not farfetched, it happened with SARS-1 twice in Beijing: https://www.who.int/csr/don/2004_04_23/en/

It seems, just by the coincidental location of the emergence of SARS COV2 in Wuhan of all places, to be the most likely origin scenario, just on a probability standpoint.

[ceejayoz]

Demonstrating that - that it's a natural virus released (accidentally or intentionally) from a lab - would be the realm of an intelligence agency or police forensics, not a genetic analysis of the virus like the debunked article linked upthread.

[eloff]

I won't grant that. If you were to find a close enough genetic match to a strain known to be in a lab, that would indeed constitute strong evidence.

Now the "debunked article" cites 89% similarity to a published strain, but that's hardly a smoking gun. That's not to say genetic analysis cannot constitute proof, however.

I think the problem is, if there ever was such a strain in the Wuhan lab or elsewhere, it's very likely that the evidence had been intentionally destroyed by now, making it unlikely we'll ever know the truth.

It's not like you can prove it didn't leak from a lab either, at least not unless you're lucky enough to find a very close match in nature somewhere.

[ceejayoz]

> If you were to find a close enough genetic match to a strain known to be in a lab, that would indeed constitute strong evidence.

In two possible directions. You'd still need additional evidence demonstrating it was lab --> nature, not nature --> lab.

> Now the "debunked article" cites 89% similarity to a published strain, but that's hardly a smoking gun.

Right, and virologists say citing 89% similarity is bogus, as that's actually substantial difference in genomes. It's evidence in the opposite direction asserted by the paper.