[flavius29663]

Occam's razor works against your argument...given everything we know so far, the simplest explanation is that a chinese lab leaked a virus and it's covering it. There is no jump in logic needed. It's actually easier to explain why the virus was so close to the Wuhan lab.

[bunnie]

Maybe it's the other way around. They put the lab in Wuhan because it's easy to get many samples of the zoonotic viruses of concern due to the presence of many natural reservoirs and wet markets, and you want a lab near the action because you want to be able to study the hot spots.

In other words, your argument is like saying occam's razor concludes that fire extinguishers start fires because they are always found in the vicinity of fires.

Also I think many on this thread greatly underestimate the adaptive and evolutionary capabilities of nature. Having done some wet lab myself, I'm impressed at the ability of nature to do lateral gene transfer, and also it's damn hard to make any experiments work. Plus there are multiple layers of safety and containment around any lab experiment. Movies make engineering look like AI robots in labs and biology experiments that work on the first try, and people who say lab near outbreak must implicate the lab have probably spent more time watching movies about outbreaks than trying to engineer organisms themselves. Having spent a lot of time trying and failing to engineer organisms, occam's razor screams to me that the most likely explanation is natural evolution.

The real lab of concern are the hundreds of millions of people living in close contact with animal reservoirs, performing millions of competitive, uncontrolled evolution experiments daily, with single hosts sometimes simultaneously infected by multiple viruses, thus facilitating lateral gene transfer... and this continues to be the status quo. If you can accept that MERS and SARS CoV-1 are naturally evolved, then occam's razor would indicate that SARS CoV-2 is just one point in a series, and yet another coronavirus outbreak is likely to emerge in the next decade or so, from a dense urban area near animal reservoirs.

Distracting ourselves by fantasizing that only humans could be so devious to create such a virus makes us miss a very important opportunity to try and prevent the next outbreak through careful monitoring and research.

So, if you believe that we should have fire departments and fire extinguishers near ignition sources then, maybe we should have /more/ labs like Wuhan's in high risk areas, not less. And we'd want to encourage more cross border cooperation, not antagonize it, because viruses don't give a damn about your politics.

It's concerning that threads like this, on a forum as ostensibly pro-science as HN, are pushing ourselves further away from science and transparency...

[flavius29663]

> the presence of many natural reservoirs and wet markets, and you want a lab near the action because you want to be able to study the hot spots.

The closest relative to this virus (it's not even that close, just 95% similarity) was found in a bat cave hundreds of miles away. They flew it in Wuhan and made experiments on it (this is all documented, not some crazy theory). Something tells me it's more likely to escape from the lab right there, rather than somehow infect people for hundreds of miles undetected. Your analogy is wrong, the lab is not really a fire extinguisher, because a fire extinguisher cannot cause fires on it's own! Lab leaks happen all the time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

A better analogy is: a nuclear scientist works with heavy metals at a lab (far away from home), suddenly his family gets radiation poisoning. I wonder if it was the scientist that made a mistake, or should we focus all our search for natural radiation sources in the family's house? Sure, it's always a possibility, but what is it more likely? Also, you should at least acknowledge that the person is working with radiation and investigate that possibility thoroughly.

Those lab safety measure were criticized by the US state department https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...

> And we'd want to encourage more cross border cooperation, not antagonize it, because viruses don't give a damn about your politics.

The Chinese took the virus database offline 2 months before the official outbreak...what a coincidence. And what a cooperation effort. Renaming the closest relative virus to hide it's trail. And a lot more.

Yeah, we need more cooperation, and China needs to do it first. They created this mess, the least they can do is cooperate rather than hinder investigations. We need better lab security and better protocols worldwide.

[bawolff]

Occams razor states "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity"

It doesn't seem neccesary for a chinese lab to be involved, and the only evidence so far (afaik) is that it exists and was studying something similar. Meanwhile there exists (albeit definitely not ironclad) evidence that china wasn't involved.

If there is no evidence beyond circumstantial evidence that china had a lab near by, and there is a pretty much equally reasonable explanation that the event happened by chance, than i think occam's razor favours the one with less entities involved.

I'm not saying that china isn't involved. I'm saying that we basically have no idea and the argument that china did it is no more strong than the alternative. On the balance i find the natural explanation more compelling, but ultimately we have no idea. I also think there may be some cognitive biases going on - covid 19 has hurt, and we want scapegoat to blame. If it was natural, than we have only ourselves to blame for being underprepared. If china did it, we convinently have someone to hate.

[flavius29663]

If you take it like that, the it seems like the lab leak theory is even more probable. For the lab leak to work, we have all the entities we need: the bat fever a few years ago, ongoing studies on those coronaviruses, outbreak near the lab, very suspicious lab behavior, Chinese coverup.

If you take the other hypotheses, it goes like this: some bat coronavirus -> jumps to an unnamed animal -> jumps to a human. There is an unknown entity in this equation, which is the third party animal. This is necessary for the theory to work.

If you make me chose between a theory that has all the elements and one that might or might not find a mythical animal in the future...I think Occam's razor favors the one with all known elements. Otherwise, ad-absurdum, you can win any argument stating it's Occam's razor: you just introduce a single magic black box which can substitute any number of entities.

I am not doing this to blame China. I blame China for the opacity of the response, which at times seemed like they didn't care what happens with everyone else. I can blame China regardless of how this virus appeared. I also blame our top scientists, which covered their asses instead of coming out with everything they know and work for the greater good.

What I do want is better bio-labs safety protocols, something that can be monitor by third party inspectors, say from UN, just like we have for nuclear facilities. Lab leaks happen, it's not a Chinese thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...