| > These stories remain ludicrous when compared with the unambiguous epidemiological evidence for zoonosis that we have in hand. What would you consider the strongest evidence for zoonosis? All previous pandemics of novel[1] viruses have been of natural origin. But the technology to enable such an accident has only existed for a few decades, so that seems far from decisive. No one had died in a plane crash before the Wright brothers, but that doesn't mean the risk wasn't there. We've found lots of viruses related to SARS-CoV-2 in bats; but no one questions that the virus is ancestral in bats, just whether it passed through some postdoc's hands on its way to humans. We've found new bat viruses in Laos, and perhaps SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally from that; but the WIV was also sampling in Laos, so perhaps it emerged that way too. I don't think natural zoonotic origin is impossible, but I certainly don't see unambiguous evidence for it. > The damage it does is distracting us from the unregulated wild-meat and fur industries that were the overwhelmingly likely cauldron for evolving these strains (as in SARS-1!). I'd certainly argue for restricting those industries, even if this pandemic turns out to be lab-origin, just as I'd argue for restricting certain virological research of concern even if this pandemic turns out to be natural-origin. Per above, neither risk seems small enough to me to ignore for the sake of the other. 1. I say "novel" to exclude the 1977 flu pandemic, which somehow nobody gets upset about even though ~700k people died. |