[alevskaya]

Occam's razor does not mean every coincidence is meaningful - that's just pareidolia. The simplest scenario is that this viral pandemic is like every other one in known history - including the last coronavirus pandemic - a zoonotic crossover. Something that most professional biologists like myself has have been trying to stress.

[walkhour]

I wish this was better explained to the public like myself.

Every now and then someone comes along and says: "there's no evidence the virus was engineered in a lab". But what would the evidence look like?

For example, is it possible to replicate a zoonotic crossover in a lab so that both hypothesis (zoonotic and lab leak) are equally probable?

> The simplest scenario is that this viral pandemic is like every other one in known history - including the last coronavirus pandemic - a zoonotic crossover.

Do you however give a positive probability to a lab leak? In what range does the probability lie according to most biologist? Is it more 20%, 2% or 0.2% that the lab leak is the correct hypothesis?

[8note]

I'd suggest that a wet market is a lab for replicating a zoonotic transfer.

Put a lot of immune compromised animals together with humans, and nature will find a way

[peakaboo]

The difference is - humans now has the capability to create viruses. And it's obvious that covid is created by humans. You just need to look at its generic code to figure that out.

[alevskaya]

Sorry? I was a genetic engineer for two decades who has done plenty of mammalian cell engineering and viral design work. There's simply nothing about the original SARS-COV-2 genetic sequence that looks artificial.

[gus_massa]

Do you have a link for that? Last time I read a preprint claiming that, it was about a few (4?) parts that covid-19 has that are equal to parts of of other virus. But the matches were very short and some of them not even consecutive parts. It's very easy to get matches by chance comparing all the genome of covid-19 with all the genome of other virus, and if you allow holes in the matches it's even easier.

[Ekaros]

My understanding is that in general on average DNA across things is very similar. Specifics are different, but lot of material is shared even across species.

And then take fact that there is essentially 4 characters with million pairs to read surely some random data will collide.

[jtc331]

I found that unconvincing also. However the fact that the matching parts are in the furin cleavage site (which has never been seen in a coronavirus) did at least bump claim up to “this could plausibly be interesting”.

[Ekaros]

I have always wondered if this wasn't a deep-state operation by USA to make China look bad. Would make perfect sense right? Collect some samples, make a virus, release in Wuhan. Then blame China on it to lessen their soft-power... Exactly type of evil stuff that USA is well known for... Like toppling democracies, assassinations and funding terrorism...

Sounds to me like most realistic and simplest explanation knowing the sides involved.

[jokethrowaway]

It would make sense if US officials wouldn't get money from China in various ways. Besides we also went along the "it's a natural pandemic" story until people forgot to penalise China in any way.

It sounds more like Fauci wanted to do Gain of Function research and needed partners who wouldn't complain about small details like the law. His partners turned out to be careless enough to release the virus and here we are.

[crest]

Citation needed!

[user-the-name]

Lots of people looked at it, and they did not conclude that.