[someuser54541]

Genuinely surprises me that there are people out there who think or have been persuaded the virus is of natural origin. The lab right next to the market was literally studying and experimenting with the exact same type of virus. How can a someone think that that's just a coincidence?

Add that to the fact that the funding for that research lab was approved by the same guy who become the de facto thought leader on the virus in the U.S., AND funded by the foundation of one of the most recognizable American billionaires. To put the cherry on top, even suggesting a synthetic origin resulted in bans on most social platforms!

This stuff is common sense...Occam's razor comes to mind. No wonder there were so many "conspiracy theories".

[bee_rider]

> Genuinely surprises me that there are people out there who think or have been persuaded the virus is of natural origin. The lab right next to the market was literally studying and experimenting with the exact same type of virus. How can a someone think that that's just a coincidence?

It seems plausible, at least, that it leaked from the lab, in the sense that labs aren't magically impenetrable and leaks could happen.

> Add that to the fact that the funding for that research lab was approved by the same guy who become the de facto thought leader on the virus in the U.S., AND funded by the foundation of one of the most recognizable American billionaires. To put the cherry on top, even suggesting a synthetic origin resulted in bans on most social platforms!

I don't understand what this is supposed to mean. How does the fact that this guy (Fauci?) approved some funding make COVID seem more likely to have been leaked from a lab? It seems natural that somebody who's been working in government on medical topics at a high level for a long time would have approved funding on lots of things, and also likely that they'd become a figurehead in a pandemic, but I don't see any deeper links.

[projektfu]

Absolutely incredible to think that the national institute of allergy and infectious disease might fund research into infectious disease.

[peyton]

I think you’re committing a motte-and-bailey here. We are talking about research deemed so dangerous Obama banned it, not infectious disease research in general.

[bee_rider]

It looks like the US government stopped funding Gain of Function research for 3 years while working on handling guidelines, is that what you are referencing? That seems more like working out some details than burying the forbidden tomes in the desert.

[kelseyfrog]

My Occam's razor says that every other virus has a natural origin, why wouldnt this one too? Maybe your razor needs sharpening?

[adamredwoods]

Seeing how the previous SARS-CoV was from natural origins, most likely the following ones will be, too.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7113851/

>> In most bat families, both alpha- and betacoronaviruses are known, and these detections have originated from both frugivorous and insectivorous bat hosts. Lack of detection in the remaining bat families is likely due to non-exhaustive sampling of the almost 1200 extant bat species (Schipper et al., 2008, Simmons, 2005, Teeling et al., 2005). This void may be filled in future studies.

[someuser54541]

> My Occam's razor says that every other virus has a natural origin, why wouldnt this one too?

That's simply not true. There's an entire branch of virology dedicated to synthetic viruses; the first was made over 20 years ago.

[natch]

You seem to think a natural origin virus can't be A) examined in a lab, and leaked; B) cultured in a lab, and leaked; C) tweaked in a lab, and leaked.

All three of these are possible. And all are compatible with your Occam's razor (and mine).

My bet is with option C.

Lab leak of a natural-origin, but tweaked, virus.

Yes, it can be both natural origin and tweaked. When you tweak something, you have to start with a something, and that something can have a natural origin.

The evidence against the lab leak appears cooked up based on data provided by interested authorities in China, and was assembled and presented by compromised people (people in the field with an active interest in protecting their own field) who actively promoted the false claim that they had no conflict of interest.

[natch]

What do you think "gain of function" research is even doing? Starting with natural origin viruses, and tweaking them.

[MockObject]

How can you prove that natural origin is the hypothesis selected by the razor in this particular case?

[shadowgovt]

The point of Occam's Razor is you can't prove the things the Razor leans you to. Not in a way sufficient to remove the need to invoke the Razor. But you can say that one explanation is simpler than another (such as a pandemic virus being more closely patterned to every other pandemic in human history than to a novel mechanism that has never become a pandemic before).

I see a bright glow on the eastern horizon about 7AM and it's probably the sun coming up. It could be the first strike in a world-ending nuclear exchange. I can't prove it isn't.

... but it's probably not.

[MockObject]

I wasn't asking for a proof of the phenomenon, but a proof that the razor points to that phenomenon.

[shadowgovt]

That's going to come down to an individual observer's priors on probabilities of "pandemic virus being more closely patterned to every other pandemic in human history" vs. "pandemic introduced via a novel mechanism that has never become a pandemic before."

[MockObject]

Wasn't the lab working with coronaviruses? So maybe some of it escaped. I really don't see how that's an unnecessary multiplication of entities. Is the objection simply that, pandemics have emerged from markets, but not labs? But we know that an escape of a coronavirus could lead to a pandemic.

I see nothing needlessly complex here, and certainly not extraordinary.

[whydid]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is why people are skeptical.

[MockObject]

Great attempts are made to prevent lab leaks, so a failure of procedure can't be considered extraordinary.

[arisAlexis]

It depends on bayesian priors.how mahy coronaviruses were studied, how frequently a new virus is found next to a biolab of said virus by chance etc. The extraordinary claim could be that it is of natural origin actually.

[divided]

Fun fact! There are just 9,110 named virus species as of 2021. But there are estimates that mammals and birds may have as many as 1.7 million undiscovered viruses. An older source says there were ~200 some known viruses that could infect humans as of 2013. They estimate there are 800k unknown ones which could infect us. Basically every time they look for viruses, they find new ones.

[peyton]

However, the evidence that Ecohealth Alliance refuses to share their Wuhan lab notebooks “explains away” other beliefs.

If you’re at home and you hear loud booms, then look at the calendar and see it’s July 4, the date “explains away” the thousands of other explanations for why you are hearing loud booms.

[arisAlexis]

How many bat coronaviruses existed in the vicinity of the Wuhan market, including the specimens from the laboratory ? How many bats were freely roaming in the neighborhood? That's a much better probability analysis, not a flu virus in Antarctica

[divided]

Right, what I’m saying is we know <1% of virus types, and it’s reasonable to believe we know <1% of coronavirus strains.

The bats don’t need to be at all near the market, the theory is an intermediate host was in the market. A bat could infect the host population days prior or years prior. A long potential span of time.

It might be illustrative to look at MERS. They found camel populations >3,000 miles away from the outbreak with antibodies to MERS. One potential explanation is the virus doesn’t sicken camels and had been spreading in their population for a long time prior to transmission to humans.

Or we look to SARS. They did not find SARS in a bat population, but after 5 years of searching they did find a cave where all the building blocks existed. It was a couple provinces away from the outbreak. >500 miles.

So despite your beliefs, how many bats freely roaming the neighborhood may not actually be a much better probability analysis than flu viruses in Antarctica. /s

[arisAlexis]

Because the theory of intermediate host hasn't Led anywhere after 3 years but we know for sure and as a fact that experimentos with bat coronaviruses did happen 1km from epicentro, I don't get why people insist so much. I think it's more like "I hope it's not true" thing.

[bequanna]

How is it an extraordinary claim?

It is by far the simplest and most obvious explanation.

[arisAlexis]

Add to that that China forbade investigations and furthermore these regimes have a long history of obscurity

[AnonymousPlanet]

Studied and then escaped from a lab does not equal synthetic.

Exactly nothing in your post supports a synthetic origin over a sample from nature that got studied in a lab.

Jumping to these kinds of one sided conclusions should be a red flag.

[natch]

It could also be studied and altered in a lab, and then escape.

[AnonymousPlanet]

> It could also be studied and altered in a lab, and then escape.

Of course. But saying "It was studied in a lab, therefore it must be synthetic" is just idiotic and pretty much derails the entire conversation.

It derails the conversation because it conflates a number of issues that have to be assessed seperately: lab safety, mucking about with deadly deseases, and the intent to set deadly deseases free.

If you start conflating any one of these, it becomes more easy to deride the entire conversation as tinfoil hattery. If just one of those components is an easy target for derision or is seen as unlikely, everyone who dares to pick up any of the other points gets painted in the same colour in the public eye. There doesn't even need to be any evil intent behind it. It's just how people are.

And this is precisely what happened when people started pointing out the existence of a lab next to ground zero. A lot of scientists retracted their speculation on this because they were immediately put into the same category as the crowd shouting "tHe cHiNeSe made iT!!".

[natch]

Exactly. And so the crowd shouting "tHe cHiNeSe dIdN't mAkE iT" has been dominating the conversation by disingenuously pretending that the bar to be met is 100% total from-scratch lab synthesis or nothing.

[stonemetal]

I thought it was common sense to not believe in a thing if there is no evidence of a thing. The only way I am going to believe it was a lab leak is if credible evidence shows up. Until then it is an unknown.

[misja111]

Exactly this. I'm completely stunned how everybody seems to be ignoring the fact that the closest relatives of the Covid virus are in Yunnan, which is 1500 km away from Wuhan, or even further, in Laos. So a zoonotic origin of the outbreak which started in the Wuhan market would have involved animals transported to the market over 1500km or more. Doesn't anybody ask themselves, why Wuhan? Why was there no outbreak in any other city in China that was closer to Yunnan? Or even some in some market in Yunnan itself?

[mikeyouse]

Everyone agrees that SARS1 was of natural origin, right? All of the same points you're making about Covid19 apply equally to the origin of SARS1.

First outbreak of SARS1: Foshan

Distance from cave containing progenitor virus in Yunnan to Foshan: 1,400 km

Doesn't anyone ask themselves why Foshan? Why not Qujing or Hanoi?

People don't take the location as some dispositive point proving the conspiracy because 15 years prior, a bat coronavirus from nearly 1,500km away infected an animal in the wildlife trade that started a pandemic in busy metropolitan area. So it doesn't seem especially unlikely for that to have happened again.

[beiller]

I have the opposite Occam's razor thoughts. My opinion is we are not capable of developing in a lab a virus that is so transmissible and survivable in human species only. I think the complexity of the virus machinery and its interactions inside of our bodies and immune system is beyond astronomical in complexity. It's laughable to suggest that we are so intelligent as to invent a better version of the machinery that is hypothesized as the very machinery responsible for creation of multi cellular life itself.

[astrange]

Well, SARS-CoV-2 isn't transmissible in humans only; it survives just fine in many other mammals, including pets.

This is basically the reason we can't get rid of it. Even if we had a perfect human vaccine that blocked transmission, it wouldn't help.

[johnwdefeo]

Speaking as an artist, many (most?) of my enduring works were the result of an accident of some kind. I call them "happy accidents" because I recognized that the mistake was better than whatever the vision was that I had at the time.

As a corollary, there are unhappy accidents, and with respect to life forms in a chaotic system, such accidents can perpetuate and endure without human recognition.

[samatman]

The lab in question was doing gain of function research.

The existence of gain of function research shows that you are wrong.

[someuser54541]

> My opinion is we are not capable of developing in a lab a virus that is so transmissible and survivable in human species only. I think the complexity of the virus machinery and its interactions inside of our bodies and immune system is beyond astronomical in complexity. It's laughable to suggest that we are so intelligent as to invent a better version of the machinery that is hypothesized as the very machinery responsible for creation of multi cellular life itself.

The very first synthetic virus created in 2002 and was modeled after polio, which is fairly transmissible and affects humans. That virus was made 20 years ago; synthetic biology has come a very long way since then.

Does that fact alter your opinion?

[beiller]

Sorry it does not. Was that virus more deadly, effective, or in any other measure better than the original polio? Or was it "polio" with a spike protein glued to it's head?

[sfink]

You can trigger a pandemic by making a virus less deadly too.

[iso1337]

There is a huge variety of viruses, just because someone wrote the equivalent of "Hello World" doesn't mean you can write a complicated CMS anytime soon.

Synthetic biology (the actual synthesis of DNA) has come a long way, we don't understand all the components yet though.

[astrange]

> The lab right next to the market was literally studying and experimenting with the exact same type of virus. How can a someone think that that's just a coincidence?

If they built the lab next to the viruses that were already there, then it would be reverse causation, which isn't a coincidence, but also kind of is one.

That's the meaning of "correlation is not causation".

[wk_end]

Except they didn't. The WIV was founded decades before coronaviruses were a subject of interest, and the bat coronaviruses they were researching that SARS-CoV-2 is related to all come from caves in Yunnan, which is about 1,500km away.