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by MockObject
1333 days ago
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> It’s not that it’s needlessly complex. It’s that you have a market with animals who have coronaviruses and you have a lab that studies coronaviruses. Both are reasonable explanations, but a pandemic similar to all other prior pandemics and lots of humans being exposed to lots of potential virus carriers with no protection _is_ a simpler explanation. The likelihood a lab accident is independent of "all other prior pandemics", because it is not adjusted by whether there have been two natural pandemics, or two million of them. Rather, it's adjusted by the safety practices at the lab. It's still not obvious that the wet market explanation is simpler than the lab leak. I don't see Occam's Razor making a selection here. |
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All throughout history viruses have spread from close animal contact with humans. Including—and I cannot stress this enough—a novel coronavirus circa 2002 that spread from bat to intermediary host to humans in a wet market in the very same country.
In comparison, for the lab leak you’re assuming a lab accident (rare), that it wasn’t noticed and quarantined immediately (even rarer), and that the wet market still randomly became the epicenter of early cases despite at that point the transmission being human to human (rare, there’d be no reason for it to be any more significant than any other place people gather).
So when we’ve never seen a significant outbreak from a lab accident (zebras) and throughout all of human history we’ve seen viruses spread to humans from close contact with animals (horses)… yes when there is ambiguity to what the cause is, defaulting to what we’ve always seen before—including literally just 20 years ago—is simpler.