[yellowapple]

Were any of these "theories" (they're hypotheses, at best) ever mutually exclusive? It seems entirely possible - and maybe even probable - that SARS-CoV-2:

- Originally evolved in the wild to at least some extent

- Was being studied in a lab and escaped

- Found its way into a wet market near said lab

[bradleyjg]

Originally evolved in the wild to at least some extent

Almost everyone thinks this is true. Even the most fringy people don’t seem to be claiming that a virus was synthesized from scratch.

Found its way into a wet market near said lab

Ditto for this one. It’s pretty clear that there was a cluster of people early on that were infected in or near the market.

—-

The distinction between the lab leak and non-lab leak theory is whether the lab had anything at all to do with the chain of transmission.

If patient zero caught the virus in the lab or from a vector that was once in the lab, that’s lab leak. It’s apologists for the lab that want to conflate lab leak and bioweapon in order to dismiss the former as a nutty conspiracy theory.

[igouy]

> … want to conflate lab leak…

And if a lab worker had become infected while field sampling captive farmed "wild" animals for the lab and brought the infection to Wuhan?

And if a lab worker had become infected while buying captive farmed "wild" animals for the lab and brought the infection to Wuhan?

And if a lab worker had become infected while buying captive farmed "wild" animals for dinner and brought the infection to Wuhan?

[areyousure]

Your example chain of events would be called "lab leak".

[woooooo]

But the lab is completely superfluous to the chain of events. It's jammed in the middle so we can still say "lab leak".

[bradleyjg]

How so?

Suppose a lab worker went to a cave hundreds of miles away and collected a bunch of bats. Those bats were returned to the lab. At some point a different lab worker exposed himself to one of the bat carcasses and caught proto-Covid-19. Three days later he stopped at the wet market on the way home from work to pick up dinner and infected patients 1-5.

In what way is the lab in this scenario superfluous? If it had better and enforced protocols for handling potentially infected specimens there would have been no pandemic.

[woooooo]

Because there's no reason it has to be a lab worker involved.

The ground zero wet market in Wuhan is several miles away from the virology lab, and across the river.

The simplest explanation is that one of the 11 million Wuhan residents who do not work at that particular lab brought it to the wet market. It was right before spring festival, lots of people traveling.

Inserting "possible" events that loop in the virology lab while all of the initial infections were nowhere close to it, with no evidence, is just trying to keep "lab leak" alive. Sure, it's possible! We could assume it was lab workers somewhere in the chain, or assume the CIA, we can assume whatever we want.

[eggy]

I lived in Macau for 6 years, and I went to Wuhan more than a few times. How is "several miles away from the virology lab, and across the river.", a virology lab that specifically studies coronaviruses, be so much more unlikely than a bunch of people traveling from places that don't have bat caves or other zootonic sources be more likely? Also, going to the wet market from work is very common for lunch and to pick up food on the way home. I have been to the wet market in Wuhan.

Second, COVID-19's furin cleavage site is unique from all other coronaviruses and that is what allows it to bind so well in humans. A new preprint (not full reviewed, Oct 2022) is interesting from a genomics perspective on this being a potential bioengineering marker[1].

I think just because Orange man called it out early on, it immediately became a non-starter for most people. A coronavirus lab just mere miles from a wet market where it supposedly bloomed, and contrary to finding other zootonic sources of other viruses relatively soon, none has been found at all in the past two-plus years. The wiping of databases by China; the involvement of US/Europpean/Russian agencies in the Wuhan lab; the whole NIH/Fauci mess with funded research there in gain of function or whatever you want to call it research, and it is unlikely?

Common sense has left the room during the political divisiveness these past years. I do believe over the years more evidence will come out proving a lab leak given the advances in genomics, intentionally slow drip feed of documents, and the sheer number of factors pointing towards this. I do believe it was an accident, and not a bioweapons thing, and originated from the Wuhan lab. Lab leaks are more common than people think, and having worked in China for over 7 years, I can imagine this was not your movie rendition of a BSL-4 lab, but one with a lot of warts. I say this about other countries too. I did some work for an aerospace robotics lab and I was dreaming of the BSL-4 suits and all, and what I found was a normal shop with out of tolerance machinery. This was in the U.S.

[1] https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/preprint-covid-19-shows-f...

[woooooo]

I've also been to Wuhan and it's a big town with more than one place to buy food.

It's absolutely possible that the epicenter wet market was on a particular lab worker's way home and that's how the spread started. Also possible that someone who lived in the countryside, contracted it from an animal, and went to Wuhan to visit family for spring festival.

That biomarker stuff is interesting and I'll have to take the biologists' word for it. If it looks and quacks like a bio weapon, that is evidence. "Some people generally study viruses across town" is a lot weaker.. it's like automatically blaming Columbia University for an infection in Brooklyn because they have bio labs.

[bradleyjg]

You’ve now pivoted from saying that the lab is irrelevant in the lab leak scenario to saying the lab leak scenario is unlikely. Those are two very different statements.

Why the need to throw everything against the wall to see what sticks?

[woooooo]

I'm saying it's being shoehorned into the middle of a series of events, in a way that is both irrelevant and unlikely. And I'm positing that the shoehorning is because people are really attached to the idea of blaming a lab, given that said lab is not a necessary or likely component of the story.

I can't prove a negative, you believe what you want.

[roelschroeven]

They were not really mutually exclusive, but were often portrayed as such. The lab leak theory got confused with the intentionally fabricated theory, probably as a strawman argument to discredit the lab leak theory.

For what it's worth, your scenario seems to me the most probably by far. I don't think we'll ever know for sure, since China has done it's best to destroy all evidence (we should be careful not to take that fact as evidence for one theory or another though).