[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.

[eggy]

I believe it was an accidental leak of a modified coronavirus in order to study possible epidemiology even if from the lab, and not a bio weapon. Spring Festival? If it started in Oct-Dec 2019, it would be around Golden Week. Chinese Spring Festival 2020 was January 25.

Yes there are a lot of places to buy food, but wet markets are a special type of place to buy food. The wet market in question is right across the river from the WIV, which coincidentally(?) studies coronaviruses and was conducting studies prior to the outbreak.

From a 7 June 2021 paper [1]:

Here we document 47,381 individuals from 38 species, including 31 protected species sold between May 2017 and November 2019 in Wuhan’s markets. We note that no pangolins (or bats) were traded, supporting reformed opinion that pangolins were not likely the spillover host at the source of the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

The other human coronaviruses came from bats mainly. The WIV had bats from a location known to have coronaviruses. Scientists now wear masks when bat hunting in caves, but before COVID-19 they typically did not (I'll dig up the reference later). No bats were sold at the Wuhan wet market. The US/NIH/Fauci and other world players have a stake in the WIV of some sort. They were doing research on coronaviruses, and they were manipulating the virus. Documents before 2019 asking for approval to conduct such research are in the public record.

[woooooo]

As far as I know, "wet market" just means a place you can buy live food. It's the default rather than the exception outside of tier 1 cities for most of the third world, live animals are self-preserving and don't require refrigeration. You can walk past several "wet markets" on a single block.

[eggy]

I meant they were special compared to Western market models, but there are usually large, famous ones in any Chinese city compared to any small, limited 'wet market'. In Macau it was Hung Kai Sie (Red Market), which takes up an entire block or more.

[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.