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by snowwrestler 1104 days ago
It’s absolutely not common sense, we have tens of thousands of years of evidence that viruses can evolve to cause human illness, and zero documented examples of a man-made novel virus doing so.

It would be an extraordinarily rare and noteworthy event in human history. The bar to prove that it happened to cause COVID is very high and the direct evidence (not circumstantial) for it is so far very low.
1 comments
wizofaus 1104 days ago
Did GP imply if a virus was leaked it must be man-made? Obviously the fact that the exact virus hadn't been seen before is suggestive of that but it's not inconceivable the lab happened to have samples of a never-before-seen naturally occurring virus that they were planning to do research on. That wasn't the same lab that released the first genome sequencing of the virus though (I gather it was in Shanghai). Not sure how virus research is usually done but I would have thought genome sequencing would be one of the first procedures you'd undertake, and there's no suggestion the Wuhan lab had done such sequencing (implying if they had, it was covered up).
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wizofaus 1104 days ago
Btw this seems to be a pretty thorough and technical overview of the various hypotheses: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00583-23 It concludes zoonotic origin to be the most likely, though certainly doesn't rule out other alternatives.
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randomperson01 1104 days ago
Imperiale, the last author is a known gain of function proponent with a history of downplaying the possibility of a lab leak

https://twitter.com/emilyakopp/status/1620884457032155136?t=...

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snowwrestler 1103 days ago
> Did GP imply if a virus was leaked it must be man-made?

This is what the “lab leak” theory is. It’s why every conversation of lab leak is tied up with comments about gain of function, etc.

The interesting thing about SARS-COV-2 is that it can infect humans and cause illness (unlike the vast majority of known viruses). When people talk about the origin of the pandemic, it is the origin of this property specifically that they mean. The lab leak theory is that this property originated in a lab.

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wizofaus 1102 days ago
The paper I linked to above has as one hypothesis that it was a naturally occurring virus, cultures of which had been stored or worked on at the lab, and "leaked" by way of infection of workers there. Seems just as plausible as some source virus having been manipulated to increase its infectiousness to humans.
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