[TechBro8615]

I had personally decided by April 2020 that there was sufficient information for me to believe that Covid was a lab-enhanced pathogen that was accidentally released by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. My "source" was mainly common sense (the simplest solution is usually the right one, and guilty people doth protest too much), an understanding of probability (there is a lab studying the pathogen right next to the wet market which an authoritarian regime claims was the source), and an unbiased reading of history (like looking at 2001 articles on CNN about the last time SARS leaked from a lab).

For better or worse, I'm not a policymaker, so my opinion is meaningless and would have had no outcome on what "we" could have done differently (aside: I dislike this kind of rhetoric that shifts the blame to the amorphous "we" rather than the specific policymakers with names and titles who "we" should be blaming and holding responsible for their failures). But I've at least saved some sanity by listening to my gut instincts instead of subjecting myself to the whiplash that would have come with a world view determined by appeals to authority.

It seems this is more and more necessary these days - if you rely on authority as a heuristic for truth, your reality can shift under you at the whims of politicians who manipulate it for their own selfish reasons. It's best to stay above the fray. Sure, gut instinct can be wrong, but when I'm not a policymaker and only need to be concerned with my own health and well-being, the consequences of incorrect critical thinking are usually less bad than the consequences of trusting the wrong authority. I will continue to prioritize my "gut feeling" - informed by critical reading of publicly available data, and careful triangulation of the motives and biases of stakeholders in the current political reality - over any blessed truth that "we" have anointed as "consensus."

[stubybubs]

> My "source" was mainly common sense (the simplest solution is usually the right one

https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html

75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. Isn't the simplest solution that COVID also came from animals? Just because it was a bad one doesn't make it less likely. Where did smallpox come from? Polio? Spanish flu?

Is it strange that the lab was near the wet market where it supposedly started? There are about 40,000 wet markets in China as of 2019. It might be more strange if it was nowhere near a wet market. It's a little bit like a psychic helping the police saying "the body will be found near water." Fantastic, most humans live near water.

[hackinthebochs]

>Isn't the simplest solution that COVID also came from animals?

No, you don't get to leave information out of consideration and call your conclusions the simplest theory. Most viruses are from animal spillovers. Also SARS has been leaked from labs on more than one occasion.

>It might be more strange if it was nowhere near a wet market.

It's not strange that it was near a wet market. It is strange that it was near a lab studying coronaviruses that was at least thinking of doing GoF research of the kind needed to create COVID-19 if indeed it was created.

The spillover theory leaves too many unexplained coincidences for it to be the simplest theory.

[baja_blast]

> 40,000 wet markets in China as of 2019

And yet it happened to spillover in a wet market in a city with the premier coronavirus research labs in the country. It also happened to happen far away from where these types of viruses originate. There are only a handful of labs in the county that do this type of research and WIV is the top one.

So why did not not appear in a wet market in Yunnan or Guangdong?

[lamontcg]

Guangdong was SARS-CoV-1.

We've had two spillovers now of sarbecoviruses and the first one hit a completely unrelated city. The other one happened in Wuhan, which is the biggest city in central China and its "catchement area" is probably fairly wide around it.

It does appear that they spillover in wet markets in big cities.

The level of coincidence here may look like rolling a 1d20 two times and the second time getting a natural 1.

[notahacker]

> The level of coincidence here may look like rolling a 1d20 two times and the second time getting a natural 1.

Or a more related and much bigger coincidence: a man was killed by a nerve agent in what appeared to be a targeted attack on the home of a Russian defector approximately 10 miles from the UK's main lab studying nerve agents. Which is a similar distance between the Wuhan lab and wet market, though the UK version is a rural backwater rather than a major regional capital. Sometimes relative geographical proximity coincidences are just that. (if you think there's something to the geographic proximity of Porton Down to the Salisbury poisonings, you have to try to explain away an even more remarkable coincidence that two Russians protected by the Russian government took a very short holiday to 'see the cathedral' and somehow stumbled into the same boring suburb the nerve agent was left in on the same day. And the decision of presumed target Sergei Skripal to live there... )

Wuhan would look like less of a coincidence if it had been accompanied by a characteristic Chinese coverup "the researchers have retired and wish to spend their time not talking to the media" rather than something very uncharacteristic of a Chinese government coverup (scientific papers releasing data on origins which unconnected non-Chinese virologists and epidemiologists generally find credible) or if China had been way out ahead rather than miles behind in their vaccine efforts.

Lab leaks are enough of a known phenomenon not to be ruled out as wildly improbable, but the coincidence of the virus that leaks out of the Wuhan lab happening to be one they hadn't documented and happening to plausibly spread from an epicentre which contained the other most likely vector for the transmission of zoonotic viruses in Wuhan sounds... pretty much as big as the coincidence of a zoonotic virus being in the same major city as a lab for studying zoonotic transmissions of similar viruses prevalent in that large region.

[lamontcg]

> Or a more related and much bigger coincidence: a man was killed by a nerve agent in what appeared to be a targeted attack on the home of a Russian defector approximately 10 miles from the UK's main lab studying nerve agents.

That's a good one, I'm going to have to try to remember that.

[yibg]

Maybe because the lab is located where the virus is abundant?

[baja_blast]

But it's not, the head of the WIV even stated how unexpected it was for a SARS outbreak to happen in Wuhan and area not endemic to SARS like coronaviruses. If they wanted to be near the source they should have built it in Yunnan or even Guangdong where the last one broke out.

The lab is there for the same reason there are labs in Boston or NYC. Proximity to major research institutions

[Izkata]

> Where did smallpox come from? Polio? Spanish flu?

Which time?

Lab leaks are pretty common, all three of those have leaked from labs (smallpox 5 times): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

And keep in mind these are just the leaks we know about.

[stubybubs]

> Which time?

I mean the original appearance, thousands of years ago, when it definitely was not a lab leak. The point is that our worst viruses have come from nature, likely zoonotic sources.

[tim333]

Simplest given the known facts I think. I mean all viral pandemics in the past have come from nature. However in this case where everyone agrees it came from a bat coronavirus, the nearest similar viruses were in nature 600km+ away or at the WIV 10km away. If natural you'd have to explain how it covered that distance without infecting people en route. Also why no infected animals were found. Also the WIV lab was advertising for coronavirus researcher on its job page at the time of breakout so obviously that stuff was going on.

[netsharc]

I'm "agnostic" whether it's lab leak or natural/from the market, but I'd like to ask how you can be certain that your gut feeling is right? I think to be certain is to be ignorant/dismiss other possibilites, and confirmation bias doesn't help in that regard, you start dismissing evidence that don't conform to your "gut feeling". I also shook my head at all the scientists that loudly proclaimed that "I'm certain it can't be from a lab, it's natural!" (A scientist should be aware, that like in a math exam, if they can be certain of something, they need to show proof/show the work!), but I'm not going to prescribe motives like a Bill Gates + Rotschild + pharma industry conspiracies behind these scientists proclaiming this. Although I am curious what did motivate them to make these very non-scientific proclamations.

If you ask me why the Chinese authorities were secretive, I can come up with many theories, it could've been a lab leak, yes, but it could also be them wanting to save face rather than face the embarassment of admitting the virus started there (is there anything to be embarassed about, or is the CCP, like many political bodies, full of men with grade-school level emotions?), heck their internal propaganda blames the US, saying they brought in the virus through the Wuhan 2019 Military World Games. Or the Chinese refusals could be them not wanting foreign organizations looking around their labs. Heck, if a virus started in Atlanta and the WHO said some their investigators from many countries, including China and Russia, would like to inspect the CDC lab there, Americans would probably scream the same amount...

[TechBro8615]

Well, I suppose I'm "agnostic," too. That's my point. I have no need to be certain one way or the other, so it's better to have "good enough" confidence, which I prefer to get from a (well-informed!) "gut feeling," rather than delegating my confidence metrics to some authority who can deliver me the latest proclamations of truth from on high.

Did it actually impact me in any way to decide whether I thought a natural or lab origin was more likely? No, probably not. But I'm an avid internet commenter and so naturally I spent time reading and posting about this stuff.

But there is one tangible benefit to the time I invest in researching controversies like this when the news story first breaks: I can save time in the future when the narrative changes, by skimming stories to see if they contain new information or merely reframe existing data. At least, that's how I justify the amount of time I spent reading about this stuff in 2020...

Fun fact, I created this pseudononymous HN account to post wrongthink about Covid origins - one of my first posts [0] about it was flagged (and unflagged about a year later when I complained about it in a similar comment to this one).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22912353

[hotpotamus]

Ok, given your prescience about the origin of COVID, how did that influence the actions you took to mitigate its effects?

[TechBro8615]

I lived alone, stayed isolated, kept healthy and exercised, took reasonable precautions while outside, and... because this is what you're really asking... chose not to get any vaccination, because data by July 2021 showed its effectiveness waned after three months and I had no plans within the next six months to interact with any crowds or expose myself to another individual for more than fifteen minutes. Then in December 2021, Omicron became the dominant strain, with much lower risk than previous strains, so I decided there was no sense introducing unknown variables associated with a vaccine for diminishing protection against a strain of a virus that presented risks I felt personally comfortable with accepting. (At some point I was also of the opinion that Omicron itself was an engineered strain, but I had stopped paying sufficient attention by that point to have much confidence in that opinion.)

I never felt any need to tell others what decisions they should make, and I understood my circumstances gave me relatively rare affordances of being able to remain isolated for long periods of time. Had those circumstances changed, maybe my decision regarding vaccination would have changed too. But by the time of Omicron, any risk analysis I made seemed to lead to the same conclusion that vaccination was not worthwhile, and if anything, that I should hope to contract the Omicron strain since it might confer the most effective immunity, with the lowest risk of complications, against future strains of the virus.

As of today, as far as I'm aware, I've never contracted any strain of COVID-19. Knock on wood.

[hotpotamus]

Interestingly, you did much the same thing I did despite my belief that the virus arose naturally (seemed reasonable since viruses have risen naturally for give or take a billion years). I practiced the extreme social distancing for about a year since the vaccines were not available and wore KN95 masks the rare and brief times I was indoors with anyone else. I did start getting the vaccines at some point in 2021 though I was hardly in a rush and then pretty much dropped most precautions in March 2022 figuring that 2 years was about as much as I wanted to do. And then I finally got a confirmed covid case in April of this year which left me pretty weak but functional for about 36 hours and then it passed. I do think that getting a vaccine now and again probably kept the illness mild, but I suppose who can say - I certainly recommend them to people based on my experience. While I have a friend who was practically laid out by the innoculation, all I got was a little soreness.

[oska]

> Interestingly, you did much the same thing I did despite my belief that the virus arose naturally

Except they decided not to get the injection (so called 'vaccination'), while you did. That's a crucial difference in the eyes of most (on both sides) so I wouldn't agree that they did 'much the same thing' as you.

[hotpotamus]

I didn't think it was a terribly significant difference. Why would you think so?

[evandale]

I don't either and this is coming from a 4x vaxxed who (I'll shamefully admit) was part of the crowd who shamed everyone who didn't get the vaccine.

I still think if you live in a big city or any dense living arrangements, medical field, interacting with the immunocompromised, etc. you 100% should be getting it. But I now recognize if you wanted to roleplay lumberjack living alone in the woods or had a rural lifestyle it really isn't as important.

[Vecr]

I hope it included PAPR helmets and full face respirators.

[dfee]

Perhaps not mitigate its effects, but instead refocus our efforts on accountability – both in the US and in China.

[P_I_Staker]

Common sense says that these pandemics happen cyclically, and are of natural origin. Just like all the other ones that happen every 20-100 years.

[jsnell]

So, what you're saying is that we indeed would have done nothing differently?