[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.