zlacker

>>delbar+(OP)
Whenever this topic comes up, the discussion seems to consist largely of _extremely_ strong opinions against the perfectly plausible hypothesis (don't forget, the evidence of zoonotic origin is equally thin on the ground).

My question is, why? What does it matter whether the virus originated from a lab or from a wet market - it isn't any more dangerous if it came from a lab, nor does knowing the origin really help dealing with this crisis at all.

It is certainly interesting to know where it did originate, and that knowledge could inform a debate on the future of (respectively) wet markets and animal husbandry practices, or BSL facilities, but these don't strike me as particularly emotionally charged topics, and in any case the posts I'm referring to don't mention these debates...

Anybody care to explain why you would respond so strongly to claims of lab origin?

>>bearbi+d7
> evidence of zoonotic origin is equally thin on the ground

What are you talking about? Zoonotic origin is the source of the majority of viruses:

> Approximately 60% of the known infectious diseases and 75% of the new emerging or re-emerging diseases infecting humans came from animals. SARS-CoV-2 is the latest addition to the seven coronaviruses found in humans, and experts said that all of these viruses either came from bats, mice, or domestic animals.

> More so, bats are the source of the Ebola virus, rabies, Nipah ad Hendra virus infections, Marburg virus disease, and influenza A virus.

https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/26492/20200717/covid-1...

> An estimated 60% of known infectious diseases and up to 75% of new or emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic in origin (1,2). Globally, infectious diseases account for 15.8% of all deaths and 43.7% of deaths in low-resource countries (3,4). It is estimated that zoonoses are responsible for 2.5 billion cases of human illness and 2.7 million human deaths worldwide each year (5).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5711306/

>>js2+zm
One can conclude you believe it purely coincidental that the Wuhan Institute of Virolgy specialized in research on bat coronaviruses?

A paper in the lancet early in the year reported that the Wuhan Seafood market not only did not sell bats, but that many of the early patients reported never visiting the market.

At this point, it may be too late to ever discover the true origin of the virus.

>>SpaceR+uq
It isn't coincidental. The reason the institute is there is because of the high prevalence of bats and bat viruses in the region. If you want to study bat viruses you can't pick many better places. The researchers involved, including connected US researchers, have been warning about this for years.

Ironically one of these researchers, Daszak, was politically targeted for his connections to this Wuhan lab [1], even though he and Wuhan scientists have been trying to get the attention to this problem for some time. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02473-4