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?
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).
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.
For one thing, this is a classic example of correlation != causation. Let’s say you had a shark attack on some beach and there was a team researching shark attack located right in that area. Would you then conclude that the team engineered the shark attack? The simple reality is that the most likely reason the team studying shark attacks is located in that region is simply because that region either has a history of shark attacks or even if it doesn’t have a history, is likely to have shark attacks. That’s why a team studying shark attacks would decide to locate themselves there.
The same is true here. Wuhan hosts a bat virology research institute because bat viruses are a higher risk here than in most places.
The other factor is that there is probably an infinite number of things that could look suspicious if there is such a disaster. It could be the presence of a bat focused research institute. It could be a conference that was held out there in the past few months. It could be a scientist from that region predicting a bat virus a few weeks before. It could be a district updating its pandemic protection plans in the weeks before. Etc.
The odds of any specific one of them happening are extremely low and would rightly make one suspicious. But the odds of at least one of the infinite suspicious things being true is almost 100%. And that’s probably all there is to it here. The presence of the bat research is just the 1 of many suspicious things that just happens to be true.
That being said, I think the strongest explanation is that Wuhan was considered a likely source of bat virus infections and that’s why the research was focused there.
> The bats carrying CoV ZC45 were originally found in Yunnan or Zhejiang province, both of which were more than 900 kilometers away from the seafood market. Bats were normally found to live in caves and trees. But the seafood market is in a densely-populated district of Wuhan, a metropolitan of ~15 million people. The probability was very low for the bats to fly to the market. According to municipal reports and the testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors, the bat was never a food source in the city, and no bat was traded in the market.
Source: https://archive.is/r4Yac
Now, I don't suggest that the virus was created in the lab, or deliberately leaked. But it had to be brought into Wuhan somehow. I just don't consider it dismissible, yet, that an inadvertent leak from the lab could have been the cause. I look forward to all new evidence that may emerge.
If the market was indeed the cause, then in the interests of global safety, wild animal markets of this nature should be prohibited.