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[return to "US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins"]
1. esja+Da[view] [source] 2021-02-13 19:04:52
>>lazycr+(OP)
I am yet to see a single piece of evidence which rules out the lab leak hypothesis. Meanwhile the circumstantial evidence in favour of that hypothesis (including China’s behaviour) continues to pile up. We may never discover the truth, but I really hope we do.
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2. pgodzi+6x[view] [source] 2021-02-13 21:38:28
>>esja+Da
What evidence could ever rule it out?
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3. triple+8C[view] [source] 2021-02-13 22:18:32
>>pgodzi+6x
Identification of an animal host? For MERS-CoV, that host (camels) was identified in a little more than a year, and genetic analysis shows multiple spillovers:

https://elifesciences.org/articles/31257

For the original SARS, it's palm civets, identified in less than a year. (The link to bats wasn't discovered until much later, by Shi Zhengli; but the intermediate host is enough to feel pretty confident it's natural-origin.)

For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting for that intermediate host. That's the significance of the early pangolin papers; but as Alina Chan and many others have noted, those papers have significant data quality issues, and even the Chinese have pretty much abandoned the pangolins.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v1

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