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>>ruarai+(OP)
My understanding of the author's central thesis is this: the US, despite its world-class virology and disease study labs, regularly has lapses in procedure that regularly lead to situations in which the public might be exposed. Given that this is happening in our own backyard, we might reasonably expect countries of similar status (like China) to experience similar lapses.

That reads as reasonable to me, but raises a subsequent question: if these lapses are so common and so many countries possess the capacity for serious mistakes, why don't we see more regular outbreaks (if not full-blown pandemics) caused by labs? In other words, what makes COVID special? I didn't find a satisfactory answer to the latter question in the article.

It's my (uninformed, uneducated) opinion that the severity of the author's claims don't correspond to the reality of the last few national and international disease crises (AIDS, Ebola, Zika, COVID). Which isn't to say that we should absolutely dismiss the possibility that COVID originated in a lab, only that claims that it did amount to currently unsubstantiated claims about COVID's special status among other recent pandemics.

>>woodru+bz1
Other viruses do escape the lab sometimes. The first SARS virus escaped the lab more than once.

https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...

>>medyme+CA1
I'm not claiming that they don't! The article has multiple examples of viruses escaping either individual containment or the lab outright.

What I'm claiming is that the volume of attributed escapes indicates that the average escape has relatively local consequences. In other words: historically, when everything goes wrong, it hasn't resulted in a global pandemic. What, then, made or makes COVID special?

Maybe the answer is raw numbers, and that it was bound to happen eventually. But "one of these incidents was bound to cause a global pandemic" is the exact same reasoning as the (original, still mainstream?) "wet market" theory. What I'd personally like to know is why I should believe one over the other, apart from human propensity to believe conspiratorial claims.

>>woodru+QC1
COVID-19 is special because it doesn't cause severe illness in most people. SARS killed a far far higher percentage of people it came in contact with, and made 100% of them sick, so it was much more easily detected, and therefore contained.

>>koheri+LD1
Right. The last case of smallpox was from a lab leak but people knew better than to fuck around with that.

Covid is asymptomatic and mild enough in enough people that masks get political