zlacker

>>ruarai+(OP)
This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1]

This article points out that a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world. We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https://www.resea...

>>gregwe+pV1
There is no requirement that bats be transported to Wuhan. It's close to a known bat virus, and that's all we know. There are local bats in Wuhan, needless to say. Other species can easily be involved. The truth is that there is nothing particularly surprising about the way this virus evolved. Fundamentally this is a pandemic like any other. They happen in some species or another every year.

And that, more than anything else, is why we should be suspicious of "exotic" theories like human intervention. It's an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary proof. You seem to be arguing the opposite, when Occam is clear that we should be betting on natural evolution.

>>ajross+1n2
Is it Occam's razor?

The Bayesian probability suggests the odds that it would evolve by chance AND first become an issue right next to one of the top three bat virus research centers in the world are pretty slim.

It would be like a new mosquito disease first being an issue in human population next the CDC headquarters in Atlanta instead of somewhere in Africa of South America. Sure - there are mosquitos everywhere - but the chance that a new disease would start in Atlanta are very slim.

>>handmo+rC2
If I were to build a bat virus research center... i'd put it close to where bats are. So these aren't independent.

But your point is still a good one

>>throwa+TE2
Bats are everywhere.

The specific bats that host the ancestor of COVID-19 are quite a bit far away from those labs. The disease was first noticed near the labs.

Looking at the mechanics of the thing¹, I'd put a lab leak on similar odds of some village near the bats being infected and spreading it from there.

1 - I know nothing of their policy and competence to judge those.

>>marcos+7H2
> The specific bats that host the ancestor of COVID-19 are quite a bit far away from those labs.

This is wildly misstating the science. That bat virus is a relative, not an "ancestor". And it's not known to be limited to those "specific, far away" bats, that's merely where it was documented. Believe it or not we don't routinely test every animal species for an exhaustive catalogue of virus variants. It's just shotgun science.

And as it happens there was a close relative to covid found on the same continent in a species group that exists in a broad continuum basically everywhere. A bat-to-bat transmission to Wuhan is a bleedingly obvious hypothesis.

And yet we have to talk about all this Andromeda Strain nonsense anyway, based largely on jingoist US politics.