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
The fact that they didn't find an intermediate host after more than a year of search should tell you something.

>>bgandr+Lp2
It took nearly a century to somewhat establish the geographical origin of the Spanish flu and even these results are still a bit controversial to this day [0].

The reality is that epidemiology is not a straight forward nor simple field of research, finding concrete and solid answers is usually way more difficult than most people assume when they want answers to point fingers.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/emph/article/2019/1/18/5298310

>>freefl+qK2
what I'm saying is that until the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2 is known to be exactly the same virus that was researched in Wuhan institute of virology, it's obvious that lab leak should be number 1 hypothesis. That wouldn't be so, if covid started in Beijing or Nanjing. Or if Wuhan wouldn't be home to one of the two BSL–4 labs in China. And the only lab to my mind that investigated SARS-CoV-2 closest known relative before the outbreak. But since all those facts are true, I really have a hard time considering other hypotheses.

>>bgandr+S63
SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in Wuhan, but it's not that clear that it's where it originated. The genetic divergence between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 is explained with about 20 years of natural evolution, which puts the common ancestor somewhere in late 2000s, and given that bats migrate, the ancestor occurred potentially anywhere in Eurasia or even Africa.

Post-hoc analysis of waste water and patient samples in Europe shows that it was circulating in Europe by mid-late 2019, way before the patient 0 in Wuhan.

So the leak hypothesis, while feasible, would have to address why the virus was seemingly abroad before it became a problem in Wuhan itself.

Of course it's a reasonable hypothesis, but putting it as number 1 is kind of reframing the whole picture.