zlacker

>>ruarai+(OP)
This has honestly been my unbiased opinion since essentially day 1. I believe that the release was almost certainly a complete accident, but there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus. The denialists, including the WHO and CDC and everyone else, need to get real and own up to what happened and figure out how to stop it from happening again. This has nothing to do with the PRC or anyone or anywhere else, it could have happened at any biological facility in the world and will eventually happen again somewhere unless scientific honesty and cooler heads prevail.

>>crx07+ML
> there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus.

I think that it is at least somewhat likely that it was the result of the lab's activities, but your assertion here has a huge dose of selection bias.

If the virology labs studying coronaviruses were placed randomly around the world, you'd be correct - but they're not. They're placed near locations where novel coronaviruses have crossed the species barrier in the past, and where they are likely to do so in the future.

It would be equivalent to say that lighthouses cause ships to run aground, because many teams when ships run aground it's near a lighthouse.

>>Ancapi+231
People keep saying this, but it's not true; SARS-like viruses haven't been found in nature near Wuhan. In the words of Dr. Shi herself:

> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.

https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli...

>>triple+rh2
You've said elsewhere that you think it's reasonable to to suppose they have unpublished samples that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2, indeed that's your central claim. So why do you trust this statement about their sampling results but not the one about not having anything closer than RaTG13 [18.5, p6]?

>>Siempr+H63
Honestly, I don't fully. From a standpoint of a lab accident, evidence of natural zoonosis near Wuhan would be exculpatory and they'd have no reason to conceal it. But the CCP also seems to be pushing to exclude any origin whatsoever within China, like with their frozen food theory (which is thoroughly rejected by almost all scientists physically outside China, but which the WHO team nonetheless seems to be considering).

So I think it's entirely possible e.g. that China has confidently determined the non-lab origin of SARS-CoV-2, but that it's from an agricultural practice so reckless that they've decided it's better for their reputation to leave everything shrouded in doubt. It's much more obvious to me that China is concealing something than what they're concealing. (Of course, that's usually how concealing stuff works.)

That said, I still think zoonosis near Wuhan is unlikely. In a pre-pandemic publication with no incentive to lie, the WIV studied antibodies to SARS-like viruses in the blood of people living near bats in Yunnan province. They used blood from people living in Wuhan as a negative control:

> As a control, we also collected 240 serum samples from random blood donors in 2015 in Wuhan, Hubei Province more than 1000 km away from Jinning (Fig. 1A) and where inhabitants have a much lower likelihood of contact with bats due to its urban setting.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/

So while it's possible that natural zoonosis did occur in Wuhan, I believe that would require the WIV staff to be genuinely mistaken.