zlacker

>>todd8+(OP)
We should really be considering this if we want to make sure something like this doesn't happen again.

Unfortunately this theory coming out during the Trump era made people knee-jerk shoot it down for political reasons, and you can also say the CCP is very invested in making sure they don't have pie on their face if this ends up being what truly happened.

>>zthrow+Ai
The problem is evidence. What is the evidence? As far as I can tell, what we have is either circumstantial (for example, the location of the first detected cases) or outright hunches (the virus seems to be more adaptive than expected for normal corona viruses).

Compare that to what we know: it's a SARS variant, in a place where SARS outbreaks have already occurred in the past, with DNA showing it came from pangolins, in a place where pangolins are caught, sold, and eaten by people.

>>metall+2k
It originated in a city with a research lab that was criticized for bad safety practices. That lab performed gain of function research on coronaviruses, and the strangest element of covid-19 is the spike protein furin site, which enables the infectivity in humans, and is not present in other coronaviruses.

Or we can take the Bayesian approach, and look at the base rate of novel pathogens coming out of China over the past 70 years and determine how many were lab leaks versus not, and realize the majority were lab leaks.

This doesn't mean it for sure was a lab leak, but it does mean it should be investigated, which is all any one reasonable has been saying for the past year anyway.