zlacker

>>codech+(OP)
Anybody who has ever worked in a wet lab, or a lab of any sort, knows that accidents happen. All the time. Things catch fire, things are dropped, labeling issues happen, anything you can think of.

I worked for many years in a lab, the accidental leak hypothesis was and still is what I consider the most probable. Calculate the joint probability of everything we know about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 happening and it should be obvious that the "lab leak" should be _thoroughly_ investigated before dismissing it.

>>tpfour+88
What makes lab leak more probable than cross species transfer, something that happens all the time?

>>542458+B8
As I understand it we haven’t identified a similar enough animal virus to be the source. China has and continues to have every incentive to find it.

>>bradle+k9
It also differs from every betacoronavirus backbone that had been used for genetic modification (and there’s no clear reason somebody would want to come up with a new one), which is basically the same problem but in reverse.

We’ve never, despite years and years of trying, been able to identify an origin for Ebola. The basic reality is we don’t know anywhere near all the diseases that animals have.

>>542458+la
I’d guess several small teams have received single digit million dollar grants to look for the origin of Ebola. Maybe one or two got double digit millions.

China put sanctions on Australia that will and have cost their economy billions for implying that the lab leak hypothesis is plausible. Reasonable or not the Chinese government believes suppressing this theory to be a major policy goal. So I expect they’ve either spent orders of magnitude more effort than we ever spent on looking for Ebola’s origins, or they have some reason to believe they wouldn’t find anything.

This isn’t a smoking gun, but it is a dog that didn’t bark.

>>bradle+qd
by guess, do you mean estimate, or just a real guess? Is there somewhere I can read more about the teams that have looked for the ebola origin and how they're funded?