zlacker

Alina Chan's WSJ article is a decent popular summary,

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-needs-a-real-investig...

https://archive.is/R6kwN

There's also been a string of academic preprints and articles, like

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2102/2102.03910.pdf

The authors tend to be kind of fringe, not surprisingly given the reputational cost (and given that if a lab origin is ever confirmed, many of the techniques that top researchers have spent their lives mastering will probably become illegal). A lot of very senior virologists are on the record as open to the possibility of a lab escape, though, for example:

> Baric said he still thought the virus came from bats in southern China, perhaps directly, or possibly via an intermediate host, although the smuggled pangolins, in his view, were a red herring. The disease evolved in humans over time without being noticed, he suspected, becoming gradually more infectious, and eventually a person carried it to Wuhan “and the pandemic took off.” Then he said, “Can you rule out a laboratory escape? The answer in this case is probably not.”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...

I don't recommend that article in general; the author uses his talents as a novelist to paint a more vivid picture than I believe the evidence justifies. I do trust him to faithfully print the quote, though.

>>triple+(OP)
The simple fact is that until you find the reservoir you can't say anything about where it came from, and they haven't found it yet.

And as your first article details, the "lab accident" theory rests on some lab doing secret virus experiments. Even if you find a whole sea of the virus in some cave, someone will argue they could have gotten there after the first "accident". Good luck disproving that without letting US virologists snoop in every lab in China.

To me "open to the possibility" is a very strong reading of "can't rule it out".

>>Siempr+9u
I think we've effectively ruled out lab origin of the original SARS and of MERS-CoV, because we've found proximal animal hosts. In other words, we've found animals that we believe first transmitted those viruses to humans, because (a) those animals are infected with a variant of the virus, and (b) that variant's genetic sequence implies it's an ancestor (or at least not a descendant) of known human variants. Condition (b) is why we believe that the animals first infected humans and not the reverse.

If we ever find the same for SARS-CoV-2, then I believe that pretty confidently excludes origin from lab manipulation (e.g., serial passaging). It would still be possible that the first human infected was on a WIV sampling trip, and not even all that unlikely (since an expert deliberately looking for novel viruses is far more likely to find them than e.g. a merely reckless wildlife trafficker).

If we see evidence in the phylogenetic tree of multiple animal-to-human spillover events--as we do for MERS--then that would pretty clearly exclude any scientific activity as the origin. At the very least, it would imply that even if some hapless grad student did accidentally start the pandemic, if they hadn't then someone else would have soon after. But as you say, so far we have neither.

>>triple+(OP)
Baric knows the truth. After all, it's his coronavirus research that ended up in Wuhan.

Ralph Baric and 'batwoman' Shi Zhengli worked together on several coronavirus research projects spanning more than a decade.

It's like asking the fox if he knows where the hen went.