zlacker

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+(OP)
Also the CCPs investments into "political" careers in the WHO helped them alot there.

>>zthrow+(OP)
What is the actionable "fix", though? I mean: there are very real questions to be asked about gain-of-function research. There are other questions to be asked about standards for lab safety. But we should be asking these questions anyway, especially now that we've seen how devastating a real pandemic can be.

Whatever happened in Wuhan it seems like the primary evidence is gone now. Trading in unverifiable theories about a lab leak is only useful insofar is that it kicks the ball forward on these issues. However the risk here is that these debates will make the issues controversial and politicized in ways that actually make safety improvements more difficult and not less.

>>zthrow+(OP)
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+s1
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.

>>matthe+V
One actionable fix is not putting virus labs in big cities (just like Nuclear and industrial plants), the other is stronger regulation of animal markets. Both make sense independent of where the virus originated from.

>>metall+s1
> in a place where SARS outbreaks have already occurred in the past,

Not correct. All previous SARS outbreaks were in a totally different places (~1000 km away).

Prof. Shi (石正丽, the head of the Wuhan virus lab) herself said in her March 2020 interview that she was totally surprised of a SARS outbreak in Wuhan. It is not a location where it was expected.

>>metall+s1
There is a lot of evidence. The lab in question was specifically warned about by the US State Department for studying coronaviruses that affect human ACE-2.

I mentioned this in another comment, but here's the 2018 State Department warning.

Please note part (6) about human ACE2 coroniavirus:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-state-depart...

> with DNA showing it came from pangolins, in a place where pangolins

This is false. You can read the science here (note the "receptor binding studies of reconstituted RaTG13 showed that it does not bind to pangolin ACE2."

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/bies.2020002...