zlacker

> generally it’s beyond current science to independently create mutations for a specific purpose.

Labs are the places where people go to push the boundaries. If we go with lab-leak, it is extremely possible that they had figured something new out. They were doing something novel in there, because they were paid money to do novel things.

>>roenxi+(OP)
If we're going to play at paranoia and assume the virus was engineered, it doesn't necessarily follow that the release was an accidental leak.

It would be trivially easy for a hostile power to covertly release a pathogen in another country.

It would also be trivially easy to engineer simultaneous release in multiple locations.

It would be less easy but not impossible to take an existing pathogen during a pandemic, engineer a variant, and release it in another country.

There would always be ambiguity and uncertainty about the source, because there are no telltale markers that unambiguously define an origin, or even whether a pathogen is natural or man-made.

I am not suggesting any of this happened. But I am pointing out that biowarfare has some unexpected covert possibilities.

While Covid may or may not be an example - insufficient data - any defensive strategy should consider the possibility that some other pathogen might be seeded deliberately.

>>roenxi+(OP)
It's true that labs were pushing boundaries, the Wuhan lab as well. But every time they succeeded in doing something novel, they were celebrating it in the media. If they really had been able to reach this major technological breakthrough, one would expect that they would have made this one public as well.

I would say that it's more likely that this was a natural mutation that got its chance to survive natural selection because of the lasting and intense contact with human researchers in the Wuhan lab. There are some media sources that show that researches didn't take too many precautions with avoiding this contact. E.g. there are pictures of researchers without wearing gloves and one that's even showing bites from bats.

>>TheOth+z8
We are not playing paranoia. And you have a valid point that in this scenario it's not crystal clear that it was accidental.

>>misja1+gb
It depends how quickly the mistake was made. Totalitarian states are not famous for admitting mistakes, in fact they hide them with all their tools. So I don't think your media hype story is a good explanation.