> 3. The PRRAR furin cleavage site is not one humans would have tried it is unlike any other known furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses
I believe what you mean to say here is that there is no published literature describing these things. That may be true. But the people doing this work are the ones who would develop and then publish such knowledge, if it were indeed something they were working on.
> It is not particularly suspicious that the thing which we were worried about happening and causing a zoonotic spillover event is the thing which actually happened.
It isn't. What is suspicious is the following:
1. It happened in the city that houses the lab where this research was proposed to take place.
2. The natural reservoir of these viruses is hundreds of miles from this city.
3. The outbreak occurred exactly 2 years after this research was originally proposed, in the city that it was proposed to take place in, in roughly the amount of time one might expect this research to take.
4. Peter Daszak, despite coming out forcefully against the lab leak theory, and purposely downplaying his involvement with the lab in so doing, and being inexplicably selected as a member of the WHO team to investigate the lab origin theory, completely neglected to mention having made this proposal a mere two years prior.
If I were a major virus researcher, and my proposal to investigate the exact thing that just caused a massive global pandemic had been denied by DARPA two years prior, I would be shouting it from the rooftops as vindication. See, had you just let me investigate this, maybe we could have avoided this pandemic! But he didn't do that. He didn't mention it at all, despite its obvious relevance to all that has gone on.
This is not the behavior of someone with nothing to hide. Whether or not this virus originated in this lab, it's pretty clear that Peter Daszak is up to something he'd rather the world not discover.
Could you provide some data to support the assertion that the virus was engineered? I'm hoping something like a leaked paper, or a lab notebook, or maybe hand written data on a piece of scrap paper that somebody found in the garbage bin in china.. I mean, I'll take anything.
You will only accept hard evidence, yet you are aware that parties in China have actively removed some possible evidentiary sources. And others in USA promoted a campaign to shut down lines of enquiry, whilst withholding relevant information.
Many disciplines use Bayesian statistical models. In this case it may be the only way to "prove" a lab leak - assuming that were actually true.
I understand how this makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist. I hate that. It would certainly be better to have hard evidence. I belive we have to reserve judgement in it's absence. And keep investigating both avenues.
To paraphrase Wernher von Braun - "Hard data is worth a thousand expert opinions." :)
We don't see adaptation to the new host. This means that either the spillover happened a long time before it was detected (months, years), or the proximal host was a primate. Or, the virus could have been adapted to human cells and their surface proteins in relatively straightforward laboratory experiments. Then, if accidentally released, the phylogeny and virus adaptation process would look exactly like the one we are seeing with hundreds of thousands of viral genomes.
A spillover from nature would look like SARS1. There are rapid phenotypic adaptations in the beginning of the epidemic. The initial virus is infectious, but not anything like SARS2. In SARS2, it takes many months for real phenotypic change to appear. The rate of variation is clock-like because there are few easy phenotypic wins to be made.
This is hard evidence. What do you make of it? Maybe you have to understand genetics and evolution to "read" this material, but that doesn't negate it.
Where did I say it was engineered? We have no evidence of its natural origin either. Can you provide its natural reservoir? An animal sample? Another coronavirus with this furin cleavage site? Anything?
What we are trying to do is ascertain the likelihoods of various scenarios given the evidence we have. Not the evidence we wish we had. I do not believe, nor have I anywhere asserted, that we have proven the virus was unnatural in origin. I also do not believe we have proven that the virus was natural in origin.
What I believe is that the evidence is presently insufficient to determine, and fairly ambiguous. What is unambiguous is the extraordinarily shady and self serving behavior of Peter Daszak. Why it is that he's doing that, I don't know. It could be because he participated in the engineering of this virus, but it could be for entirely separate reasons that pertain to him. I do think we should at least make a serious effort to find out, though.
... point to it being a natural zoonotic spillover event. Wuhan had a virus institute because it is a place where novel viruses are found, not the other way around.
Actually, Bayes statistics works great in poorly defined problem spaces where we can update our priors as new information becomes available. Just like in the issue under discussion.
Your example of rolling dice is Frequentist, not Bayesian. We wouldn't use Frequentist stats in this domain, for the reasons you mention.
Btw A conspiracy theorist doesn’t change his conspiracy when new evidence comes to light. So if you are a critical thinker, you just want to know what happened there, whether lab or natural origin (or a combination of both?)
It would be interesting to see an updating Bayesian model played out over 18 months of investigation into SARS-COV-19 natural origin with no result so far. Absence of evidence is not proof of non-natural origins, but it does shift one's priors.
Thanks. I guess beyond the stereotypes there's no actual conspiracy theorists. Just people reasoning imperfectly with imperfect data.
Can you give me a few comparable scenarios where it worked great?
Why do you say so? Co-evolving organisms/species and their cross-interaction in a large changing global environment is not a deterministic process, or rather is not a process that we can predict with any great degree of accuracy. What things would "look like" is extrapolation, not evidence.
In any case, my main objection to your argument is that you're drawing inferences from an imperfect dataset and them employing backwards reasoning "Well nothing else explains it except theory A". Sorry, but that doesn't satisfy me. I still want to see actual evidence of actual work being done in an actual lab that corroborates the hypothesis. It is pretty much impossible to keep such large multi-year scientific development projects secret in this day and age. There are dozens of people involved, past employees, lab assistants, etc, etc. I work in biotech (I'm not claiming to be any expert on anything) and maybe that's why I'm finding it difficult.
I don't know whether Bayesian search is currently being used to search for the unknown reservoir species from which SARS-COV-19 jumped to infect humans (assuming a natural cause).
Under this approach, the longer the search goes on, the more we may lessen our confidence in the prior assumption that it was a natural infection.