These threads are long, contentious, and often go in circles. To save time, I propose a scale:<p>1. It was definitely zoonotic, and suggestions otherwise are racist conspiracy theories.<p>2. While it's impossible to rule out a lab leak, I believe it's zoonotic unless confronted with hard evidence.<p>3. While I admit the possibility of a lab leak, I secretly am pretty sure it was spillover.<p>4. Both lab leak and spillover are plausible, and the best priors are past experience (dozens or more spillovers, probably one or two lab leaks).<p>5. Lab leak and spillover seem equally likely, and a lot of the behavior of the CCP, WHO, EcoHealth Alliance are suspicious.<p>6. It was almost certainly a lab leak, the CCP is covering it up.<p>7. Definitely at least a lab leak, probably an engineered bioweapon.<p>8. Kill Fauci, he was in on it.<p>This article is 3. The recent Vanity Fair article is 5. Most virologists I follow on Twitter are 2 or 3. As I say, you can save time in responding by just posting the number of where you are on this scale. Explaining why you think so won't add too much more information, it's a function of what sources you pay attention to and that can be pretty reliably inferred from the position on the scale.
I'm not impressed with this article, which is long on appeals to authority and short on actual analysis and facts.<p>I recommend this one: <a href="https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/" rel="nofollow">https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...</a><p>And this one: <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins" rel="nofollow">https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...</a>
There is circumstantial evidence for a lab leak, and there is circumstantial evidence for the wet market. That's fair, but somehow the wet market was accepted as truth for the last year, and the lab leak was treated as a crazy conspiracy. We don't know the truth, China is blocking access to look into the facts.
Maybe if journalists (and those who employ them) actually started investigating a year ago when this stuff was first coming out instead of immediately and dismissively labeling everyone who actually did as a conspiracy theorist nutjob and thus stymieing legitimate discovery, we'd have <i>slightly</i> more accurate information by now.
A good overview of the evidence so far.<p>Facts are hard to come by. It’s weight of evidence in context.<p><a href="https://swprs.org/on-the-origin-of-sars-coronavirus-2/" rel="nofollow">https://swprs.org/on-the-origin-of-sars-coronavirus-2/</a>
There are some more-or-less new facts.<p>1. The virus that WIV identified as closest to ours is identically the virus that the miners caught in 2013. It was renamed for what were described as administrative reasons, but the 2013 events were not mentioned in connection with it.<p>2. Several (3?) WIV employees were sick with Covid19-like symptoms in November 2019. WIV tried to cover this up.<p><i>If</i> there are coverups by Chinese and US officials, they seem to be trying to cover up different things.<p>Neither fact bears much on whether the jump occurred in or out of a lab, without more information than we have. Useful information would include details of the infection(s) in Nov 2019.
> 1. It was definitely zoonotic, and suggestions otherwise are racist conspiracy theories.<p>How is the zoonotic hypothesis (“virus originated in Chinese wet market” / “due to Chinese dietary practices”) any less racist?
The important question is, “who cares?” (Non rhetorically).<p>There is a useful scientific question of interest to a small nu,ebr of people: if the virus transferred from Petri dish to humans, what can we learn about bio safety practices for future research.<p>There is an unuseful question which is what most people are asking: “how can I find someone to blame after the fact for what is essentially a natural phenomenon?”<p>Not impressed by humanity on this one.
A biologist told me "it doesn't really matter, the virus is there anyways", and she is right.<p>I don't think learning how the virus appeared will help. It will only allow countries to put responsibility on china, which is only a geopolitical concern.
There is a lot of science out there that shows how Covid-19 appears to have specific qualities that make the lab leak theory very plausible.<p>I don't want to get into the weeds with all of this, but here's just one scientific paper among many investigating the actual structure:<p>The genetic structure of SARS-CoV-2 does not rule out a laboratory origin [PDF]<p><a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/bies.202000240" rel="nofollow">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/bies.2020002...</a><p>This is the exact sort of stuff you would see with "gain of function" research.
Question to those who believe the lab leak story:<p>If it came from an animal in the lab where did that animal come from?<p>If it was synthetic, how was it synthesized?
The zoonotic origin claim for Covid-19 is in the news, but it is fact free.<p>A fact: all SARS-CoV-2 sequences fit into a phylogeny with a common ancestor in Wuhan in October/November 2019.<p>Another fact: we have not found the intermediate host or natural viral reservoir from which this virus arose.<p>These are pretty intense facts. We would need a lot of other facts to make the zoonotic origin claim hold water.