COVID-19 Lab Leak Debate

Yes. Some more quotes might clarify:> These papers fill in some interesting details about the early outbreak at the market in Wuhan where the epidemic was first identified, but they don’t identify an intermediate host species that caught the virus from bats and then spread it to humans. Nor do they identify a precursor virus in a population of wild bats that lives near Wuhan or near farms supplying the Wuhan market. They show that the virus was introduced to the market at some point, but t

Are you serious?Occam's Razor says the only (non-vet) BSL4 lab in China, studying bat coronaviruses, several miles from known first virus reports, that has had multiple previous virus leaks, with huge information shutdown by China for a year, is the more plausible culprit.

This depends how you define "like this one"; but Zhengli Shi personally discovered the origin of SARS in bats, and her group is probably the world's top researcher of such viruses. The only lab I'm aware of that's remotely competitive is Ralph Baric's. If anyone knows of others with programs of similar scale, please post citations.Of course far more virology labs exist in the world. But since this pandemic is SARS-like, the correct comparison is only labs working

I can't speak to this article, because I don't have the technical knowledge to evaluate it.I think that if you don't accept that it's a reasonable possibility that this escaped from one of the labs in Wuhan, you're being unscientific. The evidence for it having come from the lab is:1. The Wuhan Institute of Virology published papers in the past two years about their experimentation with chimeric coronaviruses. Viruses similar to this one were without question pre

I've seen an article claiming that it spread from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But not in the sense that they created, improved or selected it. I gather that they were simply isolating and studying viruses from bats that had been collected in southern China. And they were doing that based on concerns about new pandemics, given experience with SARS and MERS, and the expectation that there would be more zoonotic jumps from bat populations.

I don't think you're being very good faith right now.Clearly a lab studying coronaviruses is interesting. Clearly its possible that the lab could have had a leak. Clearly it's possible a farmer could have wandered into a cave, or run into a bat in the wild. Clearly it's possible that it didn't originate in China.There is certainly enough evidence to investigate the lab being a possibility. It definitively being responsible or not is definitely of interest. There wa

Occam's Razor indeed. The lab in Wuhan was studying bats and coronaviruses. Animal transmission is completely consistent with a lab leak, especially given that the virus in question is transmissible before symptoms.The wet market in Wuhan was not selling bats.

The US frequently has it's own lab incidents including even with anthrax. China must be having lab incidents as well. There isn't a smoking gun to indicate either that this is a lab outbreak or natural. However, in the absence of evidence we need to ask ourselves which is more likely:1) A disease traveled hundreds of miles to a large city without leaving a trace of evidence2) A lab had yet another outbreakAlmost all of the outbreak attention has been focused on the Wuhan lab t

That's correct: researchers have found a lot of similar coronaviruses in southern China.> “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she re

I lean towards the accidental lab escape theory, given the work the Wuhan lab was known to be doing, while only being a level 3 lab, and that the first cases originated in a nearby market, it feels like it satisfies Occams shaving implement.As for why there were no previous wild outbreaks, that I can't answer,except that the people who found the origins of SARS in horseshoe bats in Yunnan didn't find the virus itself, but rather it's genetics spread across diverse strains of co