Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

And here is probably the most salient argument of all.

It comes down to occam's razor.

Sure, is it /possible/ that some scientist in a lab decided to use an entirely unknown and undescribed natural virus as the subject of their experiments? And use a completely out of nowhere cleavage site from a distant coronavirus that nobody talks about or really studies to do it? And then that virus escaped?

Sure.

But in order for that to be true, we need to make some new assumptions. We need to assume such a person exists, that they had that exact idea, and that it worked and they didn't tell anyone about it, or they all agreed to cover it up, and then some of them got sick (and again, covered it up) and it got out into the public, and voila, pandemic.

Or, it could have been a completely natural event that we know already happens all the time, in the contexts we know it to occur, using mechanisms that have already been described.

On a pure numbers game, on a scale of pure virus-host interactions, which do you think happens more often? People out in the provinces use bat guano as eye drops, eat bat in soups, use bat guano as fertilizer, harvest it without gloves, tour caves without any protection, etc. All of these are well-described. They are all known to occur on the scale of many thousands if not tens of thousands of events per day throughout rural China. Each one of these is a roll of the dice.

OR, how many times do we think a human contaminates themselves in a virology lab in china, working on coronaviruses? or with bats? Sure it probably happens some, but I have a hard time believing it happens more than 100 times per day in China. There just aren't that many bat colonies or virology labs.

So Occam's razor would tell us that the most likely of these two scenarios is the natural one. Is that conclusive proof? no, and I never said it was. I don't think at this point conclusive proof is possible. We're just making estimations. I've always just been making estimations.

A lab release is much less likely than a natural one, even if both are /technically/ possible.

A lot of things are /technically/ possible. On the scale of things, I think the lab leak is likely /enough/ that China should open up itself to international investigators, to show with all available evidence it probably didn't happen. But I don't think it's likely enough that we should all be condemning china, or fueling racist anti-chinese sentiment, or all the other consequences of these news stories. The consequences are right in front of you, anti-asian hate crimes are on the rise in the US, and 30+% of the US thinks the lab release is the most likely scenario.

I'm not saying we stop talking about the lab release, just that we need to put it in the proper context of probability. It is /possible/ but it really is not very /probable/.

And SARS escaped from a lab twice. In China. The government at the time admitted it. So I’m not 100% that’s the example I’d go with haha.

It’s important to split this in two: one thesis is that it was invented or created or synthesized at a lab in China. This I’m far less bullish on.

The other separate thesis is regardless of origin, man made or wild, it accidentally or intentionally found its way through the doors of a lab in China and into society. It’s this one we’re talking about. At least I am.

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 with SARS-like viruses, weighted by amount of such work.

Also worth noting that gain of function may be a distraction. It's entirely possible that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus but still emerged due to WIV staff activity, either from culture in their lab or just from a researcher who got infected while sampling. The WIV's sampling program was the biggest in the world, visiting remote caves known to be inhabited by infected bats, to bring back samples to be cultured, sequenced, and otherwise manipulated.

If the virus was manipulated in the lab (by genetic engineering, serial passaging, etc.), then it was probably starting from a novel natural virus. Many virologists seeking to exclude a lab origin have noted correctly that SARS-CoV-2 shows no signs of being derived in any known way from any known virus; so the WIV's (considerable) ability to sample new viruses from nature seems more significant to me than their ability to engineer them in the lab.

And just to address the frequent and wrong counterarguments:

1. The WIV is not located in an expected natural spillover zone. Their sampling trips were to Yunnan and surroundings, near Kunming or Pu'er, about 900 miles away.

2. If this was a naturally-evolved virus, then the probability that it was spread by an infected WIV researcher isn't [# of WIV researchers]/[# of total people in Wuhan]. WIV researchers are a vanishingly small fraction of the total population of Wuhan, but they're a large fraction of the total population traveling from remote bat caves in Yunnan back to Wuhan. An expert deliberately seeking novel viruses is far more likely to find one than a merely reckless wildlife smuggler. In theory the expert knows the risks better and will take precautions; but many photographs exist of WIV researchers handling animals with nothing more than a surgical mask and nitrile gloves.

3. The WIV certainly hadn't published every virus they'd collected. For example, RaTG13, the closest known animal virus to SARS-CoV-2, was reportedly collected by them in 2013, but published only after the pandemic emerged. Marc Lipsitch notes that if a researcher had become infected on a sampling trip, then the WIV might never even have sequenced the virus before the pandemic emerged.

To be clear, nothing above says SARS-CoV-2 definitely emerged due to WIV staff activity. The arguments that it definitely didn't all boil down to "because the WIV says it didn't", though, and China has thoroughly obstructed any attempt to audit that claim. It's possible that they're obstructing for a different reason--for example, the CCP's favored "frozen food" theory seems to be trying to exclude not only WIV lab origin, but origin anywhere in China, natural or otherwise. Nevertheless, I'm shocked to see how many people are willing to take the same one-man dictatorship that claims the camps in Xinjiang are for voluntary job training at its word.

Hey,

Let me know what proof you would want to show I am who I say I am.

Thanks

I think you totally get the concepts, but the way you talk about it is strange, hence my time traveler comment :)

You understand the nuances better than most. I'm guessing you're self taught? I've never read the origin of species, but I feel like you might have!

The points you're making are a given in modern evolutionary theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_pressure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation

>Actually, CRISPR/Cas is a fantastic example of lamarckian evolution.

This, however, is completely wrong.

>Lamarckism, also known as Lamarckian inheritance or neo-Lamarckism,[1] is the notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism

CRISPR has nothing to do with use or disuse. Lamarckism is only relevant as an example of what evolution isn't.