The media's lab leak fiasco

How many hate crimes have been committed? There have been 3.5 million COVID-19 deaths officially. Sorry but the truth is more important. Hate crimes are already illegal.

I think they're saying that feeling the event instead of thinking about it is a problem.

A lot of times the news is all on about something as an emergency that will do something terrible if you don't pay attention to it. There may be some seed of importance in there to lend it credibility, but a large portion of the time it's simple manipulation and I ignore it on principle for that reason.

In other words, I usually tune it out because of that and instead go look for primary sources on whatever is making the news, instead, and even when I read the articles, I care only about the sources and whether I can verify them. I simply skip all the sections that are opinion.

The 1977 flu pandemic was a known virus though which was released. It was highly plausible that the virus could have been in a lab.

This virus is literally unlike any other known virus. The closest known virus to it is RaTG13 which is only 96% homologous and the 4% differences across all its basepairs is very high. We have a closer relationship to apes than SARS-CoV-2 does to RATG13.

And we had SARS-1 in 2003 and H1N1 in 2009 and MERS in 2012, where there's no lab involvement at all. Not to mention Ebola, Zika. It estimated that some 30+ viruses have spilled over from animals to humans since the 1970s, and there's been one lab leak.

And we know that Yunnan province has bats with very similar viruses, with one virus having been identified which is almost certainly the precursor to SARS-CoV-1 and another virus which is the cousin of SARS-CoV-2, and we have a spillover event that happened in 2003 to Guangdong with SARS-CoV-1 showing that this can certainly occur without the involvement of any labs.

What remains that is objectionable about the spillover theory of SARS-CoV-2 is the "wild coincidence" of the WIV lab being in the same city as where the spillover happened. This time. But a large city is likely where it would have been identified first. Estimates from the genetic clock of the virus is that the spillover happened sometime as early as October. It would have been spreading in rural areas before it hit the nearest big city and caused a superspreading event and was noticed. To accurately determine the likelihood that the spillover was in Wuhan and not somewhere else you need to accurately know the distribution of the bats in China, the distribution of the sarbecoviruses in the bats, and the intermediate animals that might have been involved and their movement and the movement of humans. We know from SARS-CoV-2 that the virus jumping from bats in Yunnan to Guangdong can happen. We can expect it would be unlikely for the virus to leapfrog all the way to Beijing.

We don't have all that information, so it now becomes pulling numbers out of butts time. To me that feels more like rolling a natural 20 on 1d20. With SARS-CoV-1 we rolled a 6 and it turned up in Guangdong. If we rolled a 11 or 12 maybe it winds up in Congquing. But we have no idea what the intermediate species might be, which might make spillovers in Congquing unlikely if those animals aren't farmed near there. And we still have no idea of the mechanism by which SARS-CoV-2 wound up in Guangdong, but we know it did, and it didn't involve a lab.

The lab leak theory is not Occam's razor. We've had many, many pandemics and epidemics and none have been associated with research labs. We've had SARS outbreaks in China that are not associated with a lab. There is also no proof beyond circumstance to associate it with the lab.

And it's not wrong because Trump said it. He may end up being partly correct. The fact remains he had no reason to be as confident in his pronouncement as he was aside from political expediency. Cotton was far more measured in his statements even if he was still stretching. I'm also saying that the MSM and scientific consensus only really threw a fit over the bioweapon theory and inflammatory rhetoric. Even the infamous WHO study said accidental lab leak was possible.

Your first example there is literally an attempt to mass produce live virus for biological weapons, with human infectious viruses. As are most of your examples. This all changes if the literal goal of research is "mass produce liters of viable virus".

But viral research in general doesn't do that, because it's a huge hazard, and unnecessary (and expensive, labor intensive etc.)

What I am drawing contention on is what physically would have to happen for a lab leak to occur (and the other side problem: if it's a natural borne virus already capable of human infectivity...then it was already in the wild).

Take the 1977 issue: the suspicion is not that it was an accident with a preserved sample. The suspicion is that the Russians were actively growing up the virus (a human infectious virus) - for some type of work, probably a vaccine trial.

So we've got two basic problems: why would the Wuhan lab be growing up large quantities of this specific virus (and is there evidence they were?)...and if it was already human infectious though, why is it more likely it escaped the lab, when such a thing would already have to be in the wild to have been recovered?

There'd be no reason, having discovered COVID-19, to start growing up the virus before it had been sequenced. And there'd be no reason, without already knowing what it does, to not publish a paper describing the act of isolating and sequencing a new coronavirus, which is the type of research the Wuhan lab put out all the time. Researcher's operate on publish or perish, and Chinese researchers publish everything they can.