Lab Leak 2.0?

It's great to oversee certain hypotheses, but as a whole it's largely clickbait, IMO.

Aside from what I said, for example, GoF research generally introduces silent mutations at about the same rate as natural evolution, because it's experimental evolution after all. Likewise, such research often implies loss-of-function, due to uneven selection pressure (unless you do GoF in humans, which isn't really needed in a pandemic scenario).

But on the other hand, he raises the point of the low level of silent mutations, which is more a case of genetic modification than GoF, and doesn't even mention the possible loss-of-function.

So even though the lab leak is plausible, she's using arguments that contradict each other, knowing that at least one of them is invalid (most certainly the GoF one).

We have a record of successfully tracing viral origins. This is extremely detailed and difficult science. The last two coronavirus outbreaks took around fifteen years to understand. The previous pandemic was HIV which took even longer than that. Thinking that there is a quick and easy way to understand the origins of SARS-CoV2 variants based on narrative inference is essentially asserting that it is different this time. That might be the case, but it will probably take a long time to be sure. In the mean time we can be confident that we understand previous natural viral origins and also predict that there will be more coronavirus outbreaks no matter what people do in labs. Science and history did not suddenly change because there is an interesting hypothesis linked to a dramatic narrative.

> /tin-foil

Indeed, we will likely never really know what the truth is here - even if the CCP dissolved tomorrow I imagine it would be years upon years before we start seeing anything emerge. A bit like the USSR.

> Definitely prefer incompetence to malice here, but maybe a decision was made to "sit back and assess" while the problem grew more serious.

I imagine that initially the CCP leadership was making decisions based on bad data. I.e. the classic "we have so much grain comrade we have to throw it away!", hence why the local government leadership in Wuhan were purged.

> Faking terroristic plots and blaming protesters is old hat [..]

I would say it's 'tried and tested'.

> A re-run of Tienanmen Square was starting to look inevitable.

I wouldn't yet rule it out. These protestors never vanished, the feeling of the people appears to still be strong (although nobody wants to be the nail that sticks out).

> What if instead of that well-trod path of war, they chose to boost the poll numbers by allowing a crisis to occur and saving the day?

How would that have looked like? I imagine it would have been achieved by keeping Hong Kong under zero lockdown to the point of collapse, and then rushing in with supplies, etc. Instead they were pretty quick to lockdown.

> In fact, a totalitarian regime may be better-able to enforce health mandates and become productive again sooner.

Not so long ago, their "5 year plan" entailed global medicine dominance, which you may argue they achieved during the pandemic. Pretty much all PPE was coming out of China. I think they made a mistake in restricting the export of PPE as other Countries suddenly saw them as a supply risk and begun to decentralise.

> What's more, USA was also dealing with a kind of dueling rebellion between BLM and Trump-Forever types. Perhaps the two agreed that the world needed a cooling-off.

I doubt that. The CCP are very interested in fuelling the political divides in the US. You get CCP officials Tweeting (despite Twitter being banned in China) stuff like "I can't breath".

I can't of course rule out that this was on purpose, but I think even the smartest of analysts couldn't possibly predict how this all would have played out. It was a massive gamble. I imagine the only sort of Country willing to take such a gamble is one with nothing to lose. If China's property market bubbles is really that bad (and they know it), maybe I would take it more seriously.

If you're going to flag things that are "speculation", you're going to have to flag quite a lot of things that make it to the HN front page.

"Conspiracy stuff" means baseless, hand-wavy claims. While the author's hypothesis may turn out to be false, my reading of it suggests that the argument is made in good faith, and is supported by data. It may not be the right interpretation of that data, and the conclusions may be incorrect, but I don't consider this "conspiracy stuff".

Regardless of whether or not any of this turns out to have been one or more lab leaks, we need to keep talking about it, in an evidence- and data-based manner. We still have no idea where this virus originally came from, and we need to continue to explore all reasonable options until they are ruled out, or another option is proved to be true. You may not think a lab leak is reasonable, but I think that's short-sighted, and certainly hasn't been ruled out as an option.

Given how quickly it was flagged, it feels like many/most of the flaggers didn't read it either, and just had a knee-jerk reaction to the headline.