What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

That would be, ironically, moderna. Will the patent court award them negative damages?

On a more serious note, to stave off conspiratorial thinking, it should be "not crazy" that a moderna furin sequence appear. If I told a biochemist to go and insert a furin cleavage site into a virus, that grad student would do an NCBI blast search and get a list of all sequences. Maybe they are more knowledgeable than me and did know that patent search was enabled (or maybe they were used to ripping off parents :| -- I'm anti-patent myself so this is not an indictment of the general process). Then that library of say a few hundred sequences is applied. Then the grad student, say, drops the 96-well plate with the virus samples, and gets infected -- It should not be surprising that the moderna sequence is the winner in the competition amongst the viruses in that grad students body because moderna has engineered that site to be a very effective site, and we know that having the furin cleavage site is correlated to virulence, so "natural selection" kicks in.

Presumably it's based on the ONS estimates.

But the comment seems to go on to say it's not nonsense.

> Reviews were mostly bad — in both senses of the word. That is to say, they were highly critical and inaccurate. In some cases, the authors said things that made clear they had not read the book but had made up their minds to dislike it. Not one but two virologists told us on Twitter that the book was full of lies — and that they had not read it. An odd thing for anybody to admit to, especially a scientist.

If you call yourself a "scientist" you have an ethical duty to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Perhaps not in the formal sense of a doctor's Hippocratic oath, but in the tradition of Galileo and Copernicus.

I will just say this:

Interest in developing and deploying nuclear power dramatically declined after Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl incidents. This lead to an increased reliance on carbon-based energy sources like Coal and Natural Gas, likely killing hundreds of thousands over the years.

I think skittish virologists rightly concluded that a lab-leak mea culpa would have a similar effect on virology and perhaps broader medical research. The author disagrees, but history has shown us what happens.

If Three Mile Island and Chernobyl had been covered up and left to conspiracies the earth would be several degrees cooler right now.