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

Yep, all we can do is estimate probabilities with the extremely limited data on hand.

Your Phd is showing.

The problem with having expertise is the ability to see how wrong, not-even-wrong, or sideways everyone else sounds when chatting about the subject.

The problem with a phd is making sure everyone knows how little you think of them.

I'm not "attacking" them for wanting to have access to large amounts of raw patient records (which is, in fact, what the dispute was about). It's just not surprising that a sovereign country would refuse to allow foreigners to have that data.

Certainly this is unlike e.g. the 1977 flu pandemic, whose genetic sequence provided strong evidence that it was an accidental release of something derived from a stored 1950 sample. Even so, at the time the WHO said "laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time":

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bul...

And nothing requires accidents to happen the same way each time. If SARS-CoV-2 was a lab accident, then it's probably an accident involving a novel bat-origin coronavirus collected from nature. The WIV probably had the biggest program sampling such viruses in the world, and that's the database they made unavailable.

Why do you think that database is unavailable now? The WIV's stated reason could possibly explain why they took it down in the first place (though it would be a spectacular coincidence), but it doesn't explain why they can't bring it back up.

Note that I asked this in my previous comment, and you chose to ignore it, instead responding to the less substantive comment from another user. You likewise ignored my original question about the database until I asked it twice. You didn't discuss the possibility of an accident involving a novel, unpublished virus (which you consider the most likely lab accident scenario, I believe correctly) until others brought it up.

I don't think that's malicious, but that's not a comforting pattern. Virologists are supposed to be the experts, so they should be the ones presenting (and refuting where applicable) the strongest and most likely scenarios for a lab accident. Instead, they (and you) seem entirely focused on defending the profession, refuting easy and wrong arguments, and waiting to see how long it takes adjacent non-specialists to learn enough to discover the harder ones. You then dismiss their arguments, because they (David Relman, Alina Chan, Richard Ebright, I assume Marc Lipsitch too; the list is getting long) are mere molecular biologists or epidemiologists or whatever, and not specialist virologists.

Regardless of what we eventually learn about the origin of this pandemic, that's not the behavior of a profession that can be trusted to regulate itself, and I believe the world is realizing that now. It would be unfortunate if important virological research gets banned because the regulations are drafted by half-informed outsiders; but if virologists themselves don't seriously engage with the possibility that their work just killed 2.9M people, that's what will happen.

Of course that's not all virologists. Étienne Decroly has been pushing quite openly for an investigation of a possible lab accident, though mostly in French-language media and perhaps you'll find something wrong with his resume too.

And just so you don't miss it: Why do you think that database is unavailable now? Please feel free to ignore everything I've written except that question.

The government made its first public announcements pretty much at the same time that information on the patients leaked online, on 30 December 2019. It was even on the national news that evening.

China's low death count is exactly what you'd expect for a country that had a severe lockdown early on, and which has not had significant community transmission since.

Beginning in late January 2020, there was a strict lockdown throughout China. In Hubei, people were essentially told not to leave their homes, food was delivered door-to-door, local volunteers went around checking people's temperatures at home and sending sick people to hospital or quarantine, in order to prevent even family members from infecting one another. The virus was starved of hosts and driven to near extinction in the country.

When China opened up again, there were sporadic cases in some cities, which were finally dealt with through mass testing campaigns. In Wuhan, for example, the government tested nearly all residents (about 10 million people) over the course of a few days in June 2020.

There have been a few outbreaks since. China has very strict quarantine rules, but the virus somehow finds a way in every few months. Most recently, someone who was infected walked over the border from Myanmar, without being tested or sent into quarantine. When these outbreaks occur, the government tests nearly every person in the affected region (the newest twist is now that there are vaccines, the government is vaccinating every person in the affected border town - in previous outbreaks, they would have just done PCR tests on everyone). When you have the resources of a massive country to throw at a small, localized outbreak, you can actually contain it.

So the basic situation is that China had one major outbreak in Hubei province early on, but that the virus has been nearly completely absent from the country for more than a year now. China's death toll is exactly what you'd expect for an outbreak in one province that infected <5% of the population of that province before it was stamped out.