of course it is plausible. a priori there is no reason why lab leak is more likely than natural origin. it just comes down to the evidence of what actually happened.

what you need to show natural origin is transmission in an animal population with an animal that can be linked to the outbreak location. that hasnt been found after 3 years of tremendous effort.

everyone associated with the wiv has millions of lives and trillions of dollars in damages on their heads if it was a lab leak so these people are definitely highly motivated to prove a natural origin. it has been 3+ years and nothing has been found. the more time that passes the less likely it becomes.

Very few. I don't know of any major virologist who actually says it's more likely, and the overwhelming majority say it's highly unlikely.

Right now, everything points to the outbreak being associated with animal markets, just like SARS.

You assertion is still wrong. It took about 4 years to nail down MERS as coming from camels, and the link from bats to camels to people is still fuzzy. There are several hemorrhagic fever causing viruses believed to come from animals, but with. no known source. We still don't know where Ebola comes from.

People have been looking for the animal reservoir for Ebola for decades, and we haven't found it yet.

A lab leak could be the source for COVID-19, but the lack of an animal source so far isn't evidence of that. It's precisely a lack of evidence.

I am not so sure about this assertion. And definitely, the lab leak hypothesis should not have been so forcefully suppressed as a conspiracy theory.

It has plenty of relevance. If lab leaks are the source of the virus, any serious solution will need to include improvements to lab containment and practices. Knowing what happened in a hypothetical lab leak could also help identify the original animal to study. Understanding how viruses hop & adapt from animal hosts to humans begins by studying specific cases of it.

For example, past US lab virus leaks including SARS have led the Obama administration to temporarily suspend and investigate the risks of Gain of Function research in 2014. At least one of the Wuhan labs were conducting Gain of Function research at the time of the outbreak.

That’s not what the studies suggest. They suggest that it was an important amplification point. Whether or not it originated there is an additional inference. It’s certainly possible, but alternative hypotheses are not dismissed by the market being an amplification point. A busy market is a likely amplification point, regardless of what is being sold.

I think that failure to find the virus in any wet market animal or in the wild (from the studies) starts to become its own kind of weak evidence as well. So two things are true: wet market was a likely amplification point and the lack of corroborating evidence for zoonotic origin is troubling. (Though I think its probably the most likely explanation, I don’t think studies like this actually add any new level of certainty and the same reasons to be suspicious remain.)

Only if you assume it's both widespread and endemic in the intermediate animal population.

If it's spreading at low levels through that population for some reason (like being a less social animal) then it's trying to find a needle in a haystack, and that's on top of the needle/haystack of identifying the correct animal and population.

If it's not endemic we may never find it, perhaps the intermediate population were well on their way to herd immunity before the virus jumped to humans leaving little to no trace.

There are some other possibilities too, like it could have been transmitting undetected among relatively isolated humans (like small farming villages) for some time before an infected farmer visited a market. This would significantly broaden the scope of when and where the infected animal population was.

That we haven't found the source yet is incredibly weak evidence.

Historically, there have been far, far more documented lab leaks of SARS-CoV than there have been animal-human jumps.

People that wish to shutdown lab leak conversation are quick to mix in engineering. Lots of less educated people can't tell the difference.

It is very possible that the virus was both zoonotic in origin, and leaked from the lab.

I don't think it's so clear. However, rejecting the lab leak is deeply unscientific.

From a Bayesian standpoint, before anything was known, it was silly to dismiss the probability. Estimates from before the pandemic suggested the annual risk was ~2.4% [1], or roughly less than a 50-year recurrence interval. Compare that to the base-rate of roughly 1% of natural spill-over once-every-hundred-year pandemics and it seems foolish to dismiss it. I tended to think the escape estimates were a bit overstated and so I reduced that to ~1% which puts it at about 50/50 without much additional knowledge.

After all the information to date has come in, there's circumstantial evidence in favor of both hypotheses. Unfortunately, it's quality is such that I doubt it pushes my truth estimate much beyond 60/40 one way or the other, so 50/50 remains a decent educated guess. The US top intelligence agencies mostly came to exactly the same conclusion.

[1] https://sci-hub.st/10.3389/fpubh.2014.00116

literally nothing in this article or in the sequences is indication of a lab leak.

it isn't even particularly clear there is any cover up here, particularly since an article on the sequences was published.

if there's any deliberate suppression it would seem to be to hide the fact that scientists were studying the virus sooner than previously admitted and that they should have raised the alarm earlier.

I don't think that's really true and I think that statement comes from ignorance of the volume of work done in epidemiology and public health. Lots of natural spillover events have been pretty well figured out in the past through contact tracing and finding animal reservoirs with plausible proximity to index patients and stuff like that. When that much evidence piles up, it'd be pretty unscientific to conclude a lab-leak occurred.

In this case though, a lab-leak remains a fairly plausible possibility. Natural spillover does too! We don't (and we may never) really have definitive evidence either way, but there are good reasons to suspect both.

It didn't start at the market. They tested every animal there and found nothing, yet they found many infected people there and found the virus all over surfaces there. The market was an early superspreader event, not the origin.

For some reason most discussions claiming that the lab leak hypothesis is a conspiracy theory focus 90% of their effort arguing against being a bioengineered weapon and little time arguing against the actual strongest lab leak hypothesis: a zoonotic virus was collected and brought to a virology lab, where it was passed through humanized mice, a worker contracted it, and accidentally spread it in the city the virology lab was based.

The fact that people can pick out whackadoodles in Congress who argue for stupid theories doesn't make the strong theory weaker.

You actually sort of can make that argument, yeah.

At this point, with the lab leak theory having become a lot more popular over the past year or so, the Chinese government would kill to be able to point to an animal reservoir. If they can't find it, the incentive for them to try to fake it is huge. My initial assumption is that if they haven't faked a zoonotic origin, it's probably because they can't, not because they don't want to. By assuming this, I'm assuming that they have basically looked in all the places possible by now, which seems reasonable because they have a lot of manpower and we're 2+ years into the pandemic. If they can't get the virus to infect bats/pangolins/etc, that indicates that the virus didn't originate in the wild and hence supports the lab leak theory

This supports the idea that a jump from animals is a possible explanation. It does nothing to indicate that a lab leak is a unlikely explanation (especially with a sample size of two.)

However, the fact that this arose in one of 3 cities on the planet where this research is conducted does provide significant evidence that lab leak is a likely explanation.

Given the lack of evidence, it seems irresponsible to make strong assertions that one theory is more likely than the other.

No one accepted that one paper at face value, it's just one of several examples of papers and research where actual evidence was presented and explored.

The fact that biolabs exist and leaks have happened in the past are not actual evidence. That lab still exists today and leaks have still happened in the past, does that mean a virus is leaking right now? It's just wild speculation. Wet markets also exist and have been linked to outbreaks of disease in the past. These are reasons for investigations, not for accusations and conspiracy theories.

Gradually, real evidence for the lab leak theory started to emerge. Your parking lot picture and the sick lab researchers are good examples of evidence, even though they're only circumstantial, but none of that evidence existed when people started spreading lab leak conspiracy theories. Those conspiracy theories had no evidence at all.

Even still, investigations were carried out to see if the the virus really was a bioweapon, to determine if it came from the lab, and to see if it came from the market. As evidence that it came from the market grew, the people spouting lab leak conspiracy theories ignored all the evidence for everything else and continued to spread their conspiracies even though the evidence for a natural origin was much stronger.

Any time actual evidence that supported the lab leak theory emerged the media reported on it, and when enough evidence existed to justify the lab leak theory the media took it seriously.

The lab leak hypothesis doesn't even rule out that it was a natural virus. It just says that the virus leaked from the lab. It could have been:

- deliberately created in the lab (gain on function)

- accidentally created in the lab through repeated cross-species contamination of lab animals

- just stored in the lab from a natural sample

- or even not deliberately stored in the lab but acquired through infection of a researcher on a collection mission.

It often takes years or even decades to find the original animal source of viruses. Sometimes it is never found, such as with ebola.

No, you don't get to leave information out of consideration and call your conclusions the simplest theory. Most viruses are from animal spillovers. Also SARS has been leaked from labs on more than one occasion.

>It might be more strange if it was nowhere near a wet market.

It's not strange that it was near a wet market. It is strange that it was near a lab studying coronaviruses that was at least thinking of doing GoF research of the kind needed to create COVID-19 if indeed it was created.

The spillover theory leaves too many unexplained coincidences for it to be the simplest theory.