If you want to study diseases you go to places where they originate. It’s odd to me that people assume this is man made when the same thing happens several times a year in other areas and every few decades an unusually bad outbreak happens.

But if it makes you feel better “ Similar logical patterns are absent in SARS-CoV-2, indicating that the virus evolved naturally.”

I don't really believe the narrative that the virus jumped from the lab, but to play devils advocate: The proper allegation is that there was a program based on funding to perform gain of function research which included taking bat coronaviruses and infecting groups of intermediate animals with them to see if certain mutations were likely or problematic.

Odd to others that some people assume research implies man made. Accidents can happen with naturally evolved viruses as well.

There are odd features with the covid genome that make it seem more than just a bat bites researcher scenario.

I agree, but nothing that is smoking gun caliber where all scientists agree the genome is engineered. My point was merely casting the widest net on research possibly being to blame, which could include many more scenarios than bat bites and GOF experiments.

There's some odd stuff though this time though for example this story https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6160720369001

At this point what would it require for you to believe it wasn't research gone wrong?

We'll likely never know. There appears to be evidence that is hard to explain, though. Hopefully that will be investigated as deeply as it can be, rather than just swept under the rug.

Likely never know the answer, or the burden of proof for accepting an answer?

The former.

So is there any possible way to invalidate the "made in a lab" theory?

No. That said, IIRC, there was some paper claiming that there was some binding (the spikes?) that appeared to be more specific to human than to any of the animals suspected of passing to us. That's at least rather surprising, if you imagine this to be an entirely natural event. And it might support the idea that there was a lab step (accident?) somewhere along the way.

Ok, so we're determining that you can easily keep the conspiracy going, with relatively minor evidence.

I'm not a microbiologist, and it's unlikely that you are one either.

I wouldn't call it a conspiracy, and it doesn't really matter what the truth is. If a Chinese lab blew it, they're not going to fess up, and there's nothing we can do about it anyway, so it's pointless to get upset about it.

It's interesting to idly discuss, in an HN sort of way, but my advice is to ignore it and continue to live your life. Or at least move on to this week's outrage-fest.

The best would be to trace how it came about naturally. For instance with Sars 1 they "traced the virus through the intermediary of Asian palm civets to cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Yunnan province." (Wikipedia)

The covid virus looks like a mix of bat and pangolin coronaviruses so it's possible that similar tracing will be done. People are no doubt trying.

Identify an animal reservoir? The chinese to be open and say come see the lab and here's the research we were doing rather than treatening to arrest people?

There seems to be broad agreement among experts that bats are the primary reservoir, and less agreement about an intermediate reservoir (although pangolins are commonly proposed). We certainly have wildlife sequences from bats that are plausibly recent close relatives to SARS-CoV-2.

As far as the Chinese lab goes, I suspect that any research they release or international inspections they allow would just be dismissed by many people as evidence that they must be confident in their ability to cover up the horrible things those people have already concluded without evidence.

The article addresses that.