> So here's the thing: the more improbable thing about the lab leak hypothesis is that the lab would even have had enough virus, in virion form, to cause even 1 human infection.

I reject that. Lab leaks have been known to occur, with human casualties:

> "After the outbreak of SARS in 2003, labs around the world began studying the virus, which had come perilously close to causing a global pandemic. Since that time, there have been no less than six lab leaks of SARS. The first took place in at the National University of Singapore, where a graduate student contracted the disease from a contaminated sample. This was followed by an incident in Taiwan, when a researcher contracted it, most likely during a botched decontamination of laboratory waste. Then several leaks took place at China’s National Institute of Virology. In one case, a researcher passed the infection to her mother, who died of SARS. In each case, human error, most likely exacerbated by inadequate safety protocols, accounted for the leaks."

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-27/covid-...

Safety incidents happen a lot.

> By 1960, hundreds of American scientists and technicians had been hospitalized, victims of the diseases they were trying to weaponize. Charles Armstrong, of the National Institutes of Health, one of the consulting founders of the American germ-warfare program, investigated Q fever three times, and all three times, scientists and staffers got sick. In the anthrax pilot plant at Camp Detrick, Maryland, in 1951, a microbiologist, attempting to perfect the “foaming process” of high-volume production, developed a fever and died. In 1964, veterinary worker Albert Nickel fell ill after being bitten by a lab animal. His wife wasn’t told that he had Machupo virus, or Bolivian hemorrhagic fever. “I watched him die through a little window to his quarantine room at the Detrick infirmary,” she said.

> In 1977, a worldwide epidemic of influenza A began in Russia and China; it was eventually traced to a sample of an American strain of flu preserved in a laboratory freezer since 1950. In 1978, a hybrid strain of smallpox killed a medical photographer at a lab in Birmingham, England; in 2007, live foot-and-mouth disease leaked from a faulty drainpipe at the Institute for Animal Health in Surrey. In the U.S., “more than 1,100 laboratory incidents involving bacteria, viruses and toxins that pose significant or bioterror risks to people and agriculture were reported to federal regulators during 2008 through 2012,” reported USA Today in an exposé published in 2014. In 2015, the Department of Defense discovered that workers at a germ-warfare testing center in Utah had mistakenly sent close to 200 shipments of live anthrax to laboratories throughout the United States and also to Australia, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and several other countries over the past 12 years. In 2019, laboratories at Fort Detrick — where “defensive” research involves the creation of potential pathogens to defend against — were shut down for several months by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for “breaches of containment.” They reopened in December 2019.

From https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca..., many links to sources and more details in the original. The USA Today story is particularly interesting though (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/17/report...).

Humans make mistakes. Accidents happen. And even at the most secure labs in the US, sometimes people die. Yes, we (hopefully) learn from our mistakes; a fatal accident in the 50s or 60s doesn't mean these things still happen today. Maybe (hopefully!) all those recent breaches and safety incidents were relatively minor. Perhaps China is much better about such things than other nations. And even if mistakes can happen that doesn't mean a mistake happened here, in this instance!

But if your prior is just "BSL-2 and higher labs are safe, they would never have a containment failure" I think you may want to re-evaluate it.

Your first example there is literally an attempt to mass produce live virus for biological weapons, with human infectious viruses. As are most of your examples. This all changes if the literal goal of research is "mass produce liters of viable virus".

But viral research in general doesn't do that, because it's a huge hazard, and unnecessary (and expensive, labor intensive etc.)

What I am drawing contention on is what physically would have to happen for a lab leak to occur (and the other side problem: if it's a natural borne virus already capable of human infectivity...then it was already in the wild).

Take the 1977 issue: the suspicion is not that it was an accident with a preserved sample. The suspicion is that the Russians were actively growing up the virus (a human infectious virus) - for some type of work, probably a vaccine trial.

So we've got two basic problems: why would the Wuhan lab be growing up large quantities of this specific virus (and is there evidence they were?)...and if it was already human infectious though, why is it more likely it escaped the lab, when such a thing would already have to be in the wild to have been recovered?

There'd be no reason, having discovered COVID-19, to start growing up the virus before it had been sequenced. And there'd be no reason, without already knowing what it does, to not publish a paper describing the act of isolating and sequencing a new coronavirus, which is the type of research the Wuhan lab put out all the time. Researcher's operate on publish or perish, and Chinese researchers publish everything they can.

Those are good questions, but I think the link I provided gives some decent potential answers.

I don't know, and I'm not asserting, that any of this is true. But given what is known about the types of research being done, this doesn't seem like something we can rule out either.

For one example, the article quotes Shi Zhengli, a lab director at the Wuhan Virology Institute, who had been doing research on RaTG13, and who upon realising COVID-19 was related to RaTG13 was immediately was concerned it had leaked from her lab. According to the article, she lost sleep over this, and was enormously relieved when she could prove that the outbreak in Wuhan was not any strain that the lab had a record of storing.

I find it surprising that you are so much more convinced than a lab director of the lab in question that no such leak was possible. To be sure, perhaps she was suffering from an excess of caution...but if she found the thought plausible enough that she lost sleep over it, perhaps we, vastly further away and with much less information, should not rule the risk out entirely?

In any case, if you feel comfortable, based on your knowledge, concluding that you can rule out the lab leak hypothesis, that's great, but it does seem to put you at odds with basically every expert I've seen quoted so far.

> I find it surprising that you are so much more convinced than a lab director of the lab in question that no such leak was possible.

> when she could prove that the outbreak in Wuhan was not any strain that the lab had a record of storing.

You answered your own question. That's the point here: the evidence does not point to a lab leak.

So the director of one lab, hearing about COVID-19, apparently went "oh shit, that could have come from MY lab!" Later, she publicly announced that it's fine, it didn't come from her lab after all, then the lab was shut down, all records suppressed, and China has prevented any independent investigation.

Even if we take this at face value, and the denials were fully truthful, this tells us that:

1) it didn't leak in that form from that specific lab (of the several operating at the Virology Institute), assuming they had good record keeping. But it might have leaked from a different lab, or it might have leaked from her lab and then mutated prior to being discovered. (And, while it might seem unlikely that it mutated without any trace of intermediate forms being found, that's the exact assumption the zoonotic theory already requires...)

2) Someone in a position to know believed that a leak was plausible based on her knowledge of the types of research being performed, the quantities of material they had on hand, the safety protocols they were following, etc.

I suppose I just find that less reassuring than you do. :)

SARS 1, which is far less infectious, escaped from labs multiple times.

> Biological materials are hard to grow and store. In general, many diseases are highly species specific and/or affect only certain cell types. When you don't have a suitable cell line, the only real option is to keep live hosts. But these hosts could cross-contaminate other species/cell lines within the lab facility. Bat physiology is very different from most other mammals. If you want to study viruses in bats, it makes sense to use real animals, because you can be certain that the virus replicates in vivo, but it can be difficult to find a good in vitro environment.

The whole purpose of the lab was to grow and study these viruses, and to promote their growth in order to study how they might grow. Hard to understand how they would not have had enough virus, as you say.