The fact that you aren't aware of the 1970s flu in the Soviet Union which was caused by a lab leak is telling. Again confident absolute statements from someone who doesn't really understand the topic they are commenting on.

There have been numerous lab leaks that are recorded in history and they happen every year.

After SARS it only took 4 months to identify the intermediate host which was a civet. After MERS, it took nine months to identify a camel as an intermediate host.

18 months later with vastly more scientific resources at their disposal and also technology that didn't exist for the other two like smartphones, no intermediate mammal host has been found yet.

The Occam's razor suggestion for this is the reason for this is the only intermediate mammal host that exists is a humanized mouse with human ACE2 receptors lining its lungs.

You know, the humanized mice that were specifically mentioned as being present in the Wuhan Institute of Virology by multiple sources including grants applied for and received directly stating this.

https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...

This entire comment is the personification of a person who has taken their political identity and with no self-awareness applied it to science. You have no basis for your confidence other than the hatred of your political enemies.

I watched brainwashed GOP folks cling to the WMD in Iraq myth for years after it was proven false. You might not be do different from them.

Its only recently that research labs could engineer these viruses. Only recently have you been able to engineer mice with human ACE2 receptors, and breed viruses in them. History is not what you base your conclusions on in 2020’s biochemistry.

It has been strongly asserted by the scientific community that Covid-19 bears no hallmarks of an engineered virus. In fact, no one in this thread is even suggested it was engineered. That's the whole point of the article. The "accidental leak" theory is being conflated with "engineered weapon theory". The only options on the table are "animal -> human" or "animal -> lab -> human". Both are plausible and we have no conclusive evidence one way or the other.

Engineering a virus, in the sense that you're talking about, is not what was meant. Allowing the virus to naturally mutate in an animal host, over thousands of generations, will get you to the same endpoint. This is gain of function research, the whole point is to find out if the virus could naturally evolve some feature you are interested in. Engineering it to do so would defeat the point.

This is not exactly accurate. But it’s easier to get to the full story if people accept the lab leak of an unmodified virus as a possibility. However, the “assertions” are misleading and have been debunked. The virus does appear to be chimeric. There is a missing link in both hypotheses, but the lab leak hypotheses offers a few possible explanations. The zoonotic hypothesis still doesn’t have an explanation for that part.

You're not actually refuting any argument the parent made.

First, pointing out that other pandemics have happened absent lab accidents doesn't negate all the evidence pointing in that direction this time. As far as evidence and probability goes (with regard to the potential evolutionary paths the virus would have had to have taken in the wild), the lab leak hypothesis is very strong. The simplest answer is that it leaked from the lab a few miles away studying this exact family of viruses.

Second, the parent wasn't saying anything about whether or not Trump was twisting the truth or being dramatic. His whole point is that the discussion was able to be hijacked by the simple act of a divisive figure talking about it. It's fine if people dismiss Trump (the smart thing to do honestly), but allowing that to bias you in the opposite direction without any evidence is making the exact same mistake he did.

> And it's not wrong because Trump said it. He may end up being partly correct. The fact remains he had no reason to be as confident in his pronouncement as he was aside from political expediency.

except his CDC head claimed after the new administration took over that Trump's administration did have additional classified evidence that made it more likely. It is extremely likely that the intelligence community knew of the chinese researchers who had gone to the hospital (and maybe more) way before it was released to the public. By the time these facts are made public, they have been researched and assigned a high level of confidence.