That's simply not true. There's an entire branch of virology dedicated to synthetic viruses; the first was made over 20 years ago.
I see a bright glow on the eastern horizon about 7AM and it's probably the sun coming up. It could be the first strike in a world-ending nuclear exchange. I can't prove it isn't.
... but it's probably not.
I see nothing needlessly complex here, and certainly not extraordinary.
On one hand you have the market which housed animals that throughout its history some have had and spread different coronaviruses naturally. Every prior pandemic has been believed to have been from animal to human transmission, it’s seemingly the simplest explanation.
The lab leak theory of course assumes a lab accident. Biolab accidents are fairly rare, some years have no recorded accidents, others a handful. They’ve all been successfully contained with no more than a couple fatalities each.
It’s not that it’s needlessly complex. It’s that you have a market with animals who have coronaviruses and you have a lab that studies coronaviruses. Both are reasonable explanations, but a pandemic similar to all other prior pandemics and lots of humans being exposed to lots of potential virus carriers with no protection _is_ a simpler explanation.
Having said that, I’ve remained open minded and willing to consider both reasonable and unproven. Some pandemic will be the first from a lab leak, this may have been it. We will probably never definitively know.
Put another way, the simplest explanation that fits the available evidence is most likely to be correct.
At this point it seems to me that a lab origin looks rather simpler than a market origin with double zoonosis and no trace of an intermediate.
Double zoonosis? The virus jumped to us and then to dogs, cats, tigers, hippos, pigs, etc. 29 known species! An unfathomable triple zoonosis that happened many, many times (thousands?) over the years. I’d say double zoonosis isn’t too uncommon.
The initial SARS presumably passed from bat to intermediate host to humans in a wet market. This exact type of event happened in China just 20 years ago.
And there isn’t “no trace” of an intermediate host. There are suspected intermediate hosts but none confirmed. Similarly SARS had a couple potential intermediate hosts, and MERS had a potential intermediate host but unanswered questions around that, too. Scientists had more confidence in those theories, but still uncertainties.
Again, I think both theories are plausible. But being a repeat to what we’ve seen before _is_ simpler. When you hear hooves, think horses not zebras.
The likelihood a lab accident is independent of "all other prior pandemics", because it is not adjusted by whether there have been two natural pandemics, or two million of them. Rather, it's adjusted by the safety practices at the lab.
It's still not obvious that the wet market explanation is simpler than the lab leak. I don't see Occam's Razor making a selection here.
All throughout history viruses have spread from close animal contact with humans. Including—and I cannot stress this enough—a novel coronavirus circa 2002 that spread from bat to intermediary host to humans in a wet market in the very same country.
In comparison, for the lab leak you’re assuming a lab accident (rare), that it wasn’t noticed and quarantined immediately (even rarer), and that the wet market still randomly became the epicenter of early cases despite at that point the transmission being human to human (rare, there’d be no reason for it to be any more significant than any other place people gather).
So when we’ve never seen a significant outbreak from a lab accident (zebras) and throughout all of human history we’ve seen viruses spread to humans from close contact with animals (horses)… yes when there is ambiguity to what the cause is, defaulting to what we’ve always seen before—including literally just 20 years ago—is simpler.
The horse/zebra analogy is not so convincing within miles of a zebra breeding farm, with fences reported to be weak. Near this place, such assumptions don't carry their normal weight.
[0] https://www.voanews.com/a/covid-19-pandemic_chinese-lab-chec...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7113851/
>> In most bat families, both alpha- and betacoronaviruses are known, and these detections have originated from both frugivorous and insectivorous bat hosts. Lack of detection in the remaining bat families is likely due to non-exhaustive sampling of the almost 1200 extant bat species (Schipper et al., 2008, Simmons, 2005, Teeling et al., 2005). This void may be filled in future studies.
All three of these are possible. And all are compatible with your Occam's razor (and mine).
My bet is with option C.
Lab leak of a natural-origin, but tweaked, virus.
Yes, it can be both natural origin and tweaked. When you tweak something, you have to start with a something, and that something can have a natural origin.
The evidence against the lab leak appears cooked up based on data provided by interested authorities in China, and was assembled and presented by compromised people (people in the field with an active interest in protecting their own field) who actively promoted the false claim that they had no conflict of interest.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is why people are skeptical.
If you’re at home and you hear loud booms, then look at the calendar and see it’s July 4, the date “explains away” the thousands of other explanations for why you are hearing loud booms.
The bats don’t need to be at all near the market, the theory is an intermediate host was in the market. A bat could infect the host population days prior or years prior. A long potential span of time.
It might be illustrative to look at MERS. They found camel populations >3,000 miles away from the outbreak with antibodies to MERS. One potential explanation is the virus doesn’t sicken camels and had been spreading in their population for a long time prior to transmission to humans.
Or we look to SARS. They did not find SARS in a bat population, but after 5 years of searching they did find a cave where all the building blocks existed. It was a couple provinces away from the outbreak. >500 miles.
So despite your beliefs, how many bats freely roaming the neighborhood may not actually be a much better probability analysis than flu viruses in Antarctica. /s
For people in the Bay Area, this is roughly equivalent distance-wise to a conspiracy theory about an outbreak at Twitter's HQ started by an "adjacent" lab that turned out to be located in Jack London Square in Oakland.
But "This happening" needs to be defined for Bayes to be of any use. State clearly what you think happened and it can be judged, because as has been proven over and over again, the virus is of natural origin. So the proximity to a lab studying Coronaviruses isn't nearly as interesting given China's history with these viruses.
This is long but in my opinion, worth reading regarding the Bayesian probabilities that actually matter here: https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g...
What if they’d done that multiple times?
“Bias” isn’t relevant when it comes to calling out bad actors.
It is by far the simplest and most obvious explanation.
The very first synthetic virus created in 2002 and was modeled after polio, which is fairly transmissible and affects humans. That virus was made 20 years ago; synthetic biology has come a very long way since then.
Does that fact alter your opinion?
Synthetic biology (the actual synthesis of DNA) has come a long way, we don't understand all the components yet though.
As a corollary, there are unhappy accidents, and with respect to life forms in a chaotic system, such accidents can perpetuate and endure without human recognition.
This is basically the reason we can't get rid of it. Even if we had a perfect human vaccine that blocked transmission, it wouldn't help.
The existence of gain of function research shows that you are wrong.
It seems plausible, at least, that it leaked from the lab, in the sense that labs aren't magically impenetrable and leaks could happen.
> Add that to the fact that the funding for that research lab was approved by the same guy who become the de facto thought leader on the virus in the U.S., AND funded by the foundation of one of the most recognizable American billionaires. To put the cherry on top, even suggesting a synthetic origin resulted in bans on most social platforms!
I don't understand what this is supposed to mean. How does the fact that this guy (Fauci?) approved some funding make COVID seem more likely to have been leaked from a lab? It seems natural that somebody who's been working in government on medical topics at a high level for a long time would have approved funding on lots of things, and also likely that they'd become a figurehead in a pandemic, but I don't see any deeper links.
Exactly nothing in your post supports a synthetic origin over a sample from nature that got studied in a lab.
Jumping to these kinds of one sided conclusions should be a red flag.
Of course. But saying "It was studied in a lab, therefore it must be synthetic" is just idiotic and pretty much derails the entire conversation.
It derails the conversation because it conflates a number of issues that have to be assessed seperately: lab safety, mucking about with deadly deseases, and the intent to set deadly deseases free.
If you start conflating any one of these, it becomes more easy to deride the entire conversation as tinfoil hattery. If just one of those components is an easy target for derision or is seen as unlikely, everyone who dares to pick up any of the other points gets painted in the same colour in the public eye. There doesn't even need to be any evil intent behind it. It's just how people are.
And this is precisely what happened when people started pointing out the existence of a lab next to ground zero. A lot of scientists retracted their speculation on this because they were immediately put into the same category as the crowd shouting "tHe cHiNeSe made iT!!".
If they built the lab next to the viruses that were already there, then it would be reverse causation, which isn't a coincidence, but also kind of is one.
That's the meaning of "correlation is not causation".
First outbreak of SARS1: Foshan
Distance from cave containing progenitor virus in Yunnan to Foshan: 1,400 km
Doesn't anyone ask themselves why Foshan? Why not Qujing or Hanoi?
People don't take the location as some dispositive point proving the conspiracy because 15 years prior, a bat coronavirus from nearly 1,500km away infected an animal in the wildlife trade that started a pandemic in busy metropolitan area. So it doesn't seem especially unlikely for that to have happened again.
Add that to the fact that the funding for that research lab was approved by the same guy who become the de facto thought leader on the virus in the U.S., AND funded by the foundation of one of the most recognizable American billionaires. To put the cherry on top, even suggesting a synthetic origin resulted in bans on most social platforms!
This stuff is common sense...Occam's razor comes to mind. No wonder there were so many "conspiracy theories".