That this is someone's fault and they can be punished is, I think, the reason people want it to be true. Rather than the world is a terrifying place that sometimes kills millions.

Occam's razor in this situation is the people people claiming the lab leak theory is most likely are interested in the truth and feel that a lab leak is the most probable cause. It never made sense either way to see how the virus came into existence to be a political question.

Whether or not someone gets punished is largely irrelevant. It isn't like 1 billion people in China would have sat down and decided to violate lab safety protocols; there'd be some supervisor somewhere who made mistakes. What happens to such a hypothetical person is irrelevant in the scheme of the damage the virus caused.

It sure seemed like a lot of people wanted the other theory to be true also though didn't it? I think the biggest driver for the lab leak arguments is backlash.

Both theories would presumably have people that are culpable due to violating safety rules designed to prevent exactly what happened. But I suppose a lab screwing up is more embarrassing to China than a hick selling wild animals or whatever illegally.

Theoretically, a lab leak should be considered less embarrassing than a hick selling wild animals perfectly legally - wet markets that sell even wild animal meat are legal in China (and other places in the world) in spite of the known dangers of this practice. And people making a mistake while intentionally working with dangerous substances/organisms is also seen as more explicitly culpable than the more distributed blame of people allowing a known dangerous traditional practice to continue, wherein the participants are not aware that they are performing dangerous experiments.

But of course, there is considerable bias to view traditional practices like wet markets more favorably than modern practices like virology labs. So, in reality, the virus leaking from a virology lab would be found far more condemnable than the virus being contracted randomly at a wet market.

Failing to enforce basic health codes is not a random act of God, it's a failure to perform the minimum functions of a state. It's not a single individual's fault, true, but these wet markets are not some obscure corner shop that managed to dodge regulation, their existence would not be tolerated in any developed country.

The zoonotic theory has no evidence to support it whatsoever. It's the viral equivalent of the 'Magic Bullet.'

- No samples were ever found, nor were any sick animals, in the market where it supposedly started. Period. Nothing.

- No evidence of genetic mutations and variants leading up to crossover, no intermediary host ever found.

- It just happened to start infecting people in the city of a lab which had been doing extremely similar experiments AND had issues with releases before.

- WHO rushed the investigation, involved Chinese scientists in the investigation, and the Chinese government did not cooperate in any way, shape, or form - no samples, no lab data, nothing. It was just "trust us." And everyone dusted off their hands and said "well, no evidence. Done then!"

The world's governments pushed the "zoological crossover" theory because the only alternative would be...what? Accusing the world's largest source of manufactured goods of killing 8 million people? And what would we do, exactly?

Level economic sanctions against a country producing most of the world's stuff? That is by and large quite self sufficient, far more so than most nations?

The initial outbreak cases were clustered around the wet market, not around WIV, and the cases weren't linked to WIV. There was a documented lab leak with SARS-CoV-1 and it killed the affected researcher's mother. That'd the kind of thing you expect to see in a lab leak. Instead you see a cluster of cases that look exactly like it spilled over from the wet market.

And there's zero evidence to support the lab leak. All the research they were doing on live virus was based on SARS-CoV-1. You can't get SARS-CoV-2 out of that. And while they sequenced RaTG-13, there is no evidence they ever had live virus, and RaTG-13 is still around a thousand mutations and a few decades of evolution away from SARS-CoV-2.

The research on “clustering” in the market is extremely flimsy. It relies on government data sources and very small sample sizes.

> There was a documented lab leak with SARS-CoV-1 and it killed the affected researcher's mother. That'd the kind of thing you expect to see in a lab leak.

SARS-1 had a CFR of 11% over all ages, 55% for >65. That's about 10x as deadly as SARS-CoV-2. The situations are thus not comparable--with SARS-CoV-2, we'd expect much more cryptic spread before someone gets sick enough to seek medical attention, and illness much more easily misdiagnosed as flu.

There's also zero question that the WIV had unpublished viruses during the pandemic, since they just published 56 new sequences collected "between 2004 and 2021". So do you really think it's impossible that they actually had 57?

Sequences aren't live virus and don't require live virus.

The article I read indicated a number of researchers did become ill and die in the right timeframe, with the wet market they routinely visited following that.

The article that was written in the NYT by the same author that wrote the "yellow cake uranium in Niger" article that was the basis for the Iraq War.

I don't give that a lot of credit.

Pretty sure I read it on Vox, but it might have been a republishing of the same AP or Reuters source. It was a kind of retrospective of how problematic it is when someone so wrong about so many things is right about something.

You might want to check out the rootclaim debates or the preprint by Cilibrasi and Vitányi (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.22.216242v1....) with code - https://github.com/rudi-cilibrasi/ncd-covid

Right. It fits well with the Anglosphere’s concept of compensible negligence.

China had a duty to run the lab safely, it breached that duty, and so China is responsible for the harms and losses caused by its negligence.

Missouri actually filed suit against China, and it is set to go to trial next week. It will be interesting to watch. If Missouri were to get a judgement for all the costs created by the virus, it could theoretically collect Chinese-owned assets in the US.

And, the news has been full of stories about one particular Chinese asset the US would like to have held in the US: TikTok.

What I don't really get is why that concept doesn't apply to both the wet market and the lab leak scenarios.

Think about it this way: if a French tourist gets a severe toxinfection while eating in a seedy restaurant in some corner of the USA, would the French state, or even the family of the person, sue the US government for failing to enforce health codes / not having good enough health codes? Would you seriously imagine that trial happening and being successful?

Conversely, say the same person got equally badly sick while visiting a friend who works in a US government lab that researches and deals with live viruses. Wouldn't you feel the US government has a higher chance of losing a suit on this?

Most people grasp the reasonableness standard for running a disease lab: you were negligent if the diseases break containment, because lab standards should be in place to prevent that obvious risk.

Under the wet market scenario, it's not instinctively clear to me what was unreasonable about the practices of the vendors at the market. Does selling bats more likely than not result in spreading disease? Or selling bats in proximity to pangolins? It seems like the vendors were doing the same thing vendors have done for millennia, not doing something unusually or obviously substandard.

If it could be blamed on "China", it could as well be blamed on "the US" for having also funded that lab, and likely having been responsible for what security measures it would have.

And more realistically, if it was a lab leak, it was likely some lab technician being careless, or some thing breaking and whoever was responsible, not fixing it quickly enough.

Except for the part they left out which is that the lab was being funded by the US government and its GoF research directed by a US nonprofit entity with strong ties to the NIH.

Or less nefarious: that they mishandled an extracted virus /someone got bitten by a bat in the lab and was allowed to leave without quarantine.

No it wouldn't imply that at all. The same animals ending up in wet markets could have ended up in labs. Nothing to imply it was engineered, which is a whole other level of culpability. Sucks that so many people are itching to make this leap.

> lab leak could imply that China had a direct, active role in cultivating or engineering the virus, as opposed to the “mere” disastrous negligence entailed by the wet market theory

This was literally outsourced US DoD research...