3 ms·

How is this the lab origin story more plausible than the original hypothesis that sars-cov2 originated from the wet-markets? Both are places where human and exo

How is this the lab origin story more plausible than the original hypothesis that sars-cov2 originated from the wet-markets? Both are places where human and exotic animals closely interact, where sars-cov2 could have jumped. Why do you think the odds of the virus jumping are higher in one place than another?

splithalf 5y ago
Not one single infected animal. No serious honest person believes the wet market nonesense. It’s not supposed to be believable.
- dang 5y ago
  Please stop posting flamewar comments. You've done it more than once in this thread already. That's basically vandalism, if not arson, when the topic is this inflammatory. No more of this please. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
chrisbrandow 5y ago
I’m not in a position to say one way or the other, but the articles detail a number of suggestive evidence that in my mind makes the wild animal spread less likely. But as has been pointed out, it is NOT definitive one way or the other.
alisonatwork 5y ago
I don't know anything about virology, but I do know about wet markets. Every working class neighborhood in every city in China has at least one wet market. I would guess that hundreds of millions of people in China shop at wet markets every day. Even if you filter out all the wet markets that do not sell exotic animals like bats and pangolins, it still seems suspicious that this outbreak appears to have been centered around one of the few wet markets in China that happens to be situated in the vicinity of a major virus lab.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  Not to mention the dozens of expert virologists that agree the virus characteristics do not seem to be natural. I have to wonder though if the wet market was a CCP smoke screen... why wasn’t it further from their lab doing exactly this type of viral work? IDK, maybe that was the point to cause suspicion? I’m not crafty enough to know my ability to write world deceiving half-truths.
swader999 5y ago
This article does a decent job of answering your question. The subject is too dense to answer in evan a long reply. https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/ https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
screye 5y ago
The video addresses it. 1. We have strong suspicion that the virus was going around in early December, away from the Wuhan wet market. 2. If the source was natural and zootonic, we would have expected to find the intermediate animal by now. For Sars1 and Mers, we found that animal within 4 months and 9 months respectively. It's been 18 months since Covid19, and we have no clue what that animal despite better science and astronomically more investment.
- flukus 5y ago
  > if the source was natural and zootonic, we would have expected to find the intermediate animal by now. Only if you assume it's both widespread and endemic in the intermediate animal population. If it's spreading at low levels through that population for some reason (like being a less social animal) then it's trying to find a needle in a haystack, and that's on top of the needle/haystack of identifying the correct animal and population. If it's not endemic we may never find it, perhaps the intermediate population were well on their way to herd immunity before the virus jumped to humans leaving little to no trace. There are some other possibilities too, like it could have been transmitting undetected among relatively isolated humans (like small farming villages) for some time before an infected farmer visited a market. This would significantly broaden the scope of when and where the infected animal population was. That we haven't found the source yet is incredibly weak evidence.

splithalf 5y ago

Not one single infected animal. No serious honest person believes the wet market nonesense. It’s not supposed to be believable.

dang 5y ago
Please stop posting flamewar comments. You've done it more than once in this thread already. That's basically vandalism, if not arson, when the topic is this inflammatory. No more of this please. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

chrisbrandow 5y ago

I’m not in a position to say one way or the other, but the articles detail a number of suggestive evidence that in my mind makes the wild animal spread less likely. But as has been pointed out, it is NOT definitive one way or the other.

alisonatwork 5y ago

I don't know anything about virology, but I do know about wet markets. Every working class neighborhood in every city in China has at least one wet market. I would guess that hundreds of millions of people in China shop at wet markets every day. Even if you filter out all the wet markets that do not sell exotic animals like bats and pangolins, it still seems suspicious that this outbreak appears to have been centered around one of the few wet markets in China that happens to be situated in the vicinity of a major virus lab.

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
Not to mention the dozens of expert virologists that agree the virus characteristics do not seem to be natural. I have to wonder though if the wet market was a CCP smoke screen... why wasn’t it further from their lab doing exactly this type of viral work? IDK, maybe that was the point to cause suspicion? I’m not crafty enough to know my ability to write world deceiving half-truths.

swader999 5y ago

This article does a decent job of answering your question. The subject is too dense to answer in evan a long reply. https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/ https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...

screye 5y ago

The video addresses it. 1. We have strong suspicion that the virus was going around in early December, away from the Wuhan wet market. 2. If the source was natural and zootonic, we would have expected to find the intermediate animal by now. For Sars1 and Mers, we found that animal within 4 months and 9 months respectively. It's been 18 months since Covid19, and we have no clue what that animal despite better science and astronomically more investment.

flukus 5y ago
> if the source was natural and zootonic, we would have expected to find the intermediate animal by now. Only if you assume it's both widespread and endemic in the intermediate animal population. If it's spreading at low levels through that population for some reason (like being a less social animal) then it's trying to find a needle in a haystack, and that's on top of the needle/haystack of identifying the correct animal and population. If it's not endemic we may never find it, perhaps the intermediate population were well on their way to herd immunity before the virus jumped to humans leaving little to no trace. There are some other possibilities too, like it could have been transmitting undetected among relatively isolated humans (like small farming villages) for some time before an infected farmer visited a market. This would significantly broaden the scope of when and where the infected animal population was. That we haven't found the source yet is incredibly weak evidence.