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The market is still involved lab leak hypothesis or not. The market may still be the place where the earliest animal-human crossover occurred, even if the lab l
by initplus 4y ago
The market is still involved lab leak hypothesis or not. The market may still be the place where the earliest animal-human crossover occurred, even if the lab leak hypothesis is correct.
Say a group of animals intended to be euthanized were actually clandestinely sold at the market, it's completely reasonable that the virus could have mutated at the lab in the animal population before being transmitted to humans. In fact, this is literally exactly what occurs during gain of function research, when scientists are explicitly trying to get a virus to mutate in live animals.
There is simply not any hard evidence to concretely prove either hypothesis. Any evidence that points to the market can just as easily be involved in a lab leak scenario.
When you have no comprehensive data on transmission, and no audit trail of how the animals arrived at the market, it's not possible to determine origin from super spreader. The evidence for both would look identical!
- DiogenesKynikos 4y agoThis is why conspiracy theories never completely die. They can be made more and more convoluted in order to avoid falsification. You're now just asserting, without any evidence, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology sent animals to the Huanan market. We already know that wild animals from the countryside are shipped into the market to be sold, and that this is exactly how the original SARS outbreak in 2002 happened. So why would you suggest that the animals came from a lab?
- initplus 4y agoI'm not asserting that it's guaranteed to be true. But the evidence that exists is not sufficient to draw a certain conclusion either way. If the market were a superspreader event or indeed the true origin, the facts before us today would look identical.