3 ms·

Well there's a whole book on it by Matt Ridley

wredue 3y ago
I really don’t give a fuck what random perpetual contrarians have to say. The biologists who study viruses say that it has markers of natural evolution with at least 2 hops from human back to animal back to human.
- gadders 3y ago
  "Yeah, not that evidence. I mean evidence by someone I like who agrees with me."
- tripletao 3y ago
  No one is asserting that SARS-CoV-2 initially spilled from human to animal to human. You're perhaps misunderstanding the assertion from Pekar et al. that it spilled from animal to human twice (i.e., from Animal A to Human A forming Lineage A, and from Animal B to Human B forming Lineage B), in "The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2". I think their argument is weak, and mostly agree with the criticisms in https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1 I can at least repeat their argument correctly, though. You've also grossly mischaracterized the evidence for a research-related origin. For example, it's not that "labs around the world work on SARS viruses"--the WIV was one of only two labs in the world (with UNC) genetically manipulating coronaviruses in ways consistent with SARS-CoV-2, and has the largest collection of novel sarbecoviruses anywhere. David Relman (of Stanford) published a note in 2020, which I believe has aged quite well: https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2021133117 https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2021133117 Many other impeccably-credentialed academics consider this origin to be an open question. Bluntly, I don't think you're well-informed here. (Did you know that the 1977 flu killed ~700k people, and is uncontroversially accepted to have arisen from a research accident? If not, does that shift your priors on research-origin pandemics?) I would urge you to learn more from scientific sources, instead of repeating shallow headline claims.

I really don’t give a fuck what random perpetual contrarians have to say. The biologists who study viruses say that it has markers of natural evolution with at least 2 hops from human back to animal back to human.

gadders 3y ago
"Yeah, not that evidence. I mean evidence by someone I like who agrees with me."
tripletao 3y ago
No one is asserting that SARS-CoV-2 initially spilled from human to animal to human. You're perhaps misunderstanding the assertion from Pekar et al. that it spilled from animal to human twice (i.e., from Animal A to Human A forming Lineage A, and from Animal B to Human B forming Lineage B), in "The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2". I think their argument is weak, and mostly agree with the criticisms in https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1 I can at least repeat their argument correctly, though. You've also grossly mischaracterized the evidence for a research-related origin. For example, it's not that "labs around the world work on SARS viruses"--the WIV was one of only two labs in the world (with UNC) genetically manipulating coronaviruses in ways consistent with SARS-CoV-2, and has the largest collection of novel sarbecoviruses anywhere. David Relman (of Stanford) published a note in 2020, which I believe has aged quite well: https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2021133117 https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2021133117 Many other impeccably-credentialed academics consider this origin to be an open question. Bluntly, I don't think you're well-informed here. (Did you know that the 1977 flu killed ~700k people, and is uncontroversially accepted to have arisen from a research accident? If not, does that shift your priors on research-origin pandemics?) I would urge you to learn more from scientific sources, instead of repeating shallow headline claims.