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They really are mutually exclusive theories. The current evidence points to at least two different spillover events (of slightly different variants) at the mar

They really are mutually exclusive theories. The current evidence points to at least two different spillover events (of slightly different variants) at the market, followed by spread of the virus in the communities surrounding the market, eventually radiating out to the rest of Wuhan. There is solid evidence now for each of those statements. If you try to reconcile that with the lab leak theory, you end up with an ever more implausible theory: two different scientists got infected in the lab with different variants (of a virus we have good evidence never existed at the lab in the first place), then both of them went to the market (where the same types of wild animals that caused the original SARS outbreak in 2002 just happened to be sold) and infected people, but somehow they didn't infect anyone else at the lab. It's just one implausibility stacked on top of the next, all with the goal of avoiding what the data is obviously saying: the outbreak began at the market.

Retric 2y ago
Carful when assuming how a lab leak must have unfolded, there’s many possibilities. A single worker gets infected/accidentally releases multiple variants, sloppy worker messing up twice doesn’t seem that crazy. A lab leak is also consistent with an infection person visiting a location that experienced a separate variant. And that’s just a few options there’s also things like an intentional leak followed by another intentional leak etc. I’ve read that the lab was intentionally set near that wet market, so there being overlap like this doesn’t seem extraordinary.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
  This is how conspiracy theories become unfalsifiable. You're now positing that a lab worker got infected with multiple variants (which wouldn't exist in the lab, by the way, since they would work with cloned virus), then traveled across town and spread the virus at the market. The evidence all points towards a spillover (two, actually) at the market, but you can always make the lab leak theory ever more convoluted to keep it alive.
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    Why do you believe that lab workers only work with cloned viruses? Do you know the exact nature of the research that was going on there? Two spillovers at a lab that has one spillover does not seem that unlikely. There's a good chance that the lack of safety was in the culture and not just one careless person. In November and December, several Wuhan Institute personnel were reporting unknown illnesses and took standard precautions (weeks of isolation) over it. It sounds like they weren't equipped to deal with a class of pathogens that they were working with.
    - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
      > Do you know the exact nature of the research that was going on there? We actually have a very good idea of what research was going on there. The groups in question publish their research, give talks at international conferences, upload the viruses they discover to US databases, talk with colleagues abroad, etc. We have a very good picture of what they were working on, and every indication is that they didn't have any virus closely related to SARS-CoV-2. > Two spillovers at a lab that has one spillover does not seem that unlikely. If that were the case, you'd see the outbreak centered on the lab. It wasn't. It was centered on the market, on the other side of town. So you have to start making implausible - and obviously motivated - assertions that two different lab workers went and infected people at the market, without infecting any of their colleagues or anyone else along the way.
      - pclmulqdq 2y ago
        > If that were the case, you'd see the outbreak centered on the lab. It wasn't. It was centered on the market, on the other side of town. So you have to start making implausible - and obviously motivated - assertions that two different lab workers went and infected people at the market, without infecting any of their colleagues or anyone else along the way. There literally was an outbreak among lab workers in November to December of 2019. Many of them got sick with something that looks vaguely like COVID and quarantined over it - this is a standard precaution when you work around weird pathogens. Social media from these workers was suppressed when they talked about getting sick. Chinese whistleblowers discussed this at the time. I'm frankly surprised you haven't seen any of this evidence given your interest in the subject. And we only know about the research they published, not what goes unpublished. That includes various kinds of failed research, research that someone did for fun and wouldn't make it past ethics boards (a not-infrequent problem for this type of virus research), and research that was done under the table to nefarious ends.
- wk_end 2y ago
  > I’ve read that the lab was intentionally set near that wet market... That seems unlikely, given that - per Wikipedia - the WIV opened in 1956 and the wet market opened in 2002.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 2y ago
    I doubt they are actually related but it’s something I read presumably because: “Wuhan Branch of the CAS.[4] Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it was founded in 1956 and opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory[5] in 2018.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology There was also a separate BSL-2 facility that moved right before the outbreak which also got news coverage due to the timing. But I think that was more confusion as they shouldn’t be working on coronaviruses in a BSL-2 facility.
    - wk_end 2y ago
      They in fact were working on coronaviruses in a BSL-2 facility, which is another thing that helps make the lab leak hypothesis more plausible. E.g. from Vanity Fair: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-leak https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-... Baric testified that he had specifically warned Shi Zhengli that the WIV’s critical coronavirus research was being conducted in labs with insufficient biosafety protections. When he urged her to move the work to a more secure biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) lab, he testified that she did not heed his recommendation. Because the WIV continued to perform coronavirus research at what he considers an inappropriately low biosafety level, Baric said of a laboratory accident, “You can’t rule that out…. You just can’t.”
      - maeil 2y ago
        Similarly: In 2004, nine people were infected with Sars and one person died after two researchers were separately exposed to the virus while working at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing. In November 2019, just a month before the first confirmed case of Covid-19, more than 6,000 people in north-west China were infected with brucellosis, a bacterial disease with flu-like symptoms, after a leak at a vaccine plant. [1] The Chinese facility hosts one of no more than six BSL-4 labs in the world that had been conducting contentious “gain of function” research on bat-related pathogens before the pandemic, according to Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University [1] Just given the above, the statistical likelihood of coincidence is so absurdly low it alone means there needs to be overwhelming evidence to the opposite to overcome it. At no point has this been the case. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/a0badd5d-4d88-4a3b-b019-61c6d8275caa https://www.ft.com/content/a0badd5d-4d88-4a3b-b019-61c6d8275...
morepedantic 2y ago
Read the paper. It claims that this is consistent with 2 spillover events, but it's also consistent with 1 spillover and an early mutation. The mutation between the 2 lineages could happen on either side of the spillover. But a 2 spillover event suggests there was a pool of infected animals with multiple lineages that were all already capable of zoonosis. So why only a single secondary event? This suggests the pool was small, contact was limited, and that the pool wasn't sustained for long. OK, then it's comparably likely that a mutation would happen on either side of the spillover.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
  We don't know how many spillover events there were. Just just know that it's at least two. Most spillover events probably do not lead to a sustained outbreak. The problem with positing that the mutations happened after spillover is that the timeline is way too short. Multiple variants were present at the market just weeks after the initial human cases. That points to differentiation before spillover, probably on the farms where the animals were being kept.

Retric 2y ago

Carful when assuming how a lab leak must have unfolded, there’s many possibilities. A single worker gets infected/accidentally releases multiple variants, sloppy worker messing up twice doesn’t seem that crazy. A lab leak is also consistent with an infection person visiting a location that experienced a separate variant. And that’s just a few options there’s also things like an intentional leak followed by another intentional leak etc. I’ve read that the lab was intentionally set near that wet market, so there being overlap like this doesn’t seem extraordinary.

DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
This is how conspiracy theories become unfalsifiable. You're now positing that a lab worker got infected with multiple variants (which wouldn't exist in the lab, by the way, since they would work with cloned virus), then traveled across town and spread the virus at the market. The evidence all points towards a spillover (two, actually) at the market, but you can always make the lab leak theory ever more convoluted to keep it alive.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  Why do you believe that lab workers only work with cloned viruses? Do you know the exact nature of the research that was going on there? Two spillovers at a lab that has one spillover does not seem that unlikely. There's a good chance that the lack of safety was in the culture and not just one careless person. In November and December, several Wuhan Institute personnel were reporting unknown illnesses and took standard precautions (weeks of isolation) over it. It sounds like they weren't equipped to deal with a class of pathogens that they were working with.
  - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
    > Do you know the exact nature of the research that was going on there? We actually have a very good idea of what research was going on there. The groups in question publish their research, give talks at international conferences, upload the viruses they discover to US databases, talk with colleagues abroad, etc. We have a very good picture of what they were working on, and every indication is that they didn't have any virus closely related to SARS-CoV-2. > Two spillovers at a lab that has one spillover does not seem that unlikely. If that were the case, you'd see the outbreak centered on the lab. It wasn't. It was centered on the market, on the other side of town. So you have to start making implausible - and obviously motivated - assertions that two different lab workers went and infected people at the market, without infecting any of their colleagues or anyone else along the way.
    - pclmulqdq 2y ago
      > If that were the case, you'd see the outbreak centered on the lab. It wasn't. It was centered on the market, on the other side of town. So you have to start making implausible - and obviously motivated - assertions that two different lab workers went and infected people at the market, without infecting any of their colleagues or anyone else along the way. There literally was an outbreak among lab workers in November to December of 2019. Many of them got sick with something that looks vaguely like COVID and quarantined over it - this is a standard precaution when you work around weird pathogens. Social media from these workers was suppressed when they talked about getting sick. Chinese whistleblowers discussed this at the time. I'm frankly surprised you haven't seen any of this evidence given your interest in the subject. And we only know about the research they published, not what goes unpublished. That includes various kinds of failed research, research that someone did for fun and wouldn't make it past ethics boards (a not-infrequent problem for this type of virus research), and research that was done under the table to nefarious ends.
wk_end 2y ago
> I’ve read that the lab was intentionally set near that wet market... That seems unlikely, given that - per Wikipedia - the WIV opened in 1956 and the wet market opened in 2002.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 2y ago
  I doubt they are actually related but it’s something I read presumably because: “Wuhan Branch of the CAS.[4] Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it was founded in 1956 and opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory[5] in 2018.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology There was also a separate BSL-2 facility that moved right before the outbreak which also got news coverage due to the timing. But I think that was more confusion as they shouldn’t be working on coronaviruses in a BSL-2 facility.
  - wk_end 2y ago
    They in fact were working on coronaviruses in a BSL-2 facility, which is another thing that helps make the lab leak hypothesis more plausible. E.g. from Vanity Fair: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-leak https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-... Baric testified that he had specifically warned Shi Zhengli that the WIV’s critical coronavirus research was being conducted in labs with insufficient biosafety protections. When he urged her to move the work to a more secure biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) lab, he testified that she did not heed his recommendation. Because the WIV continued to perform coronavirus research at what he considers an inappropriately low biosafety level, Baric said of a laboratory accident, “You can’t rule that out…. You just can’t.”
    - maeil 2y ago
      Similarly: In 2004, nine people were infected with Sars and one person died after two researchers were separately exposed to the virus while working at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing. In November 2019, just a month before the first confirmed case of Covid-19, more than 6,000 people in north-west China were infected with brucellosis, a bacterial disease with flu-like symptoms, after a leak at a vaccine plant. [1] The Chinese facility hosts one of no more than six BSL-4 labs in the world that had been conducting contentious “gain of function” research on bat-related pathogens before the pandemic, according to Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University [1] Just given the above, the statistical likelihood of coincidence is so absurdly low it alone means there needs to be overwhelming evidence to the opposite to overcome it. At no point has this been the case. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/a0badd5d-4d88-4a3b-b019-61c6d8275caa https://www.ft.com/content/a0badd5d-4d88-4a3b-b019-61c6d8275...

morepedantic 2y ago

Read the paper. It claims that this is consistent with 2 spillover events, but it's also consistent with 1 spillover and an early mutation. The mutation between the 2 lineages could happen on either side of the spillover. But a 2 spillover event suggests there was a pool of infected animals with multiple lineages that were all already capable of zoonosis. So why only a single secondary event? This suggests the pool was small, contact was limited, and that the pool wasn't sustained for long. OK, then it's comparably likely that a mutation would happen on either side of the spillover.

DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
We don't know how many spillover events there were. Just just know that it's at least two. Most spillover events probably do not lead to a sustained outbreak. The problem with positing that the mutations happened after spillover is that the timeline is way too short. Multiple variants were present at the market just weeks after the initial human cases. That points to differentiation before spillover, probably on the farms where the animals were being kept.