a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
b_b  ·  919 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Mysterious Case of the COVID-19 Lab-Leak Theory

It's not my fight either, as I make it my business to not get in internet fights with anyone, almost ever. Personally I can't wrap my head around the idea of coincidences this big and unlikely. That's the source of my consternation and the thing that, to me, needs disproving. ooli is incorrect about there never being evidence enough to satisfy me. If they found a single example of a furin cleavage site that matches this one, I'd be more skeptical of the lab leak. And if they could find it in an animal that has any reasonable connection to the Wuhan area, I'd be even less skeptical. Right now that evidence is absent, and the government of China isn't doing much to unabsent it.

It absolutely matters how this happened, because it should guide our future policy responses. If the thing is natural, then there are mitigating steps we can take, but maybe you just have to live with the idea that we get a global pandemic every 50-100 years. If it's not natural it should be a warning to everyone about the dangers of manipulating pathogens in a lab, and our policy repose should follow. This virus had been in the Wuhan lab for no more than 6 years before it escaped, if it did in fact escape. That's a really short period of time, and it puts very low confidence bounds around our ability to stop similar projects from going sideways.