I'm not a biologist or immunologist or any -ologist at all. But I have read a few very detailed articles about the components of SARS-COV-2, and there are two key elements to the virus that make it particularly targeted toward humans. The thing is, we see these things in the wild first. Someone notices them, documents this weird variation in this one gene or protein or whatever, and later on someone finds it elsewhere, and suddenly there's a Patient 0 where it jumps from the original species and moves into its first human host. The problem is, there is no evidence for these two elements in the wild. And the only place they occur is in labs, when researchers are testing the limits of a specific biological function or element. So yes, it is possible that the virus existed, whole and transmissible, in a wild bat or pangolin population somewhere, and a person got infected. Statistics say it can happen, probability says it is extremely unlikely, and sometimes these two lines cross. But there is no Patient 0. There's no mapping of the virus in the wild prior to the outbreak. Personally, I've always been on the "wild variant, made jump to humans" side of this. But after reading these articles recently, where biologists and virologists point out how entirely unlikely it is for these two things to change spontaneously in the wild, simultaneously, to create exactly what we see in humans today......... well.... I think I need to step across the line into the "escaped from a lab" rather than "wild variant" school of thought.
Two things I learned from this Journal article (and I thought there was already plenty of damning evidence): 1. There were at least 3 Wuhan lab workers who became seriously ill in September 2019; 2. The Wuhan lab erased their entire online, open source catalog of virus sequences also in Sept 2019. Apparently the stated reason for the delisting was that it was prone to cyberattacks.But there is no Patient 0.
Let's be clear: For over a year now, every biologist on this site has been patiently and elaborately explaining the likelihood of an inadvertent leak While you've been enthusiastically posting Vox articles that are devoid of science. You're on the downslope. So that's something. But when you say You could do a quick headcount of -ologists in the conversation before adding ___________________________________ There's no Patient Zero for AIDS, either. No Patient Zero for Hep C, no Patient Zero for MERS, no Patient Zero for Ebola. What there is is a lot of circumstantial evidence that is being protected from investigation, which is not the case for Hep C, MERS or Ebola.
I'm not a biologist or immunologist or any -ologist at all.
But
I post the articles I read that I think have some merit, and I never post without comments. I want to learn. This type of feedback - and deeper reading - help me to mature my understanding of the problem space, and where the fulcrum points are in each argument. And I only do Hubski in my spare time when I need something other than work to focus on for a bit... a distraction to freshen up my mind. So nothing I post here is intended to be exhaustive or authoritative. (Although I do tend to have an "absolutist" way of writing that makes it seem I am much more married to a stance than I actually am.) Writing that way also assuages the pain from the marketing bullshit I spend much of my time writing... :-)