Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

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There is plenty of suggestive evidence the pandemic arose from a lab escape. Novel natural bat SARS-like coronaviruses have been found in caves hundred of miles from Wuhan... but are brought to Wuhan for study.

Here – https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1197631383470034951 – an expert on the topic & scientific collaborator with a Wuhan lab describes research he was proud of in November 2019:

> we’ve made great progress with bat SARS-related CoVs, ID’ing >50 novel strains, sequencing spike protein genes, ID’ing ones that bind to human cells, using recombinant viruses/humanized mice to see SARS-like signs, and showing some don’t respond to MAbs, vaccines...

Lab accidents leading to investigator infection & escape are distressingly common. So why should "wet market vendor" or "wildlife trader" or "farmer" be a more presumptive index-case than "researcher modifying bat coronaviruses searching for those that are most dangerous in humanized animal models"?

See sister reply, it’s all basically FUD.

Sister reply only seems to address the Yan report & malicious/military engineering - nothing about more generic lab escape.

In particular, your NatGeo link's description of constant natural discoveries, and continuing searches for natural origins, is totally consistent with the most trivial & non-malicious lab escape scenario:

(1) lab interested in this topic collects hundreds of novel natural strains that wouldn't normally cross from bats to human;

(2) lab accident infects researcher;

(3) researcher infects community.

Isn't Peter Daszak, author of the tweet I quoted, a domain expert?

We now know, from the pandemic, that a bat-related SARS-CoV2 virus that's highly transmissible in humans actually exists, somehow.

There are human-staffed error-prone labs that specifically search for those kinds of viruses in bulk – for example, sending people deep into rarely-visited bat caves, collecting strains, then replicating (& remixing!) those strains to test them against human (and 'humanized') tissue for pathogenecity & treatment-resistance.

Given those plain facts, what makes you think some other bat-human (pangolin-human?, something-else-human?) contact should be presumed a more likely route into humans than something involving a lab researcher? Until there's more evidence, why aren't they all live hypotheses?

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