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Comment by InTheArena | Hacker News Reader

Just so people know who is posting this - Donald McNeil Jr was the chief voice at NYT focusing on covid. He was ousted earlier because of some remarks that he allegedly made to a school group a few years ago, but before that, the NYT was pushing for him to get a Pulitzer for his reporting on COVID. Him starting legitimize the lab-leak theory as possible is reflective of the people more generally taking the lab-leak hypothesis seriously.

That's never to legitimize violence, or score political points, but maybe to get us a bit closer to what sparked the pandemic.

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Its astonishing “scientist” in labs are so detached from the real world and dismissive as always.

The virus wasn’t tampered with. Th lab in Wuhan is “GAIN OF FUNCTION” testing.

read it again. Gain of function means nudging viral samples so they gain functions on their own without human gene editing or modification that can easily be traced.

Why now? Why not 5 years ago? The animal markets have always been there.

Occams Razor.

Why MERS was in 2009? Why not 2007 or 2001? Etc. The animals were there since millions of years.

This argument is bootless. Viral mutations and spread happen according to anomalous diffusion statistics that are inherently chaotic at outset.

For those who do not know what chaotic means, it is extremely sensitive to initial conditions. Most of which are actually unknowns. Risk is always there, but details are never initially predictable.

Why did SARS-CoV-1 jump from Bats in Yunnan to humans in Guangdong in 2003?

Your logic here isn’t sound. “Why not 5 years ago?” - the mechanism here is that each year there is a low but non-zero probability of a virus jumping to humans.

That is why you have infrequent intermittent epidemics like Spanish Flu, or more recently SARS, and not constant evolution of new crossover viruses.

It seems that crossovers happen more on the timescale of decades than mere years. (Though I’m excluding crossovers of unviable infections that don’t go anywhere, of course).

None of the above argues against the lab escape theory. As the OP details it’s possible. Just your specific line of reasoning here oversimplifies, hence the downvotes.

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