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Comment by synergy20 | Hacker News Reader

Based on what China's reaction to the source-chasing-efforts, I have no doubt it is where this is originated.

Wuhan is a huge city with the only lab on earth that works with SARS, virus-leak is not uncommon in China over the years(including SARS-1 that was leaked a few times but was contained quickly), after COVID China issued lots of new policies including stricter lab management, and new leadership from military to be in charge of Wuhan lab, and hide the initial samples of COVID, and started a diplomatic propaganda to paint USA as the virus maker.

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Lack of transparency in China proves nothing. CYA is standard operating procedure there, regardless if there is any guilt or not. Up and down the chain they will cover for each other, if not for the simple reason they themselves don't know what shit their superiors or underlings are up to...

And it is entirely rational, even when they believe that there hasn't been a lab leak, to shut down any investigations into it, because all such work or information would just add fuel to the fire, regardless the "objective" outcome.

The biggest evidence for lab leak is that no one can find a wild reservoir of covid 19. The Chinese government and the rest of the world has a ton incentive to find a reservoir and havnt.

That's a very weak argument.

How so?

Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

Do I really need to point out to you how many animal species and potential reservoir populations there are? It's impossible to sample all of them, or even enough to be sure there is no such reservoir.

One potential explanation could be a commercial mink farm somewhere in China. The virus is very affine to mink, mink can infect Humans and Humans can infect mink. If they were the intermediate host or "reservoir" there is no way of ever proving it, because those mink are all dead now and I doubt there will be enough samples left to detect the Virus somehow.

Not really.

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