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Comment by dtx1 | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe this to be true. I consider the likelyhood that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the cause of this to be much higher than that the seafood market in wuhan was the cause and there's no reason to trust any media or NGO to be truthful in that regard.

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The two are not mutually exclusive. For example, some "theories" say that a WIV employee took animals that had been used in experiments, and sold them at the market. I'm not suggesting this is actually what happened, just that there's plenty of room for involvement from both of these entities (or, perhaps, neither).

MMmmm, medical monkey meat.

I would categorize such a situation as a lab leak, too. Either way, we will never be able to confirm the truth.

A very good point, which is sadly absent from most of the public discussion.

Having said that, a case could be made that this (lab leak via market) is a distinction without a difference.

It's transparently obvious that the Market was first place where it began to spread in humans - so "neither" isn't an option. The Market was unequivocally involved.

The reason for the doubt is that it wasn't transparent nor obvious. The Chinese government retroactively censored the institute's publications, Fall 2019 job postings, staff listings, and internal discussion of new symptoms amongst certain researchers [1]. There is a possibility that there were a few earlier cases than the market ones which were covered up to conceal negligence at the institute.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU

It's just so silly -- we can do genomic analysis to figure out the lineage of every confirmed sample. "There's the possibility" is weasel wording that obscures the fact that there's literally no evidence for earlier cases.

The lack of evidence is from people and information being disappeared by a totalitarian regime. That itself is evidence.

It’s perfectly possible that the Chinese government isn’t entirely sure about the origin either, and is censoring just in case.

I think a more likely lab leak via market theory is that an employee was exposed and then exposed others at the market. As I remember the market is between the lab and some public transit destinations. It would make sense to go through the market on the way home from work.

> As I remember the market is between the lab and some public transit destinations. It would make sense to go through the market on the way home from work.

You don't remember correctly. The WIV is ~15km from the market and there are multiple other markets nearer the WIV if employees were regularly 'shopping.

There is a second "small WIV" just around the corner from this market.

So when people were insisting the WIV was the source for all this time due to the type of work they were doing there, they really meant that the CCDC was the source even though the CCDC was doing entirely different (and lower level work)? You get why that's not very convincing and reeks of "god of the gaps" style arguments, right?

You find it more believable that it somehow made sense to sell animals infected with viruses for human consumption than someone made a mistake and got infected with a virus they were doing experiments on?

The Wuhan lab used to catch wild bats and take virus samples from them. It’s not too far fetched someone sold the same bats to the market or was infected and infected other people / living animals there.

I still don't see why you think researches would resort to selling bats to a wet market to make a little extra money.

They'd be fired for sure if caught.

They also would make almost no extra money... The going rate for bats isn't much...

There are more persons in a lab than only high qualified researchers. Cleaners for example. And one bat might not be much, but if your job is to dispose 20 or 50 of them and you can just go a few hundred meters and sell them to a vendor for a few bucks?

I don't say that is what actually happened there, I just think that this would be one possibility.

Actually yes. If someone is trading hundreds of live animals for meat on a weekly basis, and the animals aren't obviously seriously ill, why would you expect them to use any standard more rigorous than 'looks fine to me'?

Consider how things like hoof & mouth disease have ripped through agricultural herds in western countries, where there are much higher regulatory standards for food production. Diseases can spread fast before the symptoms become obvious.

Two things can be true. The virus might have originated from a Virology lab and the contamination epicenter can be on a wet market.

I would consider that a lab leak and to focus on the epicenter without looking at the obvious leak from the lab next door is just propaganda to make people not look to close. Because anyone that says "covid-19 originated from the wetmarket in wuhan" implies that it was not a lab leak.

Especially of importance is the market hypothesis was initially propelled by Peter Daszak with huge conflicts of interest as analyzed in excrutiating detail and sourced in Alina's Viral [2] book. I recommend this book, worth reading it as it strong arms every other hypothesis of COVID-19 origin and shows how unlikely it is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Daszak

[2] https://www.harpercollins.com/products/viral-matt-ridleyalin...

Not sure why you're being downvoted for your opinion. I think it's quite clear all we have are theories at this point and if anyone knows, it would be the Chinese government.

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