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Comment by barnacled | Hacker News Reader

Ah I expected to get downvoted into oblivion, I know it's a cliche to say it but HN isn't what it once was.

A key point to take away is that the fact there are 2 lineages means that lab leak is super unlikely. It would require somebody from the lab to come to the same relatively small market to give lineage A, then somebody else who got infected through a totally different evolutionary route at the lab to happen to come to the market just after and both to not spread it anywhere else.

Of course lab leakers are working hard to try to deny this or claim the data is wrong or yada yada. It's an ongoing battle and they have several highly dedicated 'independent scientists' (lol) working on it seemingly 24/7.

It's quite dispiriting to see.

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> Of course lab leakers are working hard to try to deny this or claim the data is wrong or yada yada. It's an ongoing battle and they have several highly dedicated 'independent scientists' (lol) working on it seemingly 24/7.

I think the downvotes are because of this type of statement, which suggests that people who have read the papers, and thought about the conflicting evidence, and finally come to a conclusion that differs from your viewpoint, dislike the implication that they are simply nutty conspiracy-theorists tirelessly and obsessively working to undermine rational science.

You do realise there are countless people who have 'read the papers and thought about the conflicting evidence' about climate change right?

The reality is unfortunately that these people ARE nutty conspiracy theorists. They are not 'thinking about the papers' and providing a reasonable push back, they're reiterating long debunked points (did you read the thread I posted?).

Ebright already claimed the papers were scientific fraud until he thought better and deleted the tweet. This is the kind of person you're dealing with.

I'm not going to both-sides something which now has very clear evidence in one direction and not a shred of evidence in the other, I'm sorry I'm just not.

Hacker news of old would be more open to that. Again,this is why I no longer post here.

The two lineages are literally just two SNPs apart. SARS-CoV-2 averages ~1/3 of an SNP per human-to-human transition, so ~1/9 of such transmissions generate "two lineages" at least that different. So intuitively, it seems easy to believe those lineages could have evolved in just a few weeks of early cryptic (unsampled) human spread.

Pekar et al. did some complicated modeling that purports to establish that the MRCA in humans is so recent that the two lineages must have arisen in animals, implying two introductions into humans. I believe that's highly suspect though, per my explanation and links at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32740568

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