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Comment by JetSetWilly | Hacker News Reader

> It started at a wet market on the other side of the city. That's been very solidly established now.

That's simply not true at all, whatsoever. See for example this paper sequencing early samples of the virus: https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/38/12/5211/6353034?logi...

The "wet market" samples are less similar to closely related bat strains than other early samples which are unrelated to the market.

The market is close to a major hospital. If the virus was circulating, it is unsurprising that a super spreader event would occur there. But saying that the market is the point of origin, and this this is "very solidly established" simply flies in the face of known facts.

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Your information is out of date. The paper I linked to shows that both early strains of the virus were present at the Huanan market. That is already very strong evidence that the market was the origin point of the original outbreak in Wuhan, and not merely a superspreader event.

We now know that early cases were centered on the market, that both strains were present in the market, and that the types of wild animals that caused the original SARS outbreak in 2002 were being sold at the market.

The market is still involved lab leak hypothesis or not. The market may still be the place where the earliest animal-human crossover occurred, even if the lab leak hypothesis is correct.

Say a group of animals intended to be euthanized were actually clandestinely sold at the market, it's completely reasonable that the virus could have mutated at the lab in the animal population before being transmitted to humans. In fact, this is literally exactly what occurs during gain of function research, when scientists are explicitly trying to get a virus to mutate in live animals.

There is simply not any hard evidence to concretely prove either hypothesis. Any evidence that points to the market can just as easily be involved in a lab leak scenario.

When you have no comprehensive data on transmission, and no audit trail of how the animals arrived at the market, it's not possible to determine origin from super spreader. The evidence for both would look identical!

This is why conspiracy theories never completely die. They can be made more and more convoluted in order to avoid falsification.

You're now just asserting, without any evidence, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology sent animals to the Huanan market. We already know that wild animals from the countryside are shipped into the market to be sold, and that this is exactly how the original SARS outbreak in 2002 happened. So why would you suggest that the animals came from a lab?

I'm not asserting that it's guaranteed to be true. But the evidence that exists is not sufficient to draw a certain conclusion either way. If the market were a superspreader event or indeed the true origin, the facts before us today would look identical.

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