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Comment by skellington | Hacker News Reader

No there isn't. More than 50K animals tested an no animal reservoir for C19.

Are there really reddit-ors who still think C19 was natural when ALL of the current evidence including genetic markers points to lab leak?

Yes, we can't say with absolute certainty, but the case for lab leak is MUCH stronger than for natural. Plus, why has China still not released the nature and details of the experiments that were conducted in that lab? You know why.

Anyone who doesn't see that lab leak is the most likely source is just being contrarian for their own ego or political reasons.

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Natural and lab leak are not exclusive. In fact we do have evidence for genetic markers being of natural origin. See the work of William Gallaher, 'A palindromic RNA sequence as a common breakpoint contributor to copy-choice recombination in SARS-COV-2'. As well as: https://virological.org/t/the-sarbecovirus-origin-of-sars-co...

The lacking evidence for a natural origin right now is just that a natural reservoir hasn't been discovered. The potential natural mechanisms for those genetic markers seem reasonably understood though.

This is a dumb argument. Sick animals were probably culled immediately by the farms to avoid getting blamed.

As a 2-decade genetic engineer: there are no genetic "markers" pointing to a lab leak, there's really no sign of unnatural manipulation in the sequence.

Indeed, the government cracked down on wild animal farming at the beginning of the pandemic.

When you hear that "X thousand animals were tested," it's not the types of wild animals that are the likely culprit. It's cows, pigs, sheep and the like. It's a complete red herring.

Passage through humanized mice wouldn't leave signs of unnatural manipulation. It's still pretty suspicious that COVID was so transmissible between people from the outset, and no evidence of it circulating in local populations was found.

If it wasn't so transmissible, it wouldn't have been a pandemic.

The question was not "why was it a pandemic", yhe question is, why was it so transmissible when earlier outbreaks, like SARS, had relatively much poorer transmission? That's the typical profile of new viruses.

Spontaneous mutations mean that a virus can become more infectious by bad luck alone. We were unlucky.

The virus becoming more infectious over time is exactly my point. That's typical. What's not typical is the virus already being so infectious right from the start. Normally a zoonotic transfer circulates poorly in the human population before it mutates to become more infectious for the host. COVID-19 was already excellent at infecting humans from the earliest points we've found. That's very, very unusual.

A million deadly new viruses, and one breaks through. Finding exactly that one is kinda hard! But finding bats with multiple scary coronaviruses at the same time is trivial.

Staring yourself blind on this specific strain of coronavirus misses the forest for the tree (yes, singular tree). There's literally a forest of nasty shit out there and you're saying "but the scientists couldn't find this one specific tree when they went looking in the Amazonas". Of course they didn't. C19 is highly contagious in humans, not in bats. For bats it's just one out of a million things that don't bother them.

> Anyone who doesn't see that lab leak is the most likely source is just being contrarian for their own ego or political reasons.

I disagree. I think those who can't accept natural origins as a hypothesis underestimate the size and variation of the viruses out there in nature.

You are arguing different things. There’s a reservoir of coronaviruses, but not exactly c19.

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