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Comment by alevskaya | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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