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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

> If it was transported to the seafood market by someone who worked at the lab that is highly coincidental that the place they infected first just happened to be the most likely place for zoonotic spillover

If we're going with highly coincidental pairings, it seems like we can't ignore "the disease originated in the only city in China to have an institute that specializes in virology, viral pathology and virus technology."

I'm not convinced of any particular conclusion as to COVID's origin, but I don't down-weight the coincidence of the city of origin hosting WIV nearly as much as you appear to.

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At this point can we not just state plainly, the whole denial argument is predicated on politics?

Which one do you mean by “the denial argument”? (and why do you use that term instead of something unambiguous like “lab leak” or “zoonotic origin” hypotheses?)

As to which of the two hypotheses is more predicated on politics, I think there are more generally left-leaning people who are swayed by the lab leak (circumstantial) evidence, than there are right-leaning people who are swayed by the zoonotic origin (circumstantial) evidence. This perception may be mistaken, but assuming I’m correct, this would suggest that the zoonotic origin hypothesis is more likely to be predicated on politics.

Edit: typo

Also, zoonotic transfer happening naturally in any particular time and place is extremely unlikely, even in places where the conditions are optimal.

I always thought this was a good test for whether someone can apply Bayesian reasoning. It turns out not many can, including a lot of highly educated people.

Without hard evidence to contradict it, lab leak should have always been the default hypothesis. That it hasn’t is a case of political propaganda winning out over basic statistics.

Bayesian reasoning is that your prior is a 99.999% chance that the virus is natural, as all other viruses are.

The probability that a virus would crop up in Wuhan out of all cities in China is 1/70.

Feel free apply Bayes' formula.

Where's the part with the virus being collected and brought to a lab in Wuhan where gain of function research was done prior to the outbreak? Feel free to include that in your formula.

There is no evidence SARS-COV-2 was being studied.

But even if you were to accept that, the bayesian reasoning would be that you'd say that the probability it's from Wuhan it's a leak is 100%, and 0% for any other city. You could go further and look at the viruses that have caused zoonoses in China in the past (the evidence is that hundreds of SARS-like coronaviruses have) and compare it to what was being studied. Even then, if you apply Bayes' formula, you'd have overwhelming odds towards a natural origin.

Your prior should be that it was just like the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak which happened in a different city without this research lab and also involved in a spillover in wet market of a virus whose closest known relative was found hundreds of miles away in bats (in close to the same area that RatG13 was found).

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