Comment by jyounker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jyounker | Hacker News Reader

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> There's no reason to shift to that broader category except willful obfuscation

It's to point out the earlier argument that the mere presence of a virology lab in a large city should be a point of suspicion.

> An unconfirmed intelligence leak further claims that work was actually performed

And how much should we trust unconfirmed intelligence leaks?

> For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting.

Part of what's different here is that the entire world shut down, and the trail went cold.

I understand the desire to blame someone, but the features of the virus are all things that have evolved in naturally in other coronaviruses. The amount of mixing that happens in a single human body in a lingering infection dwarfs what labs do in a year.

Even the most "suspicious" thing about the virus, the furin cleavage site, seems to be something with a natural evolutionary path: https://bmcgenomdata.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128...

> It's to point out the earlier argument that the mere presence of a virology lab in a large city should be a point of suspicion.

But we know it's not just "a virology lab", which indeed is not uncommon. It's the world's largest collection of related viruses, and one of only two sites in the world (with UNC) known to have proposed to enhance a sarbecovirus by genetic engineering. That's a much narrower thing.

The comment that you responded to used carelessly broad language, but I did not. So why have you reverted to that?

> Even the most "suspicious" thing about the virus, the furin cleavage site, seems to be something with a natural evolutionary path:

That's one researcher's unfalsifiable speculation, and the unusual coding has also been proposed as evidence of genetic engineering. I think the ability of genomic evidence to resolve that question of origin has been generally overstated by both sides. After DEFUSE it's certainly not evidence against lab origin, though.

The reality is that we don't know. The CIA's updated position is "lab" with "low confidence", and both parts of that seem correct to me. Public opinion has swung further towards lab origin than I would; but after years of smearing anyone who entertained that possibility as a conspiracy theorist and banning their social media accounts, it's no surprise to see a backlash.

Almost all origin theories "blame someone", since the usual alternative to lab origin is trafficking of wildlife known (from SARS-1) to present high risk. So I don't think that bit of amateur psychoanalysis explains much.

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