thing that has happened a reasonable amount: lab accidents thing that has not happened before: lab accidents resulting in the release of a previously unknown virus thing that has happened a lot before: zoonotic transfer producing previously unknown viruses
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the large city *where the pandemic was first detected.* We don't know where it started, and that's a pretty significant difference. And we also need a better standard than 'suggestive' here.
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there's also no huge difference between 'novel virus' and 'novel virus that starts a pandemic' in how they might originate.
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A lot of this discussion implies that there's a perfectly well-documented zoonotic pathway that is being shouted down by conspiracists but that's not my understanding. The virus lab leak hypothesis answers the difficult question of how a weird zoonotic strain ended up in Wuhan
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This is not a convincing argument at all that the virus was released from a lab. But it is absolutely a plausible candidate explanation in the same realm of probability as direct transfer, which is not how you are framing it. We need evidence to decide which (if either) is true
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• Remote wilds where animals abound and humans *don’t* abound • Not many pandemics but many infectious outbreaks, eg an unrelated nearby lab in Sierra Leone got blamed for Ebola too • Weird to be arguing over adjectives instead of numbers, you guys might not be that far apart
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AOL keyword is "nearby". If this was the Kunming Institute of Virology, the lab hypothesis would have much less explanatory power.
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