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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Replying to @BeijingPalmer
Your reasoning is flawed in two ways here. First, it would go through if there were regular novel virus pandemics, but they are rare, and so you can't make this inference. Second, lab accident release does not preclude zoonotic transfer as the original origin.
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Replying to @Pinboard
novel viruses are rare but there have been a lot! novel viruses that produce pandemics is a tiny category. on the second, sure, it's possible but ... why imagine an extra step that we have no evidence for, instead of just good old, has happened a bunch zoonotic transfer
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer
*Pandemics* are a tiny category so you can't reason back the way you did. On the second point, there's a virus lab that studies these viruses in the NYC-sized city where the pandemic started. This is not the remote wilds of Yunnan where weird animals abound. That's suggestive.
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Replying to @Pinboard @BeijingPalmer
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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Replying to @Pinboard
this is not a difficult question! the virus was detected in a major city *because it's a major city.* if it originated in the countryside, a handful of people getting sick would be noise.
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer
This is stuff that can be run down to ground and should help us decide. The original line wasn't "this showed up in Wuhan and God knows where it came from," it was that "the pandemic started at this very specific wet market," a claim that then got walked back
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Replying to @Pinboard @BeijingPalmer
If my house burns down, I am going to have questions for the Center of the Study of Raging Housefires next door, even though there's no record of them ever having committed arson
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Replying to @Pinboard
if there's a kitchen fire in the city and it spreads, do you assume that the Center of the Study of Raging Housefires did it, or do you assume it was a kitchen fire?
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer @Pinboard
Depends. Is this in a city with a “Center for the Study of Raging House Fires” or not?
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The case for dismissing the virology institute from first principles would be much stronger if every Chinese city had a major research center for the study of coronaviruses. But they don't.
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One might argue that it was detected in a city with a virology institute because said institute was located in a city believed to be at high risk for a novel virus.
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One might, but Wuhan is not in the region where SARS originated. It's a random major city that happens to have a key coronavirus lab.
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