the timeframe for working out the exact path of SARS in 2003 from horseshoe bats to Asian palm civets to humans was *fourteen years*. we might work out the course of this one quicker, but there's no guarantees.
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer
You can potentially preclude the Virology Institute hypothesis much faster than you can find the source of the disease. All you need is a trail of early cases that leads in any other direction.
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Replying to @Pinboard
the problem is that we are now working in a situation of 'this killed millions of people' and the incentive of *everybody* to cover up the first cases is far larger than for SARS.
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer
That is very true, too. But there are things working for us—this kind of trail of early evidence is easy to suppress but hard to fake convincingly. And China has a growing incentive to demonstrate that it did not originate in a lab leak.
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Replying to @Pinboard @BeijingPalmer
Their incentive is to say it came from outside China.
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Yes. But say it started in some remote part of Yunnan. You have a trail of cases that leads to Wuhan. You can release part of that trail, vindicate your virology lab, and still argue that the origin was outside China.
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