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
• 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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