I'll agree that the recent discussion sheds no light. The claim has increased in plausibility since last year because of negative evidence (no intermediate host identified or progress on that front). I see the odds as more like an even split. If I had to bet, I'd bet lab origin
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Replying to @Pinboard
again, I think you have to consider a) the long timeline it took to definitively establish an intermediate host for SARS, b) that the political volatility of the work involved in China is much greater than in 2003, which considerably impedes *even mundane* investigation
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer @Pinboard
Look at the timelines and state of knowledge on where Ebola or AIDS emerged from, say, and 'we haven't found a clear answer 18 months later' looks ... entirely normal.
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer
This is more like Ebola II emerged down the street from the National Ebola Center. It's pretty important to find out more.
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Replying to @Pinboard
I think, as I've said before, that you way overweigh the significance of it being *discovered* - not emerging - in a very large city. It is a remote possibility that is worth investigating. That investigation is also politically impossible, as we saw with the botched WHO report.
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer @Pinboard
again, if we map the distance between where we *detect* outbreaks and where they turn out to have originated, it is usually quite considerable.
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer
That very fact makes it quite suggestive that we detected the outbreak down the street from the Outbreak Center!
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Replying to @Pinboard
except that the center is in a very large city that is a transport hub, and we did not detect it 'down the street' from it but 'in the same city of millions of people'
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer
The early infection event at the wet market took place quite literally down the street from the virology lab. It's not proof of anything, but it's also a hell of a coincidence.
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Replying to @Pinboard
the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has the BSL-4 lab, is on the other side of the city. The Wuhan Institute of Infectious Diseases, a separate facility, is 'down the road' in the sense of 'a very long Chinese thoroughway.'
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My apologies for conflating the two
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