I understand that a lot of scientists have an unshakeable faith in the leak-proofiness of BSL4s (still not accident-proof; SARS1 escaped once from a BSL4 lab in 2003). But the live virus SARSrCoV work at WIV was performed at BSL2!https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1404910994896396288 …
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I agree we don't know much is the honest answer. This thread is not saying that. Ergo, it's a bad take. And in uncertainty, it is better to go with the more plausible explanation than a wilder one. The calculation comes from statistical probability of evolved viruses vs. leaked.
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Keeping lab leak as a probabilty is a must but claiming it's more probable or pointing fingers at virologist (let alone AS A COMMUNITY!) is just... funny.
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You could just as well say that a sustained an extensive cover up puts the real burden of proof on anyone making such a claim. Even the few early cases—such as they’ve even been shared, which is incomplete—are inconsistent and puzzling. Less confidence would be appropriate.
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We lack a good framework for thinking about this, because everyone think they might be Columbo and discover the clue intentionally hidden by a *human*. It’s narratively satisfying. But *every other novel disease ever* has emerged via evolution. Narratively unsatisfying.
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So what's your exact figure for the probability of a lab-leak? You are allowed to estimate 95% confidence intervals.
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Hard to lay out the odds in a tweet, but tl;dr: a secretive government being secretive is what we’d expect regardless, so doesn’t really change our Bayesian posteriors. As priors, we know that spillover is much more likely than a lab escape. Lab escape hypotheses are vague…
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…and inconsistent. If one (wrongly) sees spillover to a field researcher as a “lab leak,” there’s literally no difference in expectations from natural vs. lab. If, as Trump State Department officials claim, SARS-CoV-2 is an engineered bioweapon, we should have genomic markers.
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The burden of proof on supporters of lab leak would be easy to bear if they are allowed access to the evidences. So this shifts the onus of proof back to China's whose massive resources have so far uncovered no proof of zoonatic spillover.
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The same type of research was again funded through EcoHealth Alliance but now done outside of China; project start 2020-06-17