From a Bayesian perspective, it's difficult-to-impossible to evaluate the probability of these events without in-depth knowledge of genetics and/or epidemiology, and they could easily be highly correlated.
The alternative explanation to the lab leak is that the lab was studying factors like infection through ACE2 and furin cleavage sites because they were things considered likely to happen on their own, and were worth preparing for. Studying and preparing for possible mutations is what gain-of-function research is for.
Also, half of the bullets sound like filler. "An outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city" is definitely filler, and I'd estimate that P( "outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses" | "an outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city with a virus lab" ) is probably not that far from 1.00.
And at the end you seem to be proposing the fact that they haven't faked a zoonotic origin is evidence that it was lab-created? That sounds backwards.
When faced with sourceless, pointless suffering, there's not much else to do than clean up the mess and prepare for if it comes back. A person or group of people to blame gives them someone to direct their anger at. If there's a villain, then it's possible to get revenge. People are motivated to create and believe explanations that give them someone to blame, so such explanations deserve more skepticism than others.
The creeping escalation is fun and dramatic, but here it's mainly serving to puff up the amount of evidence at hand.
> And at the end you seem to be proposing the fact that they haven't faked a zoonotic origin is evidence that it was lab-created? That sounds backwards.
You actually sort of can make that argument, yeah.
At this point, with the lab leak theory having become a lot more popular over the past year or so, the Chinese government would kill to be able to point to an animal reservoir. If they can't find it, the incentive for them to try to fake it is huge. My initial assumption is that if they haven't faked a zoonotic origin, it's probably because they can't, not because they don't want to. By assuming this, I'm assuming that they have basically looked in all the places possible by now, which seems reasonable because they have a lot of manpower and we're 2+ years into the pandemic. If they can't get the virus to infect bats/pangolins/etc, that indicates that the virus didn't originate in the wild and hence supports the lab leak theory
The virus can infect pangolins, bats, and dozens of other mammalian species. It's an incredibly generalist species.
When the outbreak began, China immediately culled virtually all the stock at wild animal farms throughout the country. That is where they thought the virus came from, and they wanted to prevent any more spillover events. One side-effect of that decision is that the animals that most likely served as the intermediate hosts are gone.
With the original SARS in 2002-2003, it was much easier to find the wild animal farms that hosted the virus because the Chinese government did not quickly move to shut them down. The farms remained open for a long time, and there were repeated spillover events.
My guess is that the first reaction of government officials this time around was to just cull all the animals and eliminate the danger right away, and that tracing the origins of the virus wasn't on their minds at that moment.
The alternative explanation to the lab leak is that the lab was studying factors like infection through ACE2 and furin cleavage sites because they were things considered likely to happen on their own, and were worth preparing for. Studying and preparing for possible mutations is what gain-of-function research is for.
Also, half of the bullets sound like filler. "An outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city" is definitely filler, and I'd estimate that P( "outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses" | "an outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city with a virus lab" ) is probably not that far from 1.00.
And at the end you seem to be proposing the fact that they haven't faked a zoonotic origin is evidence that it was lab-created? That sounds backwards.
When faced with sourceless, pointless suffering, there's not much else to do than clean up the mess and prepare for if it comes back. A person or group of people to blame gives them someone to direct their anger at. If there's a villain, then it's possible to get revenge. People are motivated to create and believe explanations that give them someone to blame, so such explanations deserve more skepticism than others.
The creeping escalation is fun and dramatic, but here it's mainly serving to puff up the amount of evidence at hand.