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Comment by jerome-jh | Hacker News Reader

Simply because:

- they cannot formally prove there has been human manipulation of the virus, just like the proponents of natural selection cannot formally prove this is what happened. So as scientists, why argue publicly about that.

- as your politically inclined comment suggests, they would be at the center of a political battle. Today every western lab is dependent on China for reagents. There's a big risk getting short on them.

But the fact that only papers in favor of natural selection are being published in well-known scientific journals does not mean there is consensus.

Maybe the scientific journals also suffer from "the Disney bias".

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Mainstream scientists regularly write papers about things they cannot "formally prove". For example here is a Nature paper suggesting, but not proving, that SARS-Cov-2 had a natural origin. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

> Today every western lab is dependent on China for reagents. There's a big risk getting short on them.

So Chinese companies can ship reagents to labs around the world and ensure that none of them reach some specific Western lab? How could they possibly prevent them being resold?

> Maybe the scientific journals also suffer from "the Disney bias".

Disney is afraid of the CCP because they make a lot of money in China. I suppose it's possible that some journals are afraid of a CCP-led boycott, but there are quality open-access journals that would not be financially impacted by a boycott.

If a journal did publish a peer-reviewed article promoting the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was made in a Chinese lab, and the CCP responded by boycotting the journal, that would be a big deal and I think would rebound badly on the CCP.

First, I think you meant evolution. Natural selection is regularly, directly witnessed in all levels of life.

Towards the more general argument -- in the absence of formal proof, we are left with selecting the most likely scenario. In this case, what is the reason to believe it was created in a lab as opposed through natural mechanisms? The latter is more likely unless some evidence suggests otherwise. If the only evidence thus far is from a non-reviewed journal w/ very obvious political motivations, then it likely continues to be the less likely scenario.

Why is the latter more likely? Gain of function experiments are performed regularly in labs, also on coronaviruses. Lab escapes have occured numerous times.

Shi Zhengli herself suspected at first that it came from one of their labs, because Wuhan is so far from the bats that are the suspected original host.

What makes you think the natural selection/evolution is more likely?

Of course at the scale of China, having a virus outbreak due to a natural virus mutation is not a rare event. According to Wikipedia, there have been 3 virus outbreaks in "wet markets" in the last 20 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_market). That makes about 1 outbreak in 7 years.

Now China is big! There are 108 towns with more than 1m population (https://all-populations.com/en/cn/list-of-cities-in-china-by...). What is the probability for an outbreak to occur in a given city? Again that is going to be a very rough estimate. Let's say there are 100 "wet markets", about one per city >1m. That make the probability for a natural virus outbreak in a given "wet market" to be 1 in 700 years.

Now if you want to argue what is the most likely event:

- a natural outbreak in Wuhan: probability is about 1 in 700 years

- a virus leak from the Wuhan BSL4 lab. Note the Wuhan's lab is the ONLY BSL4 lab in China.

Have you any kind of information that makes you believe the probability for a virus leak to be significantly LESS than 1 in 700 years?

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