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Comment by nisa | Hacker News Reader

Alina Chan looks from a scientific perspektive at the lableak hypothesis and it's unresolved as far as I know: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan

Bascially we don't know and probably won't know. The conflict of interest with the WHO mission is pretty clear.

Beyond any politicization of the issue it's interesting to learn about the possibilities and risks in that research area.

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Any credibility to the study released by this Dr. Steven Quay? He seems to have uncovered ample evidence, that in the case of COVID19, it was leaked from a lab.

"A Bayesian analysis concludes beyond a reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 is not a natural zoonosis but instead is laboratory derived"

- https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-study-by-dr-ste...

The first 12 pages of the PDF read like a sci-fy thriller. Link to the PDF (scroll down the page a bit):

- https://zenodo.org/record/4477081

this looks like quack bullshit - I'd be very careful what to believe. Just look at page 6 that makes some arbitrary calculations and the bold headline. I'd skip that as evidence.

We discussed this in the past. While it is possible it escaped from the lab, his argument that it was not natural is not terribly compelling. That it reads like a sci-fi thriller is kind of a tell.

No credibility. In this poorly written paper the only interesting claim he cites is that some portion of SARS-Cov-2 looks like a "vector" sequence, but it's really just looking like a naturally occurring coronavirus and he confuses plasmid vs a vector. See: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1... Just because the Chinese government lies a lot, it doesn't mean they are lying about this. There is no need.

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