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Comment by 1234letshaveatw | Hacker News Reader

Hand wave away the "coincidence" that the virus most likely originated nearby the Wuhan Institute of Virology, because a CNN report was "presented with portentous music on the soundtrack, suggesting subliminally that something sinister is going on there".

China is "shopping" articles that absolve the lab and are actively interfering with investigation- Occam's razor starts to come into play here.

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My theory is that there must be someone who works at the lab and disposes of animals.

Considering that theres a wet market nearby and the person disposing of animal corpses is likely not earning much money they flogged them through the market as a side hussle.

Wildly speculative and nothing to back it up, but that makes more sense to me than some severe breach of protocol by staff actively working with samples etc.

It is terribly possible. As a 20 year old kid I was part of a two man crew responsible for transporting dead research animals. I have no idea what credentials the guy I was with had. But its not like this was even the only thing he did. When we were done with animal duty it was off to haul recycled books. That man possessed high degree of trust from the University authorities, I wonder if it was formalized in any way. To be very clear, this guy had an unbelievable character and work ethic. I've maybe met a dozen guys who just oozed it and he was one of them.

We have the same thing in the U.S., where people paid to dispose of people's dead pets just dump them on the side of the highway to save money. E.g.: https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/07/11/dead-animals-found-i...

Occam's razor says it came from the same place as bird flu and SARS -- animal contact.

A lab leak is possible, it can't be disproved. But the fact is that people want it to be true in excess of the evidence we have.

Lab leak and animal contact can both be true. Lab tech gets infected during animal experiments/sample collecting due to not following procedures and infects others in the lab. They carry infection out into the population, and you're off.

There are many, many more human-animal contacts outside of that lab than inside it. It's literally a billion to one.

A scientist or lab tech specifically working with virus infected bats will spend a lot more time in close contact with virus infected bats than most.

Sure, but we're back to "I want this to be true" at this point. It's possible. But there are a billion rural Chinese who also could have gotten it naturally. Add a 1000x coefficient and you're down to a million to one.

so would someone mining bat poop for fertilizer.

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