I've seen several papers with the opposite conclusion. Why do we only see the lab leak hypothesis front paged on HN?
1) It makes the pandemic deterministic (bad lab security means an outbreak) instead of stochastic (wildlife spillover). That is, to be frank, even as an epidemiologist who is very skeptical of the lab leak hypothesis, a comforting thought.
2) It's a popular topic in the Substack/Medium set, because it moves the pandemic back into their wheelhouse of expertise, international relations, policy, etc. It becomes a human problem with human solutions.
3) It appeals to the contrarian mindset.
4) All of the lab leak papers at least attempt to show definitive proof. In contrast, actually finding the source of spillover events is the work of decades (and isn't always or even often successful). "Science is slow and uncertain" is a less compelling narrative.
"Bad lab security means an outbreak" is also stochastic though?
Of course if you go down that rabbithole then you might wind up concluding that the vegans have been right all along, which certain groups might find an unpalatable result.
I'm still on the fence, BTW.
Yes, much more comforting to believe that the virus originated in a lab, that a successful (so far) conspiracy has been carried out to conceal its origins, and that there will be no transparency or accountability for any of the people involved, who are likely continuing similar research today.
Is it beyond reasonable doubt that a virus created as part of a gain-of-function research programme escaped? We simply don't know definitively one way or the other, and it's rather unscientific to make blanket statements about these things one way or the other in the absence of evidence to validate the claim. (I'm an immunologist, by the way.)
The more pressing matter is the conspiracies between some top level specialists and some governments that seem to have effectively pushed public opinion away from the lab leak hypothesis (where they both can take a lot of blame) to the zoonotic hypothesis (less blame) - even though actual specialist opinion was (and still is) pretty split... (Not so much if you remove the specialists with a conflict of interest and the pressure they and the governments might have been able to exert ?)
From my perspective inside the field, a small number of specialists and a very enthusiastic lay readership have pushed the lab leak hypothesis in a way that presents far more disagreement than there actually is.
Especially when the CNRS - (which would be partially guilty in the case of a lab leak !) - published the claim that the lab leak hypothesis could not be dismissed.
But you know how paradigms work, you have to be an anti-conformist to support what is going to become the new paradigm...
And sure, there most certainly is a very enthusiastic lay readership on the lab leak side... but why do you think there isn't one on the zoonosis side ?
And especially an even bigger fraction of specialists and lay readership that aren't rejecting either ?
(It bears repeating : I'm not anti-zoonosis, since I am not competent to judge either way anyway, I just find it very worrying that there seemed to be a campaign from quite early on, when social pressure wouldn't have had as much effect yet, to outright dismiss the lab leak theory, even though among the specialists gathered at the WHO in January 2020, there was no such consensus.)
I guess it only goes to show how bubbly the Internet (and your specific sub-field bubble ?) can be...
Because showing a zoonotic origin of a disease like SARS-CoV-2 is the work of years, if not decades, and with the disruption of the pandemic to research + the political ramifications of that work, it may well already be beyond us.
I think the reason there isn't an enthusiastic readership on the zoonotic side is simply because that's how people are conditioned to think about these diseases. Everything from movies like Outbreak to Contagion, the current fuss about the emu YouTube woman, etc. primes people to think about that. It's hard to foster an enthusiastic readership for what people think they already know.
It's also not particularly...sensational. There's no smoking gun. No shadowy conspiracy. The problems that emerge from zoonoses are hard and dispersed. It makes for very bad SubStack material.
As if epidemiologists are the only profession studying stochastic phenomena. What does deterministic vs stochastic have to do with it? Every phenomena has stochastic effects.
Bad lab security is stochastic too: consider experimental security protocols; imagine them being set in year X, no protocol results in 100% security, we can only make attempts to drive down probability. Say a certain step requires tubes to be UVC sterilized with a certain fluence dose per cm^2. This was deemed suitable in year X during which experiments happened at rate R_x. This implicitly corresponds to some unknown rate of lab leaks world wide (perhaps once in a century for example). As education and automation progresses, such experiments are occurring at higher and higher rates. A possible lesson from a conclusion that it was a lab leak, and that people again underestimated the exponential curve of scientific growth could be that that security protocols be formulated in terms of the global rate of research. If theres 100x the rate of experiments compared to 20 years ago, perhaps the protocols should be tighter so that the scurity lapse rate decreases 100x as well, in order to maintain the constant tolerable global rate of lab leaks. The electrons in a flip flop may individually behave stochastically, but collectively very deterministically. The misconception -that it is safe enough if lab security protocols meet a constant per single execution safety bar- will deterministically be violated with constant growth of rate of experiments. (EDIT/ADDITION: In a world that includes the global rate of experiments, a current researcher, reading the securiy protocols of the past will find the current protocols unfairly absurd, when he realizes they are 100x more stringent, but thats because there was perhaps 10x fewer researchers in the past and 10x higher troughput of experiments; similarily a researcher at the end of his career will find the security measures to be say 100x more stringent compared to the start of his career)
> 2) It's a popular topic in the Substack/Medium set, because it moves the pandemic back into their wheelhouse of expertise, international relations, policy, etc. It becomes a human problem with human solutions.
Why does humanity like to install lightning rods? because it moves the 'act of god' lighting phenomena (and resulting fires etc.) back into their wheelhouse of expertise, policy, etc. It becomes a human problem with human solutions.
> 3) It appeals to the contrarian mindset.
There exists no such thing as the contrarian mindset. That's an epidemic idea used to silence criticism.
> 4) All of the lab leak papers at least attempt to show definitive proof. In contrast, actually finding the source of spillover events is the work of decades (and isn't always or even often successful). "Science is slow and uncertain" is a less compelling narrative.
For the average cold coronavirus (not sars cov), its very easy to detect and trace the path of a virus, its just that nobody bothers.
When a new potential epidemic is detected (just a few death and a few sick people, as the likelihood punctures the noise-floor), it was quickly traced to the cooling towers nearby the city where I live. Turns out there was negligence which allowed a microbe to prosper and infect people. Initially there was doubt about which cooling tower of which company caused the infections, but by genetic sequencing it was quickly identified which tower caused the issues. It didn't take decades, just weeks.
An ironically fitting end for them would be that it is true, they get all similar research banned, and then the next virus is zoonotic and nobody is prepared for it due to not doing any research.
edit: added "ironically"
A nicer thing to wish for is that it leads to better safety an accountability protocols.