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Comment by BryantD | Hacker News Reader

Quite strong:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r... https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...

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Great links and even briefly skimming them makes me lean more towards zoonosis myself.

However, @hackingonempty's comment shows how dangerous over politicising these topics can be. Claiming lab-accident origin as a conspiracy theory stifles debates like the one linked.

Take a report from the first link where experts in the field still give a 21% chance to lab leak definitely takes it out of the range of conspiracy theories.

The only reason it was "removed" as a plausible origin was politics.

> asked how likely it is that COVID-19 originated from natural zoonosis, experts gave an average likelihood of 77% (median=90%). In fact, four out of five experts stated that a natural zoonotic origin was more than 50% likely. > However, consensus was not complete. Across all experts, the average likelihood they gave for a research-related accident origin was 21%. Overall, one out of five experts reported a 50% or greater chance for an origin other than natural zoonosis.

Yeah, this is both true and tricky. My belief is that the original sin was politicizing the question soon after the beginning of the pandemic; both the Chinese and US governments are at fault here (destroying all the raccoon dogs seems like a very stupid action to me, for example).

I further believe that a lot of people overreacted to the rush to judgement. It is correct to say "we don't know yet" and in March/April 2020 it was wrong to say "this has to be a lab leak." But it's also wrong to overcorrect and say "it couldn't be a lab leak." That's both a political reaction and a human reaction.

Having worked in Science, "we don't know yet" is exactly the response I expected to hear from Science leaders. It's what the scientists I worked with said often, even about subjects they were legitimate experts in. One comes to expect the familiar.

Which is why "it couldn't be a lab leak" struck me like a ton of bricks when it was said.

My immediate response was "that's not science, he's not speaking like any scientist I know, and I know a few hundred."

My position in Science, as support personnel working on software related to funding requests, grants, research collection, and reporting, for nearly a decade, left me in that moment with a distinct feeling that the difference in communication was about protecting funding, reputations, positions, etc. Scientists are not dummies, and their communications with political agencies are very politically aware. I can see a scenario in which, to preserve public confidence in Science(TM) such false confidence might be presented. Gave me the heebie jeebies.

From the review I posted above: "Whether such an escape is deliberate or accidental, the laboratory in question almost certainly must have known that an incident had occurred, such that their denial necessarily indicates a cover-up (74)."

That's what makes it a conspiracy theory, as used in the popular lexicon. While there is substantial evidence the initial transmission was from an animal at the Huanan market, the conspiracy theorists are running with a tiny bit of circumstantial evidence and a whole lot of conspiring between researchers and the Chinese government, etc...

> The only reason it was "removed" as a plausible origin was politics.

I disagree, at this point the evidence has stacked up and not in favor of the lab leak allegation. A major reason it persists is because of the efforts of the White House and their political appointees who want to cast blame on China.

I would love to see a peer reviewed review of the scientific evidence by an expert, like I posted above, that leads the author to the conclusion that the virus escaped from a lab.

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