How many pandemics, out of all the pandemics that have ever happened throughout history, have been due to a lab leak? Wouldn’t the default assumption be the one that had been the cause most of the time?
Yes the factors you raise the likelihood of a lab leak theory, or they could just be circumstantial. Without more, the fact that pandemics throughout history have a natural origin weighs heavily in favor of our current pandemic having a natural origin.
Why? You’d need to know the independent probability of a natural origin pandemic to compute this. Surely to figure this out you would need to look at history to make this calculation. How else would you estimate that value?
Well then restrict the analysis to modern time when labs have existed. How many pandemics since labs have existed have been the result of leaks before Covid? If the answer is that more pandemics have been the result of lab leaks as opposed to natural causes, then I would lean toward lab leak being the default assumption for Covid. But if some overwhelming fraction of the pandemics in modern times were due to natural causes, I would have to choose natural causes to be the default assumption. The proximity to a lab is interesting, but to understand how to weigh that factor it might be useful to know how close labs were to the epicenters of other pandemics that had turned out to have a natural cause. Mere proximity of one thing to the source of an event is an interesting clue, but it can't tell us much on its own. This could have been a coincidence or it could have been causal. To me, it certainly wouldn't weigh heavily in the face of overwhelming evidence that pandemics are natural events that occur from time to time.
It's like trying to blame an earthquake on a dance party that happened in proximity to the fault line. Okay, maybe, but are dance parties known to cause earthquakes? Do earth quakes happen absent dance parties? Can a dance party theoretically cause an earthquake? I'm not sure, maybe if it were vigorous enough. But if all you've got proximity and a narrative about how it could have happened, without any other proof, then I'm going to default with what I know about pandemics -- they just happen, and so did Covid. I also don't have any proof and just a narrative, but I am reassured by examples of naturally occurring pandemics in the past, and a dearth of lab-leak caused pandemics. I don't see any reason it couldn't be a lab leak, and could easily be convinced with hard evidence. But again, this thread was about default assumptions absent evidence.
It is also about doing dangerous research in imperfect conditions with no oversight, shady behavior like moving the dataset offline, hiding the testing status of kab members, or how the sister lab changed locations to move right next door to the wet market in fall.
It is also about how sars-cov-2 is unique in being the only beta coronavirus with a furin cleavage site, which allows it to be more infectious. It is also a coincidence to that in 2018 Wuhan was part of a failed grant to collect coronavirus in the wild and put furin cleavage sites on them. Failed grant sure, but everyone who works in academia knows that you start working on a grant for preliminary results even before it is filed. And who knows, maybe China funded this dangerous research.
The only problem in all this is how lab-leak was declared to be a settled conspiracy last year. And the only reason was because an orange idiot vouched for it.
Maybe reverse it. What is the likelihood, given that a pandemic has arisen, that it will arise in a city where a lab leak is a possible origin (having the laboratories and the research going on)? I'm going to guess that it is very unlikely.
It is indeed unlikely, because it's much easier to detect an outbreak in a controlled setting like a lab before it infects a critical mass of the population. Indeed, lab leaks have happened before and were contained before it reached more than a handful of people.
Much more likely that covid was rip-roaring uncontrolled through the Wuhan population well before the first official diagnosis, so it was already unstoppable. The real conspiracy is that China massively fucked up its handling of the outbreak because their government is generally incompetent and they don't want people prying too hard into any of it because it would be highly damaging to its world image for everyone to know just how incompetent they are. The labs have proven to be much better at this than some unelected cabal of autocratic government bureaucrats.
Yes the factors you raise the likelihood of a lab leak theory, or they could just be circumstantial. Without more, the fact that pandemics throughout history have a natural origin weighs heavily in favor of our current pandemic having a natural origin.