[opendoor]

Originally Posted by GreenLantern2814

I want to start by saying this is in no way an issue confined to your post, Opendoor, and more of a general observation.

Throughout the last decade, and especially during the Trump presidency, people have said “there’s no evidence” with regard to far too many things for which there is a lot of evidence.

Those things I was talking about are scientific though. Unless you can point to evidence of the virus being modified or a progenitor existing in the lab, then I stand by that 100%.

This is all very general stuff - more specifically as it relates to the coronavirus, we have a virus lab, studying the coronavirus that rampaged across the globe, but the origin is actually from a wet market in the same city?

That seems convenient, based on the poetry of the situation if nothing else.

There's no evidence that they had the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 and the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2 was found in Laos in late 2021. Maybe they did have it and kept it under wraps, that's totally possible. But at present there's no real public evidence pointing to that.

And there are also factors with how it spread that would make a lab leak less likely. There were multiple distinct variants detected at the market which were genetically different enough that they'd normally require a fair bit of spread to diverge like that. Whereas if it leaked from the lab you'd normally expect there to be a single variant that didn't mutate until it had spread for a while.

Now that doesn't rule out a lab leak. There could have been multiple leaks of different variants, or the detection of multiple variants could have been falsified, etc. But it does raise the threshold of plausibility a bit.

I’m just a lowly history grad - I’m not a virologist. But does it even matter if the virus wasn’t “modified” to be more virulent?

It’s a coronavirus - before 2020, there had never been a successful coronavirus vaccine. It didn’t need to be modified, it would do that on its own.

I am willing to buy that improper safety processes at the lab resulted in this escaping. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable possibility.

I'm not really sure what you're saying here. Much of the basis of the lab leak hypothesis has been that the virus had been altered (either through manipulation or gain of function research) so that it could infect humans. Bat coronaviruses normally can't transmit to humans, so the theory was that the progenitor virus was altered to do so. Some people called the furin cleavage site (one of the things that made it so effective at infecting humans) a "smoking gun". But then the coronavirus found in the wild in Laos that I mentioned above ended up being one amino acid insertion away from having a FCS. So it's not really evidence of manipulation at all.

For it not to be modified in any way, that would mean that the researchers stumbled upon it randomly. And given the precautions they normally take when collecting samples vs. what BSL-4 lab has, it would be pretty surprising if they collected SARS-CoV-2 and no one was infected, but then it leaked from the lab later on. Again, not impossible which is why the lab leak is still a very plausible scenario when taken with all the circumstantial evidence, but it's still probably less likely than the virus emerging like virtually every single other virus in history has.