[tynpeddler]

What is often missed is that chimeric viruses are easy to detect. The viral genome will show clear evidence of manipulation from random base insertions and clear homology with all the ancestral viruses. Hiding the signs of manipulation would either require vast amounts of time and resources (the expense and man power would make it very difficult to hide) or straight up science fiction technology. The chimeric origin hypothesis is not a plausible explanation for the origin of sars-cov2, which means the nature link is not relevant.

The other lab leak hypothesis is that a specimen collected and cultured by scientists, infected a lab employee and this patient zero then transmitted the virus to others. This is a plausible option, and it is being researched. However it is less plausible than wild transmission based on a simple numbers game. What is more likely, a breakout infection cause by a dozen scientists specifically trained and equipped against this possibility, or a transmission to one of the millions of other people who routinely interact with these bat populations? Both are possible, but one is much more likely. Before covid19, WIV had published research indicating that novel coronaviruses routinely jump from bats to humans in that part of the world. Most of these viruses aren't don't last in human hosts, but it's clear that it was only a matter time before something nasty got through. After all, it's already happened once before.

The real nail in the coffin is that research[0] has shown that there were at least two, independent transmissions of sars-cov2 to humans. For this to happen as part of a lab leak it would require WIV to have found and cultivated 2 different strains of sars-cov2, and then each of those strains would have to escape the lab.

[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715

[forgotpwd16]

That's a much better counter argument to the lab-origin. The

>The chimeric origin hypothesis is not a plausible explanation for the origin of sars-cov2, which means the nature link is not relevant.

seems to be incorrect. By a simple search: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7744920/

Now the two distinct genomic lineages seem to indeed present a challenge to lab-leak hypothesis. It's explained in the original study[0] that the second lineage B came from A by intra-host evolution. Due to the molecular clock of the virus the single-introduction origin of the pandemic from a lineage A can be ruled out.

[0]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337

[tripletao]

Have you looked at Pekar's full model, as described mostly in the supplementary materials? A typical molecular clock approach wouldn't give anywhere near the accuracy necessary to exclude evolution of lineage B (just two SNPs away) in humans. Pekar instead builds layer upon layer of complexity, with dozens of reasonable but somewhat arbitrary judgment calls, in the same general direction as econometrics. From the shape of the resulting modeled phylogenetic tree, he purports to exclude a single introduction into humans.

I'm not aware of any case where any similar model has been shown to have predictive power, and there's inherently no way to validate this one against any physical data. So I believe this result has been grossly oversold, per my comments and links at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32740568