[metalspot]

> nearly impossible to disprove

lab leak is dead simple to disprove. all you have to do is find an animal that you can infect with covid and will spread it and you have your proof. many people have been spending a lot of money for years trying to do this and the longer they continue to fail the higher the probability of lab leak becomes.

[ceejayoz]

> all you have to do is find an animal that you can infect with covid and will spread it

https://news.osu.edu/covid-19-virus-is-evolving-rapidly-in-w...

"Scientists collected 1,522 nasal swabs from free-ranging deer in 83 of the state’s 88 counties between November 2021 and March 2022. More than 10% of the samples were positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and at least one positive case was found in 59% of the counties in which testing took place. Genomic analysis showed that at least 30 infections in deer had been introduced by humans – a figure that surprised the research team."

“And the evidence is growing that humans can get it from deer – which isn’t radically surprising. It’s probably not a one-way pipeline.”

Still, this doesn't disprove a lab leak; it proves something other than a lab leak is plausible.

[metalspot]

> something other than a lab leak is plausible

of course it is plausible. a priori there is no reason why lab leak is more likely than natural origin. it just comes down to the evidence of what actually happened.

what you need to show natural origin is transmission in an animal population with an animal that can be linked to the outbreak location. that hasnt been found after 3 years of tremendous effort.

everyone associated with the wiv has millions of lives and trillions of dollars in damages on their heads if it was a lab leak so these people are definitely highly motivated to prove a natural origin. it has been 3+ years and nothing has been found. the more time that passes the less likely it becomes.

[baja_blast]

But humans infected the white tailed deer, and guess what when humans passed on SARS2 to different species it did not suddenly stop circulating within humans which seems to have been the case with SARS2. For SARS2 we have a single spillover event hundreds of miles away from the nearest SARS reservoir and then some how the strain that was circulating in whatever intermediate host it may have come from simply vanished! Despite being so extremely infectious SARS2's spillover seems to be a case of an immaculate infection!

But like virgin births, I find immaculate infections to be implausible.

[elicash]

I think you misunderstood my comment. In that scenario, it still wouldn't rule out the possibility of a lab leak, since like I said they still could have been studying that natural origin inside of a lab.

[metalspot]

> still wouldn't rule out the possibility of a lab leak

but finding an animal that can spread covid with a plausible story for how it cross over to humans in wuhan is a threshold that has not been crossed yet. if anyone could meet that threshold test it would be treated as proof of natural origin.

but supposing that it was a natural virus that came from an animal in the lab at wuhan then it would be very easy for people with access to that information to identify the natural source, and since that has not happened, it means the virus is either from a natural source that was not in the lab, or it was created in the lab.

the longer time that passes without finding a natural source outside the lab the more likely it is that it was created in the lab.