It’s a disease control medical centre, not a bioweapons lab. They’re not ‘developing’ new viruses.
I’m not saying China doesn’t have bioweapons labs, I’ve no idea, but the Chinese CDC labs collaborate with international medical agencies. It’s hard to believe they would conduct bioweapons research at a centre that collaborates internationally with exactly the experts that would immediately be able to spot that sort of activity.
Whether they accurately predicted the future, or made a huge lab error is up for debate in my book, and is something that should at least be investigated.
Lab mistakes happen all of the time, and we're talking about something that has a subsantial ability to spread itself.
Here is an expert's unbiased analysis of whether this could be man made:
What you are saying is theoretically possible, but the sibling comment that's getting downvoted right now invoking Occam is, I think, spot on. Why hypothesize a detour through a biomedical lab if we know that people can get these diseases from animals, it's happened countless times before and it's exactly the scenario epidemiologists have been warning about for a long time?
Beside, there's another point that makes it implausible in this particular case: BSL4 labs are absurdly annoying to work in, with personnel wearing overpressure suits. Coronaviruses are BSL3 pathogens [0], you wouldn't choose to arbitrarily work with them at a higher safety level lab.
Of course it makes sense for scientists to worry about and prepare for that scenario, but in this particular case scientists have already rejected that this is a recombination event.
If you look at the last link I posted, the Harvard epidemiologist points out that the mutation rate suggests the 2019-nCoV came from just one recent source in single jump (as opposed to several mutation sources)
Combine this with the fact that: the new coronavirus provides a new lineage for almost half of its genome, with no close genetic relationships to other viruses within the subgenus of sarbecovirus
It paints a picture that this did not come from nature.
To me occam's razor is leaning the opposite direction, as a scenario to create something like this in the wild doesn't seem plausible.
I would love for this to be proven false, and encourage any counterpoints addressing why human error should be ruled out.
The preprint you have quoted shows that the novel virus genome is very similar to a different Coronavirus (RaTG13) in some parts, and less similar in others. We have only a small sample of all the Coronavirus genomes that are out there in animals, so that's not particularly surprising.
From there to jump to a conclusion involving human involvement does not follow.
What exactly are you suggesting? That scientist have a bank of unpublished viruses collected from the wild that they play with and accidentally release? That makes little sense, particularly since it implies that people would be collecting viruses in the wild, at which point they would come into contact with animals and could get infected directly. But we already know that people collect bats for food, so that explanation only adds unnecessary complexity.
Alternatively, are you suggesting that scientist worked on specifically modifying an existing virus, e.g RaTG13? If that is what you're saying I suspect you are not familiar with how hard it is to engineer proteins for specific functions. It's a herculean basic science task, not something that is commonly done in biomedical labs.
Even in the Twitter thread that you linked, the only thing that Eric Feigl-Ding actually states is that the origin of the virus isn't well understood.
Even the article states that the fear of their research is:
>“If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,”
I'm sure engineering viruses is a difficult task, but we know that they were doing this sort of thing already via funded public projects.. and they also don't necessarily have to have developed it in the Wuhan Institute itself, but it's not unreasonable to think that a samples that were created elsewhere and being stored there for research.
Regarding: >the only thing that Eric Feigl-Ding actually states is that the origin of the virus isn't well understood.
He does also state definitively that the market was not the origin.. despite that everyone else in the world seems to accept this as fact.
You are correct that this is not my area of expertise, which is why I am hoping that people more knowledgable than myself can tell me why this thought process isn't worth pursuing.
> I'm sure engineering viruses is a difficult task, but we know that they were doing this sort of thing already via funded public projects.
Yes, but what they did is different from (and much easier than) engineering a protein for a new function, because what they did was combine parts of different known virus strains together.
If that was the origin of SARS-CoV-2, you would see precise matches to the different origin strains for the different viral proteins. Now of course, the origin might be different secretly collected wild viruses, but at that point the only reason why that's a compelling story is that it sounds exciting...
In the comment I replied to where you suggested a disease center could release a new bioweapon.
A disease center would study known diseases. A disease center could only release a new bioweapon if it was secretly a bioweapons lab — there’s your conspiracy theory. Which you’re putting forward on the internet.
Disease centers often study known _pathogens_ in lab conditions/through methods that absolutely can lead to said pathogens mutating into a previously unknown strain.
You're overly focusing on _bioweapon_ as though all pathogens that developed via human influence were due to maliciousness.
No, actually, the comment you responded to specifically said "You don't need it to be a bioweapons lab to have a virus accidentally leak out."
It's just you (and one other poster I think?) that read "it's possible this virus has an [accidental] artificial origin" and jumped straight to "these people are accusing China of making bioweapons".
I’m not saying China doesn’t have bioweapons labs, I’ve no idea, but the Chinese CDC labs collaborate with international medical agencies. It’s hard to believe they would conduct bioweapons research at a centre that collaborates internationally with exactly the experts that would immediately be able to spot that sort of activity.