A few reasons, though as I note in another comment, I'm not an expert in spillover events, my area of interest kicks in about a week later. So there's a few:
1) People I trust are skeptical, including people who are opposed to gain of function research. I've found Angela Rasmussen to be one of the better voices in terms of discussing the evidence for a natural origin, but she's far from the only one.
2) We have had two naturally occurring coronavirus epidemics during my career. A third is all but inevitable -- I wrote a grant in October 2019 suggesting a novel coronavirus as an example case for a modeling exercise, for example (sadly, said grant didn't get funded). So for me, there's a very strong prior on coronaviruses emerging as significant public health threats.
3) At the same time, I've come to distrust many of the voices who push the lab leak hypothesis, either because they're obviously doing so for geopolitical reasons, or because they've become addicted to being "the lone voice in the wilderness", despite it not being a risky position to take.
4) The lab leak hypothesis, in terms of evidence, relies on WIV, the Chinese Government, the WHO, etc. being broadly incompetent except when it comes to the characterization of the initial cases when SARS-CoV-2 emerged, which is arguably the hardest part of any outbreak.
> or because they've become addicted to being "the lone voice in the wilderness", despite it not being a risky position to take.
This frankly makes me distrust you; in 2020-2022 this was absolutely a risky position to take for most public figures, let alone those on academia, let alone those connected to epidemiology. This remains the only time and topic I've seen
blanket banned from discussing across all major US social platforms. Try looking up what the vibe was like in 2020-2021 especially.
I got death threats for suggesting that mandatory vaccination for school kids wasn't well justified not from the people who wanted vaccination, but from the people who decided I wasn't sufficiently opposed to it.
That's obviously bad. Vaccination and COVID origins are different topics, though.
Opinions do correlate in the general public, and I guess that's why you've made that link. I don't think that trend holds among scientists, though--Deigin, Chan, Ebright, Bloom, etc. all have quite ordinary views on vaccine risk and efficacy.
Let's be honest, if their is a global conspiracy to spread disease I think it's to kill off the masses due to AI replacing jobs and lowering the amount of green houses gasses people produce.
Basically, things like "It started in Wuhan near the WIV" implies that we actually have found the first case, etc., when this is notoriously difficult to do, especially with a disease that can have mild or asymptomatic presentation.
I agree with that statement. Even with prior warning, and knowing the virus could be introduced only at an airport or seaport, Western public health authorities managed to trace approximately zero cases to their introduction. So it's hard to believe the same tools would succeed at the much more difficult task of tracing the very first cases in China.
That makes it odd that you're promoting an author who has claimed such evidence shows conclusively that spillover into humans--and not just a super-spreader event--occurred in the Huanan Seafood Market. I suspect that if you looked personally at the methodology behind the conflicted (Rasmussen's doctorate was under Vincent Racaniello, a longtime proponent of high-risk virological research) authors' claims, then you'd find them much less worthy of repetition.
I think her arguments are solid, I'm just not certain they're definitive. But I do find her presentation of those arguments to be both detailed and accessible.
The claim that the location of spillover can be definitively localized within hundreds of meters from epidemiological data is core to the predominant theory of natural zoonotic origin, from an overlapping set of authors including Rasmussen.
Theories of a research accident almost never assume such localization is possible, not least because the earliest known cases weren't particularly close to the WIV. (If anyone's claiming otherwise, they've probably confused the WIV and Wuhan CDC.) So it's odd that you'd correctly note the near-impossibility of that localization, but then cite that as evidence against unnatural origin.
This makes me think you haven't looked much in the details yourself, and two of your four points above are explicitly arguments from authority. If you did look yourself, then I think your assessment might change.
Indeed, so it could be some unidentified third place. There are few labs and many other possibilities for people to come into contact with animals, so that third place was probably not a lab.
If you followed events at the time and the suppressed rumours from doctors in China end of 2019, the new illness began exactly around that area actually (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang etc).
There were no similar reports in another place on this planet. (Since 99% of other places do not have full control of media and many have better healthcare so if it happened it would be less likely to go unnoticed)
There was similar report about sudden increase of cases of atypical pneumonia at Oct 16, 2019 in Krasnoyark Krai, Siberia, Russia: about 700 cases per week, which is similar to Covid-19 levels.
> A joint study published by China and the World Health Organization at the end of March acknowledged there could have been sporadic human infections before the Wuhan outbreak.
> Researchers from Britain's University of Kent used methods from conservation science to estimate that SARS-CoV-2 first appeared from early October to mid-November 2019, according to a paper published in the PLOS Pathogens journal.
Brazil recorded its first COVID death April 15, 2019. Initially taken as a data entry error by some, data for 2019 is still published nearly six years after the fact.
November Brazil could happen because December is when rumours already circulated in China and October is when it was out in Wuhan already per your link.
April Brazil I don't know what to tell you, no sources support the wild claim that it was NOT a data error.
> 2 months before it came out of wuhan
Source? I bet it came out earlier.
It was circulating in Wuhan before the pandemic according to WHO. Just people in China who are more likely to get infected are less likely to travel abroad (social class/sanitary conditions/etc) but maybe one person brought it out.
I believe these agencies may have other kinds of intelligence data such as satellite photos of the (empty?) Wuhan Institute of Virology carpark, spikes in mobile phone activity in the area etc.
So assessments are made on more than just biological principles.
I would argue you are sowing disinfo and I honestly dont know what point you are trying to make.
Spikes and/or significant reductions in activity as indicated by external data sources, and particular the timing thereof, will obviously be very useful for determining the sequence of events.
Is Rasmussen really in favour of a GoF ban and destroying the academic value of the background of the majority of her professional friends in the field? Cause I can't really find her calling for a ban, quite the opposite really.
This is the problem with virology, it IS GoF. Expecting virologists to be objective in this is expecting the impossible, like expecting the WHO to apologize for sending Daszak as head of the fact finding mission. They were either THAT incompetent or THAT self interested in maintaing GoF/virology, damn the truth.
I suspect virologists still see themselves as guards on the wall and that we can't handle the truth. Which we already know from the early emails is how they thought early on, why should I assume their propensity for dishonesty has changed?
Yet you propose no thoughts of your own. You only base it on your belief in people around you and your disbelief of people you assume are political. This sounds not scientific at all. Are you really an epidemiologist?
I was honestly hoping for more given that you’re supposedly an epidemiologist.
I base it on my evaluation of the arguments of those people as an epidemiologist. And their expertise - as I've said, my expertise focuses on a different aspect of outbreaks, with its own theories and methods, and I know enough to recognize that addressing this requires a good deal of specialized knowledge.
Well, that sounds more reasonable, but the prior comment seems to be relying mostly on reputation and political viewpoints rather than the arguments themselves.
