rayinreverse t1_jacvbgs wrote on February 28, 2023 at 3:05 PM

Reply to comment by adsfew in Little-known scientific team behind new assessment on covid-19 origins by asdf3

That’s a really solid point, and I have no legitimate counter to it. But also the town that has a SARS lab is where a SARS virus originates and we are skeptical it came from the lab, and convinced it was from a wet market? If I show up with a piece of Swedish furniture that we need to build and the instructions have no words only pictures, you’re going to be pretty fucking convinced it’s from IKEA even if I continue to say it’s not.

adsfew t1_jad5q2k wrote on February 28, 2023 at 4:14 PM

I'm not an investigator and I don't have their facts or finding, so this is all just an extremely uninformed opinion.

I absolutely think a leak is plausible. But if 96% really is the similarity to the closest lab strain, then I just wanted to put in context how dissimilar that is genetically. I think it's one of those times where 96% sounds really high, but genetically it's pretty divergent imo.

It's still totally possible that it's a leaked strain and maybe the lab just destroyed the records of that strain or something. But taken on its own, 96% isn't that high in this context.

Electric-Frog t1_jad8b5c wrote on February 28, 2023 at 4:31 PM

And if all of the pieces were labelled "Ikeya", then it would be pretty obvious that it's not IKEA.

There is no way that 3 months of limited spread in a small area would cause 10 times as much variance as 2 years of borderline uncontrolled spread over a large portion of the world.