In this context, I’m an ordinary civilian with no specialized knowledge of genetics or virology. I read the linked article, and saw an interesting story built off relevant history and lots of conjecture. I’ve also read the comments up to this point. Here are the arguments as I see them right now:
SARS-CoV-2 (hereafter “the Virus”) must have an origin. Viral origins can be natural or artificial. Natural viruses evolve from other strains, sometimes in animals. The Virus shares a lot of characteristics with a certain bat virus, which is evidence it evolved in bats and then transferred to humans. It is therefore (at least originally) natural. Nobody seems to have any issues up to this point.
The question of how the Virus got to humans has a number of possible answers that seem to boil down to:
A random mutation in a bat virus may have caused it to be infectious to humans.
The Virus may have been engineered to be infectious to humans for legitimate or nefarious reasons.
The engineering may have been by design
The engineering may have been accidental
In favor of the random mutation possibility:
This is a thing that happens sometimes
There were opportunities for humans to have been exposed to the relevant bat virus in large concentrations for extended periods
The Virus’s genome does not show obvious signs of deliberate tampering
In favor of engineering, either accidental or deliberate:
The virus is suspiciously infectious to humans. There are lab conditions that would encourage this kind of mutation.
We know that labs at least had the opportunity to collect samples before the first noticed outbreak
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had a sample of the bat virus, is really close to the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which first noticed the Virus in the population.
It all seems circumstantial to me except the examination of the genome. Even the article started off admitting that there is a distinct lack of hard evidence here. If anything, the balance of evidence looks (to my eye) to be (barely) in favor of a random mutation resulting from the massive exposure of workers to the bat virus. We know that the Virus causes lots of asymptomatic infections, so I see no reason to believe that those workers didn’t pass it on before they were hospitalized for their own infections. We know samples of the bat virus spent time in a lab, but the lab time doesn’t seem to be necessary for the Virus to reach the general population given the presence of the workers. Given the known behavior of the Virus, I claim it could easily have moved unchecked from Mojiang to Wuhan as a barely noticed, mostly asymptomatic infection the same way we saw it spread mostly untracked through a number of other countries while we were watching for it. It then popped up in Wuhan the same way hotspots have been popping up all over the world ever since.
In this context, I’m an ordinary civilian with no specialized knowledge of genetics or virology. I read the linked article, and saw an interesting story built off relevant history and lots of conjecture. I’ve also read the comments up to this point. Here are the arguments as I see them right now:
SARS-CoV-2 (hereafter “the Virus”) must have an origin. Viral origins can be natural or artificial. Natural viruses evolve from other strains, sometimes in animals. The Virus shares a lot of characteristics with a certain bat virus, which is evidence it evolved in bats and then transferred to humans. It is therefore (at least originally) natural. Nobody seems to have any issues up to this point.
The question of how the Virus got to humans has a number of possible answers that seem to boil down to:
A random mutation in a bat virus may have caused it to be infectious to humans.
The Virus may have been engineered to be infectious to humans for legitimate or nefarious reasons.
The engineering may have been by design
The engineering may have been accidental
In favor of the random mutation possibility:
This is a thing that happens sometimes
There were opportunities for humans to have been exposed to the relevant bat virus in large concentrations for extended periods
The Virus’s genome does not show obvious signs of deliberate tampering
In favor of engineering, either accidental or deliberate:
The virus is suspiciously infectious to humans. There are lab conditions that would encourage this kind of mutation.
We know that labs at least had the opportunity to collect samples before the first noticed outbreak
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had a sample of the bat virus, is really close to the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which first noticed the Virus in the population.
It all seems circumstantial to me except the examination of the genome. Even the article started off admitting that there is a distinct lack of hard evidence here. If anything, the balance of evidence looks (to my eye) to be (barely) in favor of a random mutation resulting from the massive exposure of workers to the bat virus. We know that the Virus causes lots of asymptomatic infections, so I see no reason to believe that those workers didn’t pass it on before they were hospitalized for their own infections. We know samples of the bat virus spent time in a lab, but the lab time doesn’t seem to be necessary for the Virus to reach the general population given the presence of the workers. Given the known behavior of the Virus, I claim it could easily have moved unchecked from Mojiang to Wuhan as a barely noticed, mostly asymptomatic infection the same way we saw it spread mostly untracked through a number of other countries while we were watching for it. It then popped up in Wuhan the same way hotspots have been popping up all over the world ever since.