I'm not an expert in bioscience, I simply spent a while studying it.
There is biosecurity and biowarfare literature on pretty much every single virus you can imagine - generally it's about how it might be modified to be used as a bioweapon. And really, coronaviruses are quite good platforms for making debilitating airborne weapons.
SARS-CoV itself as a bioweapon is simply not infectious enough, it was sucessfully contained dozens of times. It's also not that lethal to military-age men, for 20-29 year olds CFR is around 1% and for 30-39 year olds it's around 3% (taking data from infections in the PRC and in HK as there is the least low-detection bias). But it definitely has a lot of potential if you engineer it. For reference, the average age of a soldier in WW2 was 26.
SARS-CoV-2 is complete trash as a bioweapon, an entire carrier was infected and no one died. Debilitation was minimal. It's infectious enough, but it's very bad at actually killing military aged people.
But certainly, they could be engineered to be suitable. That's not the claim I was replying to - the claim I was replying to was that in it's natural form it was a bioweapon.
>The rest of your posts seems to gather support for other hypothesis, not as much attacking the lab leak theory as highly unlikely.
Likelihoods are relative. Everyone agrees that likelihood for a lab escape is fairly low - those are relatively rare. The argument is that the normal process for viruses to reach humans - which was the case for literally every single other pandemic ever - is unlikely thus making lab escape more likely relatively.
I did, however, add a few points that go against the likelihood of an undetected lab escape - which is that the existence of the sample would almost certaintly be known.
There is biosecurity and biowarfare literature on pretty much every single virus you can imagine - generally it's about how it might be modified to be used as a bioweapon. And really, coronaviruses are quite good platforms for making debilitating airborne weapons.
SARS-CoV itself as a bioweapon is simply not infectious enough, it was sucessfully contained dozens of times. It's also not that lethal to military-age men, for 20-29 year olds CFR is around 1% and for 30-39 year olds it's around 3% (taking data from infections in the PRC and in HK as there is the least low-detection bias). But it definitely has a lot of potential if you engineer it. For reference, the average age of a soldier in WW2 was 26.
SARS-CoV-2 is complete trash as a bioweapon, an entire carrier was infected and no one died. Debilitation was minimal. It's infectious enough, but it's very bad at actually killing military aged people.
But certainly, they could be engineered to be suitable. That's not the claim I was replying to - the claim I was replying to was that in it's natural form it was a bioweapon.
>The rest of your posts seems to gather support for other hypothesis, not as much attacking the lab leak theory as highly unlikely.
Likelihoods are relative. Everyone agrees that likelihood for a lab escape is fairly low - those are relatively rare. The argument is that the normal process for viruses to reach humans - which was the case for literally every single other pandemic ever - is unlikely thus making lab escape more likely relatively.
I did, however, add a few points that go against the likelihood of an undetected lab escape - which is that the existence of the sample would almost certaintly be known.