> And one point Viral makes abundantly clear is that, if our goal is to prevent the next pandemic, then resolving the mystery of COVID-19 matters less than one might think. This is because, whichever possibility—zoonotic spillover or lab leak—turns out to be the truth of this case, the other possibility would remain absolutely terrifying. Read the book and see for yourself.
Apparently the book does not only focus on lab leaks.
This is buried, but I do think people would care if they could see it because it delegitimizes the very valid reasons to investigate the lab leak hypothesis. Nobody cares if you have a personal vendetta against a country, and it will end up distracting from the fact that, whether this came from a lab or a marketplace, the fact that we can't answer which was the source means the rational response is to take the precautions that would be warranted as if it came from BOTH.
Only if they are both equally likely, which they really aren't. It's more like 99.5% natural, 0.5% lab leak. Or even less. The lab leak is mostly a very popular hypothesis in circles that don't really do science. You can spend all the effort to write a book about it but in reality the biology of zooonosis is well understood and has been established many times in very recent history, including for coronaviruses very much like this one. To hypothesize a lab leak would require some evidence other than the circumstantial, and this book presents none.
Scott is primarily interested because it allows him to crow 'I told you so', but in fact the substance that he sees simply isn't there. The superlatives with which he describes the book do not come across as unbiased reviewing but as searching for confirmation.
We already have a good definition of exotic animal trading so we don't need to strawman any larger scope here.
I 100% support the shutdown of exotic animal trading. From the Wuhan wet markets carrying animals from the corners of the globe for supposed medicinal benefits to the idiots in the west with pet tigers.
What do "Wuhan wet markets" have to do with anything?
From the article:
The seafood market was almost certainly “just” an early superspreader site, rather than the site of the original spillover event. No bats or pangolins at all, and relatively few mammals of any kind, appear to have been sold at that market, and no sign of SARS-CoV2 was ever found in any of the animals despite searching.
It was received knowledge well before 11/21, I remember well from that morning on NPR [0]. I read that article and the academic paper [1] behind it. There is nothing there other than thin correlation. No evidence to say a single zoonotic exposure occurred, much less many over several months, over that human to human transmission occurred there. Correlation is great for starting an investigation such as Snow’s [2]. After the map Snow established causation and a mechanism, Worobey does nothing.
