Lab Leak?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/lab-leak-trap/619150/

I found this article a little hard to get through -- author's style more than content -- but worth reading still. Investigation into lab-leak theor(ies) is now shorthand for how folks feel about the Trump administration's bungled response to coronavirus (to be clear, whether the Wuhan lab released -- accidentally or intentionally -- or didn't release the coronavirus bears not at all on whether Donald Trump and his henchmen botched our national response).

"Gain-of-Function" is now one of those terms the chattering classes on both sides of our current cultural and political divide like to bandy about, so as to sound in the know. The right has embraced it as club though, to bash a supposed scientific elite they believe exists to frustrate Trump's grand designs.

Gain-of-function (GoF) research in virology has been with us for years. Influenza research in the last decade was concerning and led the National Academy of Sciences to recommend a pause while the research community determined how to conduct such research safely and responsibly. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, China's premier virus research institute and their equivalent to our CDC and the Army's Research Intitute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) and affiliated organizations, conducted GoF studies funded in part by international and multi-governmental donors (including the US Government), which provided donors visibility into and oversight of research being conducted at Wuhan.

For my part, I continue to think -- until persuaded otherwise -- that Coronavirus emerged naturally; although I would consider the possibility of it being introduced "innocently" from the wild by a lab worker via contaminated clothes or boots, etc -- see article -- in the process of gathering samples, which is really an extension of natural spread.

I hold this view in an Occam's Razor perspective; the simplest explanation is usually the most likely. For the lab-leak scenario to have happened, once the virus was actually in the lab and being studied, an awful lot of things would have had to go wrong in a controlled environment with overlapping mechanisms intended to prevent just such an occurrence. Which isn't to say it *couldn't* have happened, but that it's far less likely than naturally occuring spread from the virus' natural reservoir to human hosts.

From the article:

"The lab-leak theory isn’t singular; rather, it’s a catchall for a continuum of possible scenarios, ranging from the mundane to the diabolical. At one end, a researcher from the Wuhan Institute of Virology might have gone out to sample bat guano, become infected with a novel pathogen while in the field, and then seeded it back home in a crowded city. Or maybe researchers brought a specimen of a wild-bat virus back into the lab without becoming infected, only to set it free via someone’s clothes or through a leaky sewage pipe.

"The microbiologists Michael Imperiale and David Relman, both former members of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, told me several weeks ago that lab-leak scenarios of this rather more innocent variety—involving the collection and accidental release of a naturally occuring pathogen—were the most probable of all the non-natural possibilities. Yet the most prominent opinionating on this topic has clustered at the other end of the continuum, at first around the dark-side theory of a bioweapon gone awry, and then around the idea that a harmless virus had been deliberately transformed into SARS-CoV-2 (and released by accident) after a reckless series of tabletop experiments."