Thread by @JoshRosenau

I continue to find it irresponsible to treat "field worker breathed in bat poop and then coughed" as a "lab leak" rather than simply zoonosis. I mean, it's exactly the same as if a miner in the same cave got sick, which is definitely not a lab escape. nytimes.com/2021/06/14/wor…

I say "irresponsible" because it actively confuses the #LabLeak discussion. At one end, the US State Department inquiry was premised on SARS-CoV-2 being a bioweapon engineered by the PLA at WIV to target the West. Claims circulate that it was intentionally released!

Other claims about a lab escape involve questions about how safety protocols were applied in a research center. Those international protocols are a product of extensive discussion among scientists and ethicists, but are relatively recent and may not be perfect yet.

There's no sign at all that SARS-CoV-2 or any closely-similar virus was ever part of experiments at WIV. But if it was and somehow escaped, that would be legitimate grist for the policy mill. Any human system will be imperfect, and we would want to learn from a mistake like that.

Given that there's no sign SARS-CoV-2 was ever part of experiments at WIV, it's doubtful that any specific lessons can be drawn here. Field researchers contracting the virus would not teach us anything about lab protocols!

Nor would a field researcher's contracting the virus shed any light on people's concerns about gain of function research. If a field researcher got sick, so would a farmer, miner, hiker, or homeowner with bats in the attic. The virus was already ready to spill over to humans.

The main concern people discuss with a lab escape involves work to take wild viruses and either induce them to grow on human cells, or engineer changes to increase their virulence. It's a theoretical concern that researchers and ethicists have explored.

There's no sign that SARS-CoV-2 has anything to do with such research. If a field worker caught the virus from a bat and then coughed on the bus, it would tell us nothing at all about the safety of such research.

So including that sort of spillover as a lab leak rather than as zoonosis actively muddles the discussion, confusing an already murky issue. Just stop!