Thread by @JoshRosenau

This is an interesting up ultimately misleading analogy by Chan. Misleading, alas, in ways she knows are misleading. A virus is not a butterfly. A virus collection is not a butterfly aviary.

https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1431598837639127040

Rearing butterflies in a greenhouse is actually quite rare. Some species must undergo long migrations, or have a complex mutualism with one or more host plants, or with other insects (and other critters). Most butterfly houses use the same set of fairly tractable species.

Viruses *require* a host to survive. Often a really specific host. And the host and the virus evolve together over time, and viruses cross over. So such a menagerie would be incredibly complex to maintain, and ineffective at its main goal of cataloging viral diversity.

Most of what WIV has are sequences of viruses they chose to investigate, and frozen Qtips swabbed over the butts of bats. Neither poses any risk—absolute zero—of a lab escape. This isn’t a zoo, it’s much more analogous to a museum’s collection of pinned insects.

WIV also uses live viruses for experiments. They have a model system, used for most of these experiments. There’s a *reason* scientists rely on model systems, and it’s unlikely that an unpublished virus would have been subject to the sort of experimentation lab leakers claim.

So if you’re in a university town and see a lot of fruit flies with white eyes around, suspect a lab escape. If you see a rare butterfly floating around, look for private enthusiasts. Check import permits too, and if the university has one for that species, ask questions.

An average leak from a university butterfly collection would look like:

An average leak from WIV would look like (but with more poop).

A better analogy: Let’s say people start getting sick with a liver fluke in your town. The local university has a researcher specializing in liver flukes. Do you investigate that lab, or the local butcher shops?

Liver flukes need a host, often several through their lives. The researcher works with small quantities under controlled conditions. Wild flukes spread precisely by getting into a host, then hatching inside the host and laying eggs.

Obviously not impossible the researcher spilled a vial of eggs all over and didn’t clean up. You don’t declare that impossible a priori. But is it more likely that a parasite that has spread from the wild to humans before did so now? Do you prioritize investigating that path?

A lab escape isn’t impossible, but it doesn’t merit a lot of investigative energy when there is a likely pathway with no biosafety controls at all sitting right there.