Thinking Problems - Lab Leak

This is Fu (it's his name in PowerPoint).  He's our nominal Patient O (also sometimes styled as 0, or Zero) for Covid-19, caused by the virus SARS-CoV2.  Behind him is a potential other person in the chain, we can call him Fu2, he's a hypothetical intermediate human carrier of the virus who didn't come down with Covid-19 - who may or may not exist.  As they collectively are the portal of the virus into humanity, we can just refer to the Fu/Fu2 nexus as Fu, just keeping in mind that there may have been that human-human mechanism right at the start.

We don't know how Fu got infected with SARS-CoV2, but there are some theories, indicated by the lines.

It could be entirely natural, noting that there are some variants of that, some of which have the virus being shared between different animal vectors as it evolved (some of which might have been human).  That's what the additional dotted box means.  Fu interacted with an animal in the wild, at a market or somewhere else that had the virus and got Covid-19.

SARS-CoV2 could have been genetically engineered in a lab and then Fu could have been deliberately infected with it.  This would imply that SARS-CoV2 had been developed as a biological weapon.

Alternatively, there could have been infection from a petri dish, test tube or surface in a lab where the virus was being genetically engineered, as a biological weapon, in a gain of function effort to develop better methods for treating coronaviruses more widely (vaccines, retrovirals, and the sort) or just out of scientific curiosity (i.e. pure research).

Finally, there could have been a crossover from an animal infected with SARS-CoV2 that was being treated, dissected, studied or whatever in a lab.  This may have been with the intent to develop a biological weapon, or do some gain of function for benign reasons, but in this case there had not (yet) been genetic engineering carried out.

Note that the purple arrows are pointing at the boxes, not any of the other arrows.  The amount of evidence for each event is nominal, the size of the bubble could also relate to the quality of evidence, rather than a mere quantity.  Note that it's evidence, not proof.  Some evidence might support multiple possibilities.

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I think I have captured all the possibilities being thought of seriously.  Even if there is some bizarre vector, like aliens or the New World Order doing the genetic engineering and deliberately injecting Fu, this still falls into the category "Genetic Engineering".  Same with a god doing it, it's just that the technology would be different (supernatural genetic engineering).  If there is something that I have missed, I am more than happy to go through it and try to weave it in.

Note that even with genetic engineering, there was still a natural origin of the base virus that was being fiddled with.  So, there is naturally going to be a lot of evidence for natural origins.  I'm not really thinking about evidence that supports all cases, just delta evidence.  Those cases are (arrow type):

• purely natural – Natural Origins→Fu (large red)
• simple leak from a lab – Natural Origins→Leak from a Lab→Natural Origins→Fu (small orange)
• deliberate infection – Natural Origins→Genetic Engineering→Fu (tiny grey)
• complex direct leak from a lab – Natural Origins→Genetic Engineering→Leak from a Lab→Fu (large green)
• complex indirect leak from a lab – Natural Origins→Genetic Engineering→Leak from a Lab→Natural Origins→Fu (small blue) – so we can think of zoonosis as “natural”, in a sense, even if the virus were to be tinkered with at some point.

There is one other that I identified after I put the image together, namely Natural Origins→Leak from a Lab→Natural Origins→Fu.  The notion here is that the virus was transferred from where it normally is (in a bat, in a cave, somewhere in southern China) to a lab and gets into another animal (pangolin, civet cat or one of those adorable raccoon dogs), and then that other animal becomes the vector for transmitting SARS-COV2 into humans.

There is also the possibility of a pre-SARS-COV2 virus being carried from a lab to the animal (via an intermediate human infection), with mutation(s) then happening in an animal or range of animals – resulting in a variant that became known as the Wuhan strain of SARS-COV2.

I’m not specifying a lab, although there are two candidates that seem more reasonable than any others given the location of the first outbreak – Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control (about a quarter of a kilometre from the Huanan Seafood Market [also variously known as the Huanan Wholesale Market and Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market]).  It’s somewhat less likely that any leak occurred at another of the many labs in large cities in China and then got carried to Wuhan to break out there.  About as likely as Chinese authorities deliberately releasing a deadly virus on the doorstep of their major virology institute.

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The problem, as I see it, is that the light blue ellipse encompasses what some people refer to as a "lab leak", also indicated by the larger green arrow – implying genetic engineering in a lab with an accidental release, possibly of a biological weapon but, at the very least, some questionable gain of function research.  Then they take any evidence that there might have been a leak from a lab as evidence for genetic engineering, which it isn't.

I suspect that there's a similar problem on the other side in that initial discussions of a "lab leak" included the assumption that it encompassed both a leak from a lab and genetic engineering, so they weren't counting direct transmission from an animal to a human inside a lab (or even just a SARS-CoV2 sample from an animal, onto a surface or into a test tube and thence to a human) as a "lab leak".  So they were saying that a "lab leak" was considered extremely unlikely where, in reality, a leak from a lab is entirely possible and they should have said more clearly that genetic engineering is extremely unlikely (for various reasons) but not entirely impossible.

It isn't helped by the fact that dog-whistles are used on both sides, and the one term sometimes means quite different things.

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If something seems unclear, please let me know.