Rex Kerr
1 min readMay 12, 2023

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It is frustrating that there is so much noise from people who have an emotional attachment to a lab leak hypothesis rather than just trying to figure out what happened as best one can.

However, one has to be very careful not to let the noise goad one into committing the fallacy fallacy: thinking that because "that side" is doing such a bad job with evidence, their favored conclusion is wrong.

Do we even have enough environmental sampling data from elsewhere to know whether or not the presence or absence of human DNA is informative? It's clear that (1) SARS-CoV-2 was there, (2) raccoon dogs and a variety of other animals were there, and (3) humans were there. Beyond that, I don't really see the positive and negative controls that establish that the methodology is adequate to tell us very much even about what species was infected, let alone what the source was. (Lineage analysis of the viral sequence is pretty much the only hope for that.)

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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