Expert opinions on COVID-19 Origins

It always seemed entirely plausible to me that Covid escaped from a laboratory, but that doesn’t mean that it was deliberate or the result of nefarious activity.

This acknowledgement should not lead to the dismissal of the possibility (e.g., accidental leakage from a BSL-4 or lower biosafety level laboratory) or the legitimate concerns surrounding biosecurity and biosafety in general.

The story of lab leak in Wuhan is a fiction and it is as ridiculous as the counterclaim that Sars-CoV-2 comes from lab leaks in the US.

The problem is that argument doesn’t work — all evidence points to Covid starting around the same time the market outbreak started.

All he is saying in this Science article is that we need better, more comprehensive patient case and dated viral sequence data – at the time of first appearance of these viruses – to make this viral phylogenetic/evolutionary history approach more acc...

The data from the paper support the notion that Huanan market may have been just an amplifier of COVID-19 transmission, rather than the place where COVID-19 originated.

Bayesian reasoning serves as a bridge between quantitative and qualitative research that allows one to analyze any and all kinds of data within a single, unified inferential framework. This paper demonstrates the strength and flexibility of the Bayes...

The arguments around covid origins seem largely to fall into an inference trap Andrew has termed premature collapse of the wavefunction. Rather than maintaining multiple hypotheses with different levels of credibility, there seems to be a desire to c...

Determining the origin of an outbreak or pandemic can be divided into four stages: detection, identification, characterization, and attribution. Understanding how a specific pathogen entered and spread in a population to cause an outbreak is a multid...