Speaking as a biologist, this “lab accident” story is bullshit by a non-scientist mistaking conjecture for evidence. https://twitter.com/nymag/status/1346083232664727553

Humans are such narcissistic creatures. We have to insert ourselves into the absolute center of everything, even when we aren’t. We cram random facts into our own soap operas, because we cannot imagine that things can just happen.

This is one of those cases.

My objection is that the lab story underestimates by orders of magnitude how often we normally encounter animal viruses in everyday life.

If you have squirrels and bats in your attic, you are exposed to unknown viruses. Outdoor cat? Another contact. Mosquito bite? Even more.

In an ocean of 8 billion people, each having regular contact with dozens to hundreds of other vertebrate species, the probability that a lab contact- a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent of all possible points of viral host-jumping- is the big one becomes vanishingly small.

Of course it’s possible, and it happens. But so do a zillion other things, and what we need to sort among them is not a compelling human drama but replicable, verifiable evidence.

People have a worship and a fear of science. To most people, labs are what they see in TV dramas, the scene of mystery, wonder, or danger. They are places of myth. A perfect setting for an old school religious origin story.

We are, of course, getting better at altering viruses. But we aren’t great at it. Most efforts, like everything our species does, fail to have the desired outcome.

But do you know what is *great* at altering viruses? Natural virus populations.

Put another way. You can contract a virus from being in a virus lab, or you can contract a virus from going into your attic.

But, there are millions of attics, and only a few virus labs. Do the math.