WitheringWeights

Premises Here I tackle some bold claims made by Roko in three separate posts about SARS-CoV-2 being an engineered virus (Brute Force Manufactured Consensus is Hiding the Crime of the Century, The Math of Suspicious Coincidences, and A Back-Of-The-Envelope Calculation On How Unlikely The Circumstantial Evidence Around Covid-19 Is). A first rebuttal to Roko's post is already out, and since I have been preparing this post for some time, certain arguments are going to be similar. The purpose of this post is not to incontrovertibly demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 was of zoonotic origin, as I myself believe a laboratory leak to be somewhat plausible, but rather that the degree of Roko's confidence in the engineered-pandemic belief is terribly overstated in light of the presented evidence. I believe that the RootClaim debate is a great way to familiarise oneself with core arguments from all sides, it is exceedingly comprehensive and up to date. I also found Wikipedia articles on the lab-leak hypothesis and adjacent topics to be pretty informative. I definitely drew inspiration from many comments to the main post, if you recognise a comment in this post please let me know and I will link it. A Set of Explainable Coincidences Roko asserts that there the odds of zoonotic spillover are 1 in 80,000,000. > What are the chances that the bat coronavirus which caused a once in a century pandemic managed to navigate its way all the way from a Yunnan cave and home in on the city with the lab having the top Google hits for "Coronavirus China" and also the location of China's first BSL-4 lab? Well, that would be approximately 1 in 200, since that is the fraction of China's population in Wuhan. 'One-in-a-century' pandemic The '1 in 200' figure is restated here as > Coincidence of Location: Wuhan is a particularly special place in China for studying covid-19; the WIV group was both the most important, most highly-cited group before 2020, a