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by maxutility·4y ago·view on hn ↗
As the person who originally posted this to HN, after reading some of the refutations of Matt Y’s piece (the OP), I’ve come to believe the evidence for zoonotic origin is stronger than Matt Y gives credit for.

One short rebuttal I found particularly understandable to a layperson comes from a prominent economist (not a virologist), pointing out a few considerations that Matt’s piece appears to give insufficient credence to:

https://www.themoneyillusion.com/case-closed-2/

There’s also the twitter thread by one of the original research article coauthors, but I actually found that harder to evaluate as a layperson.

In particular: 1. Matts piece may overweight how much of a coincidence the virus emerging in Wuhan was if it were zoonotic 2. Matt’s piece may underweight the coincidence of emerging at a live animal market if it were a lab leak 3. Matt’s piece underweights the finding that the market hosted both the original A and B variants