The article opens by pooh-poohing the idea that three WIV researchers with flu-like symptoms in November might have had Covid-19, then a couple of paragraphs later asserts that it's well-known that Covid-19 was already circulating in Wuhan in November. Isn't there a contradiction there?
How widely accepted is the notion that Ebola is a bat virus? The last I heard (which was a while ago) the leading theory was a simian reservoir.
> What we’re left with is this: If the WIV had a secret strain (or strains) at least 99 percent similar to Covid-19, it got that raw material from the wild. That would mean there’s at least one wild virus that’s at least 99 percent similar to Covid-19 somewhere in nature, where humans had contact with it at least once. So far, it hasn’t been found, but it’s got to be out there, whether Covid is 100 percent natural or human-tweaked. So, given that Covid (or its direct ancestor) must exist in nature, it’s more likely that it got out naturally (like SARS and MERS) than that it took an undetectable detour through a secure biolab.
Is this really true? Everyone acknowledges that WIV researchers (quite openly and properly) sought out new coronavirus strains, including expeditions into remote mountains etc. to look for bat caves and take samples from bats that would probably never have otherwise had contact with humans. Everyone acknowledges that WIV cultured cells from its samples and worked closely with them under what were, at least in retrospect, inadequate (BSL-2) safety precautions. For a virus that we're all agreed must originate with a bat in a remote cave somewhere to get to a human, yes this is a more complex route than one lost bat biting a farmer or something. But I'm not sure it's really so much less plausible that humans who deliberately collected, studied, and worked closely with this virus for many man-hours might have slipped up once.
(We will probably never know for sure what happened - another thing that everyone acknowledges is that the PRC government destroyed a lot of potentially relevant evidence. On balance I think a purely natural origin is probably most likely, but I do think that the people who dogmatically shouted down any lab leak theory come off a lot worse than those who kept, and keep, an open mind)