The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

I don't think it's beyond reason to think, in a country where officials routinely fudge numbers to avoid jail time, that someone covered their ass for too long and now it's the entire CCP's problem. This article looks like it's just running cover because, idk, GOP evil I guess.

Why has the lab not been independently audited? If I was going to make a case against someone making an error, saying "well, that group said they didn't make an error" seems like a bad argument.

> The first human case of Covid could have been infected hundreds of miles away, perhaps closer to the horseshoe bat caves of southern China.

Have we found such a person?

> You can get on the fast train in Wuhan and be in Guandong Province, the home of the original SARS outbreak, in under four hours.

If someone had been in Guandong, and taken a train to Wuhan, it seems to me that the early cases would not have been so concentrated in Wuhan, for two reasons: 1) if Wuhan is really all that accessible by different means of transportation, you'd expect people would just as easily take it from Wuhan to other places, and 2) presumably, the fast train doesn't just stop in Wuhan (Google says it's 1000 km away), meaning an infected person on the train could easily have infected someone else on the train who got off in between. Honest question: is that not how the spread of disease would work?

> There is no evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or anyone else, ever had any strain that similar to Covid-19.

Again, that's what we're trying to figure out. You can't take the thing we're trying to figure out as evidence one way or the other, that's Begging the Question (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question)

> 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.

I don't understand this jump. Most people I've read arguing that the lab leak theory is possible agree that there must be some base virus in nature. The question is, what is the more likely path from that natural virus to the COVID outbreak, through a lab or through some other animal (or animals)? I understand the argument that we didn't find the transmission chain for SARS or MERS or Ebola for years, but why does asserting it started in nature lead to the conclusion it therefore had a natural path? This again seems like the author is trying to prove a conclusion using the conclusion.

> The fact that China is being secretive about Covid-19 isn’t evidence for any particular theory.

When SARS came out, I don't remember the Chinese government blaming Italian frozen food or athletes at an international athletics competition for SARS. I don't remember them promising people that it's not transmittable between humans, or that it's not a big deal. I think simply saying "China is being secretive" is not looking at the whole picture.

> All theories of the origins of Covid-19 should be investigated, including lab origin theories. We should go wherever the science takes us.

This seems right to me. We can't make bricks without clay though.

No matter how hard you yell it, correlation is not causation (and even when there is causation, the direction of the causation isn't always obvious).

Which is to say, not much. But we have no evidence for the natural origin story, and it's a somewhat strange coincidence that the initial outbreak was near a lab studying these very same kinds of viruses. Granted you might put such a lab in places where there are lots of bat viruses to be found, but that's still a much, much larger area than the city of Wuhan. The closest known wild virus came from a source 800 miles away. Draw a circle over a map of China including both Wuhan and that bat cave and you can see that quite clearly.

Combine that with the fact that Sars cov1 escaped labs in China to infect researchers not once, but at least twice, and the Bayesian calculation swings heavily to the lab leak hypothesis.