Earlier quoted context omitted.
>and this all just happened to be within a few miles of a laboratory with sketchy safety history that literally studies coronaviruses If the argument is: 1) a lab was built in Wuhan that studied coronaviruses, then a global coronavirus pandemic originated in Wuhan 2) Therefore the lab caused the global pandemic then it is a fallacious argument.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc
That's not the argument. Nobody's pretending that propositional logic can decide this. It's a question of how to weight empirical evidence. Some people think it's relevant that a new coronavirus emerged next door to a lab working on new coronaviruses, especially since concerns had been raised about unsafe conditions there.
> In a recent paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Forster reported he found three main strains of the virus that he labeled A, B and C.
> His research determined that A was the founding variant because it was the version most similar to the type of SARS-Cov-2 (the scientific name for the virus) discovered in bats. Many experts suspect that the virus migrated to humans from bats, probably via some other animal. But he also discovered that the A strain wasn't the predominant type in Wuhan.
> Of 23 samples that came from Wuhan, only three were type A, the rest were type B, a version two mutations from A. But in other parts of China, Forster says, initially A was the predominant strain. For instance, of nine genome samples in Guangdong, some 600 miles south of Wuhan, five were A types.
It doesn't seem fair to assume this originated in Wuhan. Instead the Wuhan markets may have been the first super-spreader site.
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...