Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

They're actually no good at anything. You can compare places that were right next to each other and which differed only in mask mandates, or look at the times mask mandates were introduced and removed. Cases don't shift.

See the graphs here, where the numbers from different nearby regions are overlayed on the same graph with the times of mask mandate rule changes:

https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a...

That's why when you dig into the citations of a paper claiming masks work, you invariably find some invalid evidence, like they'll be citing model outputs as evidence of real-world effects, or they'll cite a study whose CI includes zero, etc.

For example, Italy was reporting zero cases when the US and UK weren't, and exponential growth is really slow at the start - you don'tt just go from zero cases to hospital collapse in an instant. The only way this makes sense is if Italy was failing to test people hospitalized with Covid symptoms even more totally and completely than even the US, which had an official policy of not doing so for patients without travel from China yet still managed to pick up unlinked cases at a much earlier stage. Which means the information on how Italy ended up this way was useless and not applicable to other countries, and all the hospitalisation and death rates were worthless too - and remember, no other country in the world had Covid spread from China result in the kind of outbreak that Italy experienced, their major outbreaks all seem to have come from Italy. So other countries had no way of knowing whether to expect something more like Italy's experiences or their own prior experiences and also no way of knowing what if anything could prevent this.

The information on how to treat Covid patients from Italy also seems to have been hot garbage. Like, their information and treatment policies around stuff like intubation and ventilators which every other country based their policies on likely outright killed a bunch of people. On the other hand, the UK found the first effective treatment for patients with Covid that was actually confirmed to substantially reduce their risk of dying - yet somehow, you don't hear the press arguing that other countries whose outbreaks happened after the UK's should've been able to do better because they had the UK to learn from like they do with Italy. What they have been doing is comparing the total number of deaths with other European countries (rather than per-capita figures) to falsely make it look like Covid was more deadly here than everywhere else.

There's nothing ill-founded, it was then and is now the most reasonable and plausible explanation for the outbreak. You can do the same back of the envelope calculation today that I did 2 years ago, and nothing has made it less valid:

1. There's 100 cities in PRC with >1 million inhabitants.

2. There's one (1) lab in PRC doing work on bat viruses.

The probability that the outbreak happened in the same city as the one with the lab by pure coincidnce is therefore about 1%.

That's not a proof, that's not a definite argument, that's just evaluating how plausible the hypothesis is. You can tweak the values to be more charitable if you want, say note that Wuhan is a large city and we shouldn't count smaller ones, or point out that there might be a few mor labs doing the same kind of work but with less prominence. That merely lowers the lab leak's plausibility to 50%. I.e very plausible.

But you don't really need to take US intel's word for any of it. The grant application where the scientists literally propose modifying spike proteins of bat coronaviruses in the Wuhan Lab leaked from the DoD and you can read it for yourself:

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop...

https://assets.ctfassets.net/syq3snmxclc9/oVt6gT0yBx4eQXSeuN...

"A GRANT PROPOSAL written by the U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance and submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, provides evidence that the group was working — or at least planning to work — on several risky areas of research. Among the scientific tasks the group described in its proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, was the creation of full-length infectious clones of bat SARS-related coronaviruses and the insertion of a tiny part of the virus known as a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses. Of particular interest was a type of cleavage site able to interact with furin, an enzyme expressed in human cells."

Note that the names on this grant proposal were the same scientists that were executing this coverup and the ones responsible for the obvious lie that it couldn't have come from the lab.

The idea that it wasn't created by scientists requires either a lack of information or tremendous naivety to continue holding onto. You can literally read their proposals to deliberately engineer viruses to be more infectious to humans and - even crazier - to deliberately release these viruses into bat caves and then spray airborne vaccines over self-same bats.