What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

>A small grant ... isn't evidence of a lab leak

The grant is evidence of research not of the leak.

>And the "human subjects" was literally just to run PCRs on people who live near bats to try and catch viruses early.

we don't really know what was done with the "subjects". The IRB document would probably be a good starting point here. When you're doing GoF by specifically increasing human targeting virality by creating chimera viruses in the lab, the "PCRs on people who live near bats" sounds a bit sideway.

> it's not difficult to see whether a virus was engineered or manipulated with GoF research and this one wasn't.

really depends on how GoF is done. So far such conclusions in this case came from the people coopted and prompted by Daszak while those people weren't aware of the conflict of interest that Daszak has here.

>So all of the silly distractions about right-wing bogeyman like Peter Daszak secretly funding Chinese bioweapons are irrelevant.

that is strawman argument. The facts of Daszak involvement is clearly and widely documented. As to his motivation or final target - it is clearly a matter of interpretation and scale of fantasy of the one doing interpretation, and as i already mentioned in Russia for example, where fantasy these days runs amok and political interests are very specifically directed, it is interpreted in the opposite direction - as US building bioweapons. (Note: in my interpretation i see no bioweapons or the likes, just a somewhat dangerous research performed with a bit of corner cutting (not necessary for the reason of costs, as the speed of research at lower BSL also improves a lot), and instead of looking into the mistakes and how to make such research safer - i think such research is unavoidable - the issue got highly politicized with no any useful outcome as a result)

> If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information about the nature of the virus and how it spread.

You're assuming that the lab "designed" it like a new vehicle engine complete with horsepower and torque specs.

Even given it was produced in a lab through chimeras and serial passage then they still wouldn't have known what they had. They wouldn't have known its characteristics in a human population. They wouldn't have known how long its incubation period was, or when peak symptoms and peak transmissibility happened, they wouldn't have known its virulence, or its R0 in a human population or pretty much anything. They'd might have receptor binding assays against the human ACE-2 receptor. That knowledge and $4.25 will buy you a latte, but it won't predict the trajectory of a pandemic.

And why aren't you annoyed at the coverup that China is doing of its zoonotic origins and that China isn't cleaning up all of the trafficking in live animals like palm civets and racoon dogs? We know SARS-CoV-1 happened, and there was no BSL4 lab to blame it on, so it was definitely zoonotic, yet still fairly unexplained, and nothing serious was done to prevent it from happening again. Now the US is blaming the WIV lab and China is feeding its domestic population propaganda about how the US did it, and still nothing is being done to address the mechanism that we know created SARS-CoV-1. There's still a known virological time bomb there that nobody is doing anything about.

And the reason why China wants to cover up the zoonotic origins and kick the can down the road is that it can use the lab leak theory to push the domestic propaganda that the US did, along with avoiding the political costs of clamping down on the animal trade. And there will be a political cost to doing that. Imagine if in 2009 that the H1N1 pandemic happened in a US pig farm and was 100 times worse, and then Obama tried to ban bacon to prevent a future pandemic.

Thanks, I'll have to give this some deep thought, it's news to me that having that much more data gives you high resolution in real time.

I'm very clearly and obviously doing the exact opposite

When there are massive institutional incentives to proclaim X, it is only wise to discount, somewhat, proclamations of X.

In Vanity Fair's lab-leak theory story, there was an illustrative detail:

*> Inside the NIH, which funded such research, the P3CO ["Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight"] framework was largely met with shrugs and eye rolls, said a longtime agency official: “If you ban gain-of-function research, you ban all of virology.” He added, “Ever since the moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done gain-of-function research anyway.”

A whole field wants certain research to happen, with minimal limits. They don't want to admit, or even let themselves believe, that their peers' accident killed 20 million people. It's a hard pill to swallow!