"Let me be clear: Labs in Wuhan might not have played any role in the origin of the pandemic. But a year later, no source has been found, and the world deserves a thorough, unbiased investigation of all plausible theories that is conducted without fear or favor."
Okay. So basically this author has no evidence other than the fact that it's very difficult, maybe impossible to identify the site of first transmission. I don't know what progress would look like, but maybe sampling animals in the wild to find a carrier with a genetic signature that looks like an early version?
This is just speculative nonsense to try to hype the government's pivot to China. That's why its in the opinion section, the worst part of the newspaper.
For one people actually believe Chinese's numbers, something no Chinese national will ever do.
China is a totalitarian country, they have the monopoly of the press. That means official numbers are not real numbers because if you go against the official numbers you just dissapear. You can not compare numbers given in a free press country against numbers being given by a totalitarian country.
That happened for decades with Soviet Russia, while Lenin and Stalin made tens of millions of people die of starvation, their official numbers were fantastic. They even exported grain.
There is no evidence because China made impossible for scientists to study the origin of COVID for almost a year. They closed their laboratories and removed all possible evidence with bleach.