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>>ruarai+(OP)
My understanding of the author's central thesis is this: the US, despite its world-class virology and disease study labs, regularly has lapses in procedure that regularly lead to situations in which the public might be exposed. Given that this is happening in our own backyard, we might reasonably expect countries of similar status (like China) to experience similar lapses.

That reads as reasonable to me, but raises a subsequent question: if these lapses are so common and so many countries possess the capacity for serious mistakes, why don't we see more regular outbreaks (if not full-blown pandemics) caused by labs? In other words, what makes COVID special? I didn't find a satisfactory answer to the latter question in the article.

It's my (uninformed, uneducated) opinion that the severity of the author's claims don't correspond to the reality of the last few national and international disease crises (AIDS, Ebola, Zika, COVID). Which isn't to say that we should absolutely dismiss the possibility that COVID originated in a lab, only that claims that it did amount to currently unsubstantiated claims about COVID's special status among other recent pandemics.

>>woodru+bz1
There's been a number of very short transmission chains. One of the things that's difficult for infectious diseases is that they have extremely long-tailed distributions. "This has happened before, and it got a couple people sick" is a distinct possibility. It also happens relatively frequently with diseases that have a lower pandemic potential than a coronavirus.

So the answer to "What makes COVID special?" is possibly "We failed our pandemic save."

I did some research during the early stages of the West African Ebola epidemic, when a lot of people were asking why, instead of the usual sporadic, self-limiting outbreaks of the past, we were seeing something larger and different. As it turns out, if you use the parameters people estimated from the older, smaller outbreaks, there's a small but not breathtakingly so probability of a very large epidemic. It's sort of the null hypothesis for pandemics.