- 1st response to CoVID occurrence was certainly in Wuhan.
- The closest wild strain of CoVID happens in bats living thousand kilometres from Wuhan
- Wuhan had two institutes which, on record, did gain of function experiments on bat coronaviruses
- Beijing purposefully destroyed DNA evidence, and obliterated the team who first sequenced the CoVID genome
- Chinese authorities were scrambling, and suppressing reporting as early as November, seemingly with a very good idea what they are up to.
This feels so much like the Iraq "weapons of mass destruction" fiasco. Any time news outlets are credulously repeating the words of "government officials," you need to seriously devalue the reporting. Reporting isn't just being a mouthpiece for the state, and these outlets fail us when they express such a high degree of certainty before there's any independent verification of the facts.
Of course, everything you describe is still "circumstantial," and it's wise to remain skeptical. However, even if we somehow eventually confirm this was not a lab escape, there's absolutely no excuse for the certainty expressed by the NYT et al in their early reporting (which is true for so much of the other COVID-19 media coverage - the media did a terrible job of expressing uncertainty with very incomplete information throughout the entire affair).
In general, my trust for the media has fallen through the floor in the last decade. I used to think that the media was mostly trustworthy, but that they would cater to the establishment on certain issues (e.g., WMDs and the general Iraq/Afghanistan war effort) but apart from those obvious high-profile issues they were mostly trustworthy. Now I can't tell if I was wrong the whole time and I've just wisened up recently or if the quality of the media has plummeted (especially with respect to ideological issues) or both. I strongly suspect that the media has become considerably more ideological (abandoning aspirations for neutrality and objectivity in favor of activism and proselytizing, at least to a degree), but I've probably (and hopefully) wisened up a bit as well.
A good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_d...
The gist is that in the 80s nuclear winter was portrayed as apocalyptic by Carl Sagan and others using shoddy models in order to advance an arms control agenda. More recent work depicts far more modest climactic effects that are highly variable based on the season the nuclear war would occur in (worst in the summer, very modest to non-existent in the winter). The issue seems to be not so much the bombs themselves; but how cities burn, how much soot would be produced, and how it would move through the atmosphere.
This is also worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in.... Sagan's nuclear-winter modeling team predicted in 1990 that 100 oil well fires would produce a small-scale global nuclear winter. In 1991 Iraq started 800 oil well fires, which caused no such thing. The only effects were localized and stopped soon after the fires were put out.