- 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).
So I have to pipe in here as I recall this vividly. What crystalized this for me was of all things an op-ed piece by a conservative (not neocon) writer that essentially came down to this (paraphrased):
> There are essentially two possibilities here:
> 1. Iraq has no WMD. In this case the invasion is unjustified; or
> 2. Iraq has WMD. In which case, why wouldn't they give them up to avoid a US invasion?
This was such a simple and undeniable logical fallacy in the Iraq WMD invasion narrative it blew my mind.
I've been skeptical about the lab leak theory. But you can be skeptical about the theory and still recognize that the WHO just hasn't pursued enough leads to debunk the theory to a sufficient degree. Examples include:
1. China had an online database of coronaviruses. This was taken offline in late 2019 and hasn't been online since. The WHO investigation team has not examined it nor sought to do so. While the timing is certainly curious, it's not necessarily damning. But it warrants investigation (IMHO); and
2. Chinese labs have been less than forthcoming about what coronaviruses they have.
Chinese authorities have been less than fully cooperative here. Again, that's not damning. I consider it much more likely that Chinese authorities simply don't know if Covid leaked from a Wuhan lab but there's literally zero upside in finding out if that's the case.
Would you want to be a member of the CCP that released information that allowed the WHO to establish that Covid-19 came from a Wuhan lab allowing critics of China to "blame" China for this?
Nope, I wouldn't either. So why cooperate?