I'm ambivalent about the two hypotheses, but China's early behaviour fits either, I think. I do think that the instinct of the regional bureaucracy is to control the flow of information, and punish those that proceed outside the party hierarchy (even if there was no foul play/bad conscience/anything to hide).
The disappearance of Huang Yan Ling is another bit of evidence that pushes me towards the lab leak.
If I were to assign a percentage to it, I’d say about 60% chance lab origin is true, 40% chance natural origin is true.
Do you actually have any evidence in which to compare and contrast how a government behaves when trying to cover up a manmade virus vs how a government behaves when trying to cover up a natural virus that has hopped species? Genuinely asking because we absolutely need to be pinning conclusions on evidence and not conjecture here.
My counterpoint is Ai Wei Wei was disappeared for barely anything at all, dude was producing art that people don’t like. And Jack Ma also disappeared for a period of time right? The Chinese government disappears people like I have coffee in the morning. I would need more evidence to presume this disappearance of a doctor is somehow more significant.
I’m not GP, but GP used the term “lab escape”, not “man made”. Lab escape could just as easily apply to a naturally occurring disease that was being studied in the lab.
The CCP has a huge incentive to have her come forward and make some kind of a statement that she's fine and that the outbreak has nothing to do with the lab/those are all rumors, similar to what the lead researcher Shi Zhengli did. The expected behavior if she were the target of a rumor that she was patient zero would be to squash it immediately in the strongest way possible, whether or not it were true. Huang Yan Ling making a statement and talking about that silly rumor would be the strongest way to squash that rumor.
The fact that has not happened suggests she isn't able to because she is no longer alive.
As to more generic comparisons about behavior during a natural virus vs an accidentally released virus, I don't have anything stronger than conjecture, but think a comparison to SARS would shed some light. Again, it is my understanding that during that outbreak, in which a natural virus hopped species, there was heavy handed action and repression of information about how bad things were getting, but that was after things had gotten bad. I don't believe there were doctors that were being silenced before the outbreak got severe. If you want to prevent the severity of a natural outbreak you need and want doctors to be jumping on the issue early, and I would imagine you would want to exaggerate the effectiveness of their early intervention rather than silence doctors trying to mount an early intervention.