> That is, to be frank, even as an epidemiologist who is very skeptical of the lab leak hypothesis, a comforting thought.
Yes, much more comforting to believe that the virus originated in a lab, that a successful (so far) conspiracy has been carried out to conceal its origins, and that there will be no transparency or accountability for any of the people involved, who are likely continuing similar research today.
It is not possible to be certain of this. You can't state that as an incontrovertible fact.
Is it beyond reasonable doubt that a virus created as part of a gain-of-function research programme escaped? We simply don't know definitively one way or the other, and it's rather unscientific to make blanket statements about these things one way or the other in the absence of evidence to validate the claim. (I'm an immunologist, by the way.)
In a way, the actual origin of Covid is a secondary matter at this point (because it's unlikely that China will give the required evidence to definitively disprove either the zoonotic or the lab leak hypothesis... am I wrong here ?).
The more pressing matter is the conspiracies between some top level specialists and some governments that seem to have effectively pushed public opinion away from the lab leak hypothesis (where they both can take a lot of blame) to the zoonotic hypothesis (less blame) - even though actual specialist opinion was (and still is) pretty split... (Not so much if you remove the specialists with a conflict of interest and the pressure they and the governments might have been able to exert ?)
I know very few specialists, including those without a conflict of interest, who think the lab leak hypothesis is true.
From my perspective inside the field, a small number of specialists and a very enthusiastic lay readership have pushed the lab leak hypothesis in a way that presents far more disagreement than there actually is.
Hmm, it's interesting that it's so different from my impression of specialist opinion...
Especially when the CNRS - (which would be partially guilty in the case of a lab leak !) - published the claim that the lab leak hypothesis could not be dismissed.
But you know how paradigms work, you have to be an anti-conformist to support what is going to become the new paradigm...
And sure, there most certainly is a very enthusiastic lay readership on the lab leak side... but why do you think there isn't one on the zoonosis side ?
And especially an even bigger fraction of specialists and lay readership that aren't rejecting either ?
(It bears repeating : I'm not anti-zoonosis, since I am not competent to judge either way anyway, I just find it very worrying that there seemed to be a campaign from quite early on, when social pressure wouldn't have had as much effect yet, to outright dismiss the lab leak theory, even though among the specialists gathered at the WHO in January 2020, there was no such consensus.)
I guess it only goes to show how bubbly the Internet (and your specific sub-field bubble ?) can be...
So one key is to not that not thinking the lab leak hypothesis is true =/= thinking it can be dismissed.
Because showing a zoonotic origin of a disease like SARS-CoV-2 is the work of years, if not decades, and with the disruption of the pandemic to research + the political ramifications of that work, it may well already be beyond us.
I think the reason there isn't an enthusiastic readership on the zoonotic side is simply because that's how people are conditioned to think about these diseases. Everything from movies like Outbreak to Contagion, the current fuss about the emu YouTube woman, etc. primes people to think about that. It's hard to foster an enthusiastic readership for what people think they already know.
It's also not particularly...sensational. There's no smoking gun. No shadowy conspiracy. The problems that emerge from zoonoses are hard and dispersed. It makes for very bad SubStack material.
One of the leading lab leak hypotheses (of which there are several) is that it was created as part of academic research - hence the fuss over PREDICT, the NIH and WIV.
Yes, much more comforting to believe that the virus originated in a lab, that a successful (so far) conspiracy has been carried out to conceal its origins, and that there will be no transparency or accountability for any of the people involved, who are likely continuing similar research today.