"According to the newly received wisdom, anyone who hadn’t suspected a lab leak all along was either a CCP stooge or painfully obtuse..."
Huh? I am open to the lab-leak hypothesis, have friends who believe even the bioweapon version, and even I don't know anyone who thinks this. Perhaps someone does somewhere, but "newly received wisdom" implies that it is the standard belief.
I think the more widely shared belief is that it is difficult to trust any industry to investigate itself, and so it is difficult to trust the virus-research community to come to the conclusion "we have investigated ourselves, and found ourselves not at fault".
It's a long and meandering piece, but here's something like the core argument:
> And all these assumptions rest on the biggest assumption of all—that a live sample of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (or its proximal ancestor) was actually inside a Wuhan virology lab in the first place. Nobody has yet provided any evidence that it was (or that it was inside any laboratory anywhere in the world) prior to the discovery of a novel pathogen in Wuhan in December 2019. Until this is demonstrated, all subsequent assumptions can be chopped away with Occam’s razor and discarded.
But no research group in the world has published literally everything it's ever worked on. Even with no deliberate attempt to conceal, it takes time to write stuff up. The WIV had at least one unpublished coronavirus[1], which independent researchers were able to assemble from contamination in sequencing equipment shared with published agricultural samples. That merbecovirus couldn't possibly be an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2; but if they had one unpublished virus, then it's hard to dismiss the possibility that they had two.
The author then seems to take a natural-origin pandemic as the "null hypothesis", to be accepted in the absence of strong evidence otherwise. But research related to a flu vaccine almost certainly caused the 1977 flu pandemic[2], with 700k dead, and smaller-scale biosafety accidents are sadly routine. I'm amazed by the number of people that virological research has managed to kill with no significant public backlash--Bhopal and Chernobyl are famous, and both prompted significant political reforms, without even a tenth of the death toll.
So, there were labs in the Wuhan area, co-sponsored by China and the US nonetheless, and doing research on exactly that family of viruses, but it's "more possible" that the virus came from nature in the exact same area's wet markets, the same kind of markets that operated in China (and all over the world) for millenia, of which there are still thousands upon thousands in the developing world.
> doing research on exactly that family of viruses
"The IC has no information, however, indicating that any WIV genetic engineering work has involved SARS-CoV-2, a close progenitor, or a backbone virus that is closely-related enough to have been the source of the pandemic."
> but it's "more possible" that the virus came from nature in the exact same area's wet markets
The geographic distribution of cases around the wet market suggests that was the spillover event.
In the case of SARS-CoV-1 there was a lab spillover from a tech getting infected, she wound up infecting her mother who died. This is the kind of contact tracing that would be expected from a lab spillover. In the case of SARS-CoV-2 there is no link to the lab, so the hypothesis must be that the person got sick and then went to the one kind of place in Wuhan where a natural spillover would happen, caused the pandemic and then went about their life and failed to infect anyone else in their life. It requires a Shroedinger's Lab Worker that only exists when they visit the one place that makes it look exactly like natural spillover.
A deliberate release of a bioweapon in the market actually makes more sense than accidental spillover from a lab leak.
>In the case of SARS-CoV-2 there is no link to the lab
Would we have the information if there was? As if it's not in the interests in both China (where the lab operated and whose control it was under) AND the US (who co-funded the lab work) to not be blamed for some millions of deaths globally?
> This is the kind of contact tracing that would be expected from a lab spillover.
Except that SARS-1 causes ~10x the fatality rate, and correspondingly more serious nonfatal sickness? That obviously makes contact tracing easier than for a novel virus with symptoms easily misattributed to a common cold or flu.
Except we have good contact tracing associated with the wet market and it hits people >50 years old hard, and >70 with a high fatality rate ("severe pneumonia in people over 50 years old with comorbidities" is how it was characterized at the start). So again, the infected lab worker was perfectly surrounded by healthy young people and very fit old people, except for one visit to the exact location where zoonotic spillover would have happened.
> except for one visit to the exact location where zoonotic spillover would have happened.
You're continuing to assume no cryptic spread. The IFR is low, and the overdispersed epidemiological dynamics mean that most lineages die out. This makes it impossible to exclude many (even ten or more) generations of cryptic human-to-human spread between that hypothetical infected lab worker and the market.
Even with advance warning, public health authorities in Western countries succeeded in tracing almost no cases back to the port of entry. I don't see why you'd expect the Chinese authorities to have succeeded at their much more difficult task.
> the same kind of markets that operated in China (and all over the world) for millenia
But they were also spreading zoonotic diseases back then too! Just because something is traditional doesn't mean it's healthy.
Communal disease might have stayed more localized without cheap/fast/long-distance travel, but they still happened quite a lot. By modern standards, your ancestors of a few hundred years ago were probably riddled with parasites.
>But they were also spreading zoonotic diseases back then too! Just because something is traditional doesn't mean it's healthy.
Yes, they did, and that traditional==healthy wasn't part of the point.
The point is that
"wet markets operate for millenia all over the world, have spread some zoonotic diseases && a wet market in Wuhan happened to spread covid 19"
over:
"Some labs testing coronaviruses operates in a small span of time (compared to millenia wet markets exist all over the world) specifically in Wuhan && covid-19 spreads in Wuhan"
is a harder sell than what the article makes it...
Huh? I am open to the lab-leak hypothesis, have friends who believe even the bioweapon version, and even I don't know anyone who thinks this. Perhaps someone does somewhere, but "newly received wisdom" implies that it is the standard belief.
I think the more widely shared belief is that it is difficult to trust any industry to investigate itself, and so it is difficult to trust the virus-research community to come to the conclusion "we have investigated ourselves, and found ourselves not at fault".