> "Two lineages" in rapid-succession is weird - but no better explained by two zoonoses (that left no hints in any animal population) than two lab-leaks.

I mean, everyone can stop reading here... This is patently false. Multiple Spillover is a readily reproducible phenomenon that perfectly explains the dual lineages.

Again, spell out specifically the route how two distinct lineages would be present at the market under the lab leak scenario.

> It might slant things slightly against it - but when no other animals, anywhere from Laos to Wuhan, have revealed any of these supposed intermediate forms – that somehow zoonosed twice, only after reaching Wuhan

You literally only need one animal shedding virus - it's how literally every other pandemic started. The market was shut down weeks after it was clear that a pandemic was underway and only after that did the authorities start looking for infected animals. Absence of evidence here isn't remotely a substitution for evidence of the absence.

> with a dangerous new viral feature Wuhan researchers had proposed splicing into bat viruses?!? – the slant remains very much in the other direction.

This part is just false and belies your lack of understanding of the science and the direction of causality. The reason scientists proposed studying the FCS is because it was identified a decade+ ago as both dangerous for zoonosis and readily possible with natural mutation.

All of these virologists studying coronaviruses weren't doing it out of the blue, but because everyone knew that it was the single greatest zoonotic risk we faced.

A lab worker who was careless (if not depressed/malicious) could just as easily carry out two variants as one.

One animal shedded... two variants of virus? How did the animal get it, when no other nearby wild or market animals in the (lackluster) investigation around Wuhan, or since elsewhere, have shown candidate SARS-CoV2/precursor viruses?

They proposed adding the FCS to existing viruses where FCS hadn't been seen before – and yes, the motivation was because that was considered a potential natural risk. But that doesn't mean it was a natural inevitability. Isn't the proximity of the proposal, "add FCS to a bat coronavirus to see how much worse it makes it", to the appearance of SARS-CoV2 at least a little suspicious?

They & others have published lots of work that specifically made existing viruses more transmissable, or more severe – often in labs with a history of leaks. This can be done via evolutionary pressures – serial passage forced-evolution – or via explicit engineering of new chimeric viruses.

Coronavirus crossover was theorized to be a major risk, after SARS/MERS. That didn't mean that actually outracing nature to make the hypothesized worse viruses in accelerated lab processes was a good risk-reducing idea!

> One animal shedded... two variants of virus

Maybe, but more likely two different ones out of the many millions of poorly documented animals in the East Asia animal trade. Certainly more plausible than a single lab engineering two very distinct linages for no good reason.

> That didn't mean that actually outracing nature to make the hypothesized worse viruses in accelerated lab processes was a good risk-reducing idea!

Presumably you can link to the papers published about how they did just such work, or evidence it in some other authoritative way since you make the assertion so boldly?

How would two different non-bat animals shed two different (but closely-related) bat viruses, in a market with no bats, and far away from the bat caves where related viruses are documented? And further, manage this with no evidence of any other animals infected with related viruses in that region, nor along the trade routes any such animals/viruses must have followed?

Those were the two luckiest bat-viruses ever!

On the other hand, the research lab across town had collected hundreds of such bat viruses from far away - suspiciously never fully catalogued.

EcoHealth belatedly reported in late 2021 to the NIH, its funder that it had already, prior to May 2019:

• created a new, chimeric SHC014-WIV1 virus that was more virulent in human tissue than the (relatively benign) natural WIV1 virus

• took a natural virus that was already highly deadly, MERS, & added new binding sites

You can read an overview from The Intercept at <https://theintercept.com/2021/10/21/virus-mers-wuhan-experim...>, or a (partially-redacted) suspiciously-late EcoHealth report to the NIH at <https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21089573-priority-gr...> which describes these experiments.

Note also that per The Intercept, an EcoHealth spokesman had previously denied any such MERS gain-of-function experimentation had occurred - claiming instead it was only "suggested as an alternative and was not undertaken".

So: EcoHealth lied.

What if someone's secret budget, or pre-grant investigational work, had helped WIV do exactly the FCS addition they'd already asked for funding to do? That'd be a sufficient, and straightforward, way to get a SARS-CoV2-like virus from less-human-adapted viruses in nature.

And while this route isn't proven – perhaps because those involved have been suspiciously uncooperative – this hypothetical origin has more supporting evidence than "luckiest bat viruses ever snuck to Wuhan from a thousand miles away, zoonosed in Wuhan twice in rapid succession, leaving no sick animals or people anywhere else, despite a giant search".

Uh, are you aware that many different species have confirmed infections of Covid-19? The US department of agriculture has a list of different species where the virus was found: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/dashboards/tableau/sars-das... So evidently the virus has many options for intermediary hosts, there's no reason to require that there must be a bat nest directly on top of the market.

Further, note that we've found very similar Covid viruses in bats that are from caves around ~1000 km apart (RshSTT182 and RmYN02) while the individuals of the species have never been observed to move more than 200 km. Clearly virus strains can get very far even if they aren't literally carried all the way there by a single individual.

But of course, you also had your own evidence: the allegedly highly suspicious fact that a group of academics hadn't finished all their old projects before starting new ones. Oh yes, how unsurprising.

Yes, COVID has since spread back to many animals, & viruses can travel far. But they still haven't found the precursors of the Wuhan outbreak's original strains.

It is suspicious that EcoHealth lied about what research they had performed. It is suspicious that some very-dangerous, previously-undisclosed pre-May-2019 experiments were only revealed in a belated report.

> There's a field-wide omerta about gain-of-function risks – who wants to ruin their relationship with the NIH, & admit research that's pretty typical across many leaky labs worldwide, may have killed 20 million people (and counting)?

Claims like this, without evidence, reallt detract from any other point you want to make. Because it seems that your thumb is pretty heavy in the scale, without any evidence.

When there are massive institutional incentives to proclaim X, it is only wise to discount, somewhat, proclamations of X.

In Vanity Fair's lab-leak theory story, there was an illustrative detail:

*> Inside the NIH, which funded such research, the P3CO ["Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight"] framework was largely met with shrugs and eye rolls, said a longtime agency official: “If you ban gain-of-function research, you ban all of virology.” He added, “Ever since the moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done gain-of-function research anyway.”

A whole field wants certain research to happen, with minimal limits. They don't want to admit, or even let themselves believe, that their peers' accident killed 20 million people. It's a hard pill to swallow!

That's reading an awful lot into an unattributed quote, which includes a direct refutation attributed quotes right above it.

It's clear that there have been moratoriums on GoF without stopping "all of virology," so whatever was meant by this "wink wink nudge nudge" is really unclear.

Also, in the prior paragraph, the reporter talks about "details of proposed experiments being secret" but that's just standard practice for literally all government funding of science. As if they shouldn't be secret for some reason in this case.

If this the sort of weak sauce, I mean, come on.

Just a bunch of weird insinuations, and having read more, saying there's "omerta" on this seems even less likely.

How about at least a little bit of real meat?

Where have I put my thumb on the zoonosis scale?