This seems probable to me as well: they don’t know that a lab leak occurred, but believe it’s a plausible explanation, and one whose investigation needs to be suppressed because of the potential for embarrassment and retaliation. They might even have sought to destroy as much evidence as possible rather than trying to uncover the truth internally: if nobody knows the truth, the truth can never leak out.
The WIV was not set up in Wuhan to study bat-borne coronaviruses in the surrounding area. This is a widespread myth, one popularized by Maggie Koerth on Twitter.
You’d need to clarify what specifically is entailed by zoonotic origin (and what would count as not-zoonotic-origin) in order for your claim to be evaluated.
Not really. The poster is saying they used to believe X but was persuaded subsequently that ~X was more likely. This seems to indicate at least a recent pattern of avoiding confirmation bias.
Hmm, but have there been any other pandemics that started close to a lab researching the kind of pathogen involved in the pandemic? Funny you should ask. There was this one:
By “came about the same way”, I’m assuming you mean “by zoonotic transfer”. But the 1977 Russian flu pandemic is now widely believed to have been a lab leak, or a vaccine trial that went wrong.
Rubbish. The response would not be to increase surveillance near labs. It would be to float a moratorium on GoF research and to increase biosafety at labs. Much of the work being done at the WIV was carried out at BSL-2, which is absolutely shocking.
