Back in March or so, I wrote a comment about this [1], citing some even earlier (January 2020-ish) HN commentary.
My conclusion: Lab leak's not inconsistent with the evidence, but there's no smoking gun.
China's behavior is highly suggestive of guilt -- the moving location on Google Maps, destroying records, and not permitting any outside investigation.
However, China could actually be completely innocent and just doing things that make them look guilty, because "we need to do something to get people to stop talking about this" may be a strong motive of their government.
For the record, personally I'm a little cheesed off that our politicians aren't making a bigger deal out of this. (E.g. give China a binary choice: Pick one, either (a) provide us a complete explanation of why you did the things that make you look guilty and let us see some evidence to back up that explanation, or (b) we'll assume it was negligence, and try to recover the costs of the virus by putting a ton of tariffs on your goods.) I don't even think Trump's said the words "Chinese virus" for months.
But who knows, maybe world powers have some secret agreements about how to handle bioweapon accidents? Maybe China's people and our people got together back in March or April, they privately admitted it was an accident and privately made some concessions, on the condition we don't publicly blame them, keep everything they said super classified for at least 70 years, and they don't publicly criticize US bioweapons programs if we don't criticize theirs? I'm just guessing here, but it seems plausible.
The one new argument I've heard only today is the argument "But how did it get all the way from where wild bats are to Wuhan?" (From two different sources, OP is one of them, I believe the other one was from CBS News on Youtube.)
> Maybe China's people and our people got together back in March or April, they privately admitted it was an accident and privately made some concessions, on the condition we don't publicly blame them, keep everything they said super classified for at least 70 years, and they don't publicly criticize US bioweapons programs if we don't criticize theirs?
Not true. State friendly media and even state media here in China regularly push the narrative of foreign origin. They even claimed this a US bioweapon during height of their bullsh*t. And yes, a non-insignificant amount of people buy into this (data point of two: my parents).
Note that China intentionally fudges all locations, apparently you can see that in HK (where Maps is available), locations across the border are completely wrong (in the sea, etc)
Western countries (and particularly the US) have been conducting similar research for years. Despite imposing bans and other restrictions on their own soil, they may want the option to continue doing this in less regulated places, e.g. China. In the same way and for the same reasons that our manufacturers have outsourced hazardous production processes to less regulated countries. Personally I think it needs to be banned everywhere, urgently, and an inspection regime imposed.
The US may also have been complicit in this particular experiment. There was a lot of collaboration with Chinese researchers working in US labs and the US sponsoring the WIV, etc.
My conclusion: Lab leak's not inconsistent with the evidence, but there's no smoking gun.
China's behavior is highly suggestive of guilt -- the moving location on Google Maps, destroying records, and not permitting any outside investigation.
However, China could actually be completely innocent and just doing things that make them look guilty, because "we need to do something to get people to stop talking about this" may be a strong motive of their government.
For the record, personally I'm a little cheesed off that our politicians aren't making a bigger deal out of this. (E.g. give China a binary choice: Pick one, either (a) provide us a complete explanation of why you did the things that make you look guilty and let us see some evidence to back up that explanation, or (b) we'll assume it was negligence, and try to recover the costs of the virus by putting a ton of tariffs on your goods.) I don't even think Trump's said the words "Chinese virus" for months.
But who knows, maybe world powers have some secret agreements about how to handle bioweapon accidents? Maybe China's people and our people got together back in March or April, they privately admitted it was an accident and privately made some concessions, on the condition we don't publicly blame them, keep everything they said super classified for at least 70 years, and they don't publicly criticize US bioweapons programs if we don't criticize theirs? I'm just guessing here, but it seems plausible.
The one new argument I've heard only today is the argument "But how did it get all the way from where wild bats are to Wuhan?" (From two different sources, OP is one of them, I believe the other one was from CBS News on Youtube.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22805043