> Something caused it

Yes

> and it came from China.

Yes, it seems that way.

>With a government that 100% cannot be trusted to tell the truth let alone defend human life,

Sure.

> it’s more likely than not this was an accidental leak.

This does not follow your other points. Just because it's within the realm of possibility that someone could have done it doesn't mean they did it. Just because someone is a bad guy doesn't mean you can attribute everything bad that happens in their house to them. Sometimes bad stuff happens and it's not anyone's fault.

There’s no evidence that it’s a deliberate leak, and it’s highly doubtful we will ever learn what exactly happened, but I think it’s highly likely that this came from a Chinese lab and the apologists for China decry this line of inquiry

That's fine, but you're treating your beliefs as facts and assuming that because you find it convincing that must be the reality of the situation. I was trying to explain how that's not necessarily the case.

Was with you until this "many on the left" nonsense. Been "left" all my life and I don't recognize myself in your comment nor do many others.

It's not team sports, it's world issues.

Many on the right will say the lab leak theory is definitely true and has been 'proved'. So yep, we're in this together. I'm on the right, have been all my life, but nonsense is nonsense whoever is saying it.

Thats why he said many not all.

And the maximal delta between all 7 billion humans and the minimal version of many, let's say 3, makes such a statement unhelpfully limited in scope, while implying a controversy of thin air

Nothing in that article suggests a leak. If maybe your own personal theory, but this article doesn’t support it.

Nothing in the article talks about how the virus first got into humans, beyond assuming an animal (not lab) source. It simply focuses on how unlikely it was, according to simulations, to survive the chain of initial infections long enough to fully develop into a pandemic.

The researchers discussed in the article believe the virus was present in a small number of people before the spread at the Wuhan market and view the spread there as among large numbers of people, not between the animals at the market and people there. So it's the crowds that were important there, not the seafood. Many countries around the world have densely crowded areas.

In order words, this was probably an unlikely event that could have happened in any country worldwide with densely crowded areas. It happened to be China this time, but that's coincidence and should not lead to anti-Chinese or anti-Asian hate.

Criticizing governments in China, the US, etc for aspects of their early pandemic handling is of course perfectly valid, as opposed to generalizing to the populations or ethnicities as a whole. But one should not discriminatorily focus on what China did wrong early on while ignoring the early mistakes of Western countries like the US, nor praise the US's mediocre pandemic results throughout most of 2020 while overlooking China's fast recovery through strict (albeit quite authoritarian) lockdowns.

For reference, I am American and not Chinese, but I still don't blame Chinese people generally for their government's bad handling of the early containment stage of the pandemic, nor for the coincidence that this virus spread from China.

> But one should not discriminatorily focus on what China did wrong early on while ignoring the early mistakes of Western countries like the US

this is wildly inaccurate. china single-handedly delayed world response by at least a month by jailing journalists, destroying samples, and lying to the WHO. comparing that to some degree of ineptitude in the US or anywhere else is nonsensical.

I agree the Chinese government did all of that. Meanwhile the US handling of it has caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths within the US alone, according to an interview given to CNN recently by Trump's own White House coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx where she said everything beyond the first ~100,000 could have been "mitigated or decreased substantially": https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/28/dr-deborah-b... To that statistic one must add the many consequences within the US other than deaths, the consequences across the rest of the world of US-led decisions like politicization of mask-wearing, and the many consequences of decisions taken by many other governments from outside of Asia (such as the COVID-denialist/anti-science presidents in Brazil and Mexico) that get overlooked when people hate on China regarding COVID-19.

My point is not to defend the Chinese government's horrible early misdeeds, but rather that the current global pandemic situation is not uniquely or even primarily China's fault. Sure, perfect handling by the Chinese government would have had a chance of containing this pandemic within their borders. And clearly the bad-faith actions of the Chinese government early on were far from that perfect handling. But even perfect handling would still have relied on luck, and success would not have been guaranteed. In any case no country should be measured against perfection. Most of the consequences over the pandemic taken as a whole are truly the result of attitudes and policy decisions from countries other than China, very much including the US.

[Edited to replace most references to "China" to "the Chinese government", to emphasize the differentiation between the government and the people. I am just as opposed to hate against the Chinese people as I am to the early pandemic handling of the Chinese government.]

CCP is hiding some raw data.

Most likely they tried to cover it up and that led to it spreading more and around the world. If there was a true investigation, it would go up to upper/mid levels in the CCP and show how corrupt they were. In Asian cultures, saving face is everything.