The authors of this paper might well be honest and smart, but they - as we all - have to rely on raw data provided by China.

But the gp isn't making the argument that the data is suspect, and so carefully curated as to point to a misleading conclusion. Rather, it accuses the paper of reproducing a political party line.

If China is messing with the data, why do we even have data that shows the epicenter of infection moving southeast? Why not just hide or falsify it?

> Not one of the listed authors is Chinese, nor do any of them have any Chinese institutional affiliations.

Those are pretty naive criteria based on what we already know about the situation. One of the biggest opponents of investigating the lab leak hypothesis was Peter Daszak, a British zoologist who is certainly not Chinese nor does his EcoHealth Alliance have any surface level ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. EcoHealth Alliance provided grants for the coronavirus research (and the activity that has been labeled by some as gain-of-research) and authored the misleading Lancet letter [0] that was used to ostracize anyone who publicly disagree with the animal-spillover hypothesis as well as enabled social media platforms and fact-checking sites to censor any content or discussion of the lab leak hypothesis.

TL;DR: people can have agendas that may not be obvious to you at first glance.

[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

I wouldn't be complaining if the op had made an effort to establish such a linkage as you did for your example. Is it my job to validate an assertion which op didn't bother to support with an argument?

Of course not and op's reply was not, on its own, a very convincing rebuttal to the article. My only point is that the objectivity of the authors (really, any author on this subject at this point) should be assumed to be cloudy until proven otherwise. There's very few people on either side arguing in good faith about the source of COVID at this point.

My personal view is that it's impossible to know: the CCP has done everything possible to look guilty of hiding something, but unless there's some breakthrough where a source animal is found or someone in the CCP security apparatus makes a deathbed confession, I consider this an unresolvable discussion. That being said, I'm still 100% behind the shaming of people like Peter Daszak who have been shown to have acted in bad faith to cover their own asses.