The problem is that none of the circumstantial evidence for a lab leak is remotely as convincing as your hypothetical.
And most of it tends to be spun. Read the linked thread and note how many times the author throws out terms like "much more likely to be lab-generated" without evidence. We don't know any of that. We have very limited understanding of wild pathogen evolution in general. Likewise the "1000 miles from bat viruses" thing is spun. We don't know that either! We just know what we measured, not what we didn't.
And you can spin it the other way, anyway: we know that the presumptive covid ancestor was at least as close as 1000 miles, on the same continent and within easy travel distance of a migratory flying species. It's true, that if the closest relative was in Argentina, that getting it to Wuhan would require a lot of weird argument. But from Yunnan? Seems not unreasonable.
People continue to bang this hypothesis, and... it's not a bad hypothesis really. But the reason consensus among experts is behind natural evolution is that natural evolution remains a clearly better hypothesis. I know that's upsetting to people who want to believe the lab theory for whatever reason, but it is and remains the truth. Until someone finds better evidence, the lab leak is going to remain a popular conspiracy theory only.
- lab leak: researchers catch infected bat; at the laboratory, bat bites researcher; researcher gets COVID
- lab made: researchers modify a virus, and produce SARS-CoV-2; the latter escapes the laborary (in one way or another)
The importance of the lab leak hypothesis is that it doesn't need any conspiracy (a researcher being bitten is nothing strange in itself), but still implies unsafe practices and bad faith by the institutions involved.
That's not "spun", that's science. You're positing a COVID teapot that we have no evidence for. In a scientific context, it's not spin to omit stating "based on all available empirical evidence" after every assertion.
No, that's a fallacy. If I find an apple on the ground at the supermarket, it is evidence that there are apples at the supermarket. It is not evidence that there are no apples at my friend's home where I found no apples. I just didn't check the refrigerator.
The linked thread says, precisely, "Wuhan--a city 1,000 miles from nearest wild bats with SARS-like coronaviruses". And that is not correct.
I'm saying that there's no evidence of any bats closer to Wuhan with SARS-like coronaviruses. And I'm saying that, while it's indeed possible that these hypothetical bats exist - just as it's "possible" that COVID was transmitted to Wuhan via a teapot halfway between here and Mars; that COVID unicorns exist on an undiscovered island somewhere and one sneezed particularly hard and its germs ended up in Wuhan; or that COVID spontaneously formed one day on the apples in your friend's refrigerator in Wuhan - it's, again, not spin for a scientist to refrain from couching everything in uncertainty because of the infinite evidenceless hypotheticals that might disprove it; this is how every single positive statement in science functions. It is indeed correct, scientifically speaking, that there are no apples at your friend's home where you found no apples [based on all available empirical evidence]. And it is indeed correct, scientifically speaking, that Wuhan is 1,000 miles away from the nearest wild bats with SARS-like coronaviruses [based on all available empirical evidence].
That's not all you're saying, though. You're extrapolating from that fact to argue that bats closer to Wuhan with SARS-like coronaviruses are therefore unlikely to be present.[1] And no, that's not correct. Viruses span continent-wide gaps all the time, we don't need any special evidence to cite that as a possibility.
[1] Or more specifically, that they're less likely to be present than a man-made descendent. This is how you can spot a poorly justified argument. You're skipping a step and inserting an assumption in exactly the way you need to address a hole in your argument. Again, I pointed out upthread how I can spin exactly the same facts in the opposite direction (IMHO more convincingly, though logically no more sound).
That said, I'll bite: if there are bats with SARS-like coronaviruses closer to Wuhan, I suspect that the folks in Wuhan who've spent the past 15-20 years studying SARS-like bat coronaviruses, "sampling thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across China" [0], probably would have discovered the ones right on their doorstep, more probably than ones further afield. So sure, yes, I'd wager they're not all that likely (though not impossible)! But, again, that's neither here nor there to my overall point, which is that your accusation of spin on Ebright's part is unfounded and scientifically illiterate.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#SA...
You added the word "candidate". I agree with what you wrote. Your framing doesn't imply an incorrect conclusion, though it also lacks any rhetorical punch (probably the reason Ebright skipped it) since we don't have any "candidate" leak evidence either. Good job.
This stuff has been sampled extensively.
Or are you merely stating it's possible there's a bat cave no one's heard of that hasn't been sampled?
I don't think that's correct, for the simple reason that if those papers existed the (sigh) pro-leak folks would be linking them everywhere. Virology isn't exactly a trillion dollar field, we're not going out and sequencing every virus in every species. The Yunnan cave made news and was well-studied because someone stumbled on a SARS-related virus there, that says nothing about where that virus went later.
Those papers don't exist for the simple reason that "interesting" bats don't live there.
You might want to consider that while R H Ebright can be offensive and distateful, he has been banging this drum for 20 years and is generally very careful when he makes a factual statement.
As-if the only alternative to transported-to-labs was bat migration?
1,000 miles seems less ridiculous when it's animals in cages on trucks going to market — just a tiny part of the live animal trade.
(How many thousands of miles did Burmese Pythons travel to reach the Florida Everglades.)
1000 miles just doesn't take long by truck.
"… Mengla county, Yunnan province…"
"… identification of four SARS-CoV-2 related coronaviruses in bats…"
https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00709-1.pdf
Google says that 1400 miles to Wuhan is just 24 hours driving.
Conspiracy theorists will always say they have enough evidence for their theory, of course.
One should not apply standards of a criminal trial to verification of a scientific hypothesis. The results can be quite disastrous as the case of Giordano Bruno can attest [0].
Say mr X was seen at the crime scene at 10 am, he also knew the victim and lots of people have seen them fight a week ago, the victim had just came out of the bank with 20k$ in cash in a bag, mr X who's broke have been seen driving a car a month after the crime worth 18k$.
There is no evidence mr X killed the victim, but he probably did it.
Your argument removes probability, we have many coincidences linked to the lab leak theory, we don't have a 100% evidence that supports it, so we can assume it probably leaked from the lab, maybe it didn't, and since we can't quantify it with precision and a certain negligible error margin, we can use a language where probably happened means >50% and maybe happened means <50%.
A woman can safely assume her husband is cheating if she catches him flirting with girls online, find a different long hair on his coat everytime he travels for work, etc.