> Important underline: the lab database is not available to us

Genuine question, as I'm not aware that it's been made externally available to anyone - do you mean it's available to researchers around the world but not the general public? Or do you mean it's available to Chinese labs?

It's a dumb conspiracy theory about a rarely-used database that "went down" in September 2019 which was a smoking gun about how the Chinese knew about Covid. Except it turns out that it only came online in June 2019, it went down all the time from the view of the tracking website, was available into 2020, and has absolutely nothing useful to say about SarsCov2;

https://twitter.com/flodebarre/status/1577401140345507859

I'm certain that everyone who used this as a prominent 'datapoint' for the LL hypothesis will immediately reconsider and update their priors.

The thread you've linked is deliberately misleading, refuting a strawman version of the "conspiracy theory". Everyone has always agreed that the server was intermittently available until Feb 2020. It's a particular database that went unavailable in Sep 2019, not the whole server. Quoting from a document written by the "conspiracy theorists" more than a year before that thread:

> Batvirus.whiov.ac.cn had been online for a few years, saw a version 2 released in June 2019, went inactive for a week during the second half of August 19, before becoming definitely inaccessible (out of the WIV at least) on the 12th Sep 19. It was online intermittently after this date from mid-December 2019, and occasionally until February 2020, but was not accessed from outside of the WIV after 12 September 2019.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349073738_An_invest...

Were you aware of that? If not, then you might update your priors yourself.

The disappearance of that database obviously isn't proof that the WIV did anything nefarious. It continues their pattern of zero transparency, though. That might just be the reflexive secrecy of an authoritarian state; but the nature of zero transparency is that we don't know.

I think the GP's point is that it's a dumb conspiracy theory data-point that would be incredibly easy to eliminate, and it's frustrating that it's not.

Their own evidence shows the September 2019 date is correct, and that it wasn't just flakiness like previously, it stayed down for months.