Except substitute “down the street” with “30 km away on the other side of a river”, and notice that everybody who got sick initially was next to the market, none of them anywhere near the lab.

So the lab-leak hypothesis is: this virus created at the lab accidentally escaped to someone who subsequently only infected people on the other side of town.

It’s certainly a possibility, and the lack of transparency by the government is alarming (though not particularly surprising to folks studying China), but most of the experts who have studied it still think it’s relatively unlikely.

Your understanding is that a large conspiracy of various Western and Chinese (and others?) federal institutes have conspired to uphold a fake story because the Western officials funding the Chinese research don't want the world to know that their money was somehow involved?

It doesn't take too many data points to at least make you suspicious. It's not a conspiracy theory.

We know Peter Daszak lied about his involvement in this research. We know Fauci made decisions about coronavirus research. We know the NIH funded coronavirus research in wuhan. The chinese took their virus database offline. They refused any serious investigation. The batwoman has disappeared. All these organisations have a lot to lose if it was partly their fault for this pandemic. Yet at they same time they hold the keys to any serious investigation.

This does NOT mean that this is proof that it was a lab leak. But it is extremely suspicious behaviour and circumstances. At a minimum it should warrant serious pressure to investigate what happened.

> Except substitute “down the street” with “30 km away on the other side of a river”, and notice that everybody who got sick initially was next to the market, none of them anywhere near the lab. > So the lab-leak hypothesis is: this virus created at the lab accidentally escaped to someone who subsequently only infected people on the other side of town.

But this isn't necessarily how it works, at all.

The Wuhan market is one of Wuhan's most population-dense areas, in close proximity to three hospitals where the first cases were identified, and was therefore the concentration for infection-tracing.

In other words, the dataset for early cases was based on a belief that the market was where the infection was spreading, rather than the location of a spreading event that came from elsewhere in the city. Even pneumonia cases that were reported were only post-hoc assigned as probably covid if they were in close proximity to the market.

Again, it’s not impossible or even implausible that the spread could have happened like that, or that there were cases elsewhere that went unrecognized. But that’s not nearly the same as flippantly describing this as the lab just “down the street” from the market.

The possibility hasn’t been incontrovertibly ruled out (and maybe never can be at this point), and it’s important to do independent investigations and examine the lab’s research, etc. It’s just not considered by most experts to be the most likely possibility.

As a geographical comparison, it would be like having a new disease outbreak where all of the known cases for the first several weeks were in Brooklyn, NY and concluding that the source could have been a lab in Newark, NJ. It’s possible, but not the first place to look.

The “lab leak hypothesis” refers to the lab literally down the street, as per the WHO report. The lab was moved to that location about a week before the outbreak at the wet market. The WHO report speculates perhaps an accident occurred during the move.

It does not refer to the WIV as you think, again as per the WHO report.

This entire conversation (the article, the posts here, and in general the speculation about a lab leak possibility, comments about US grant money, etc. etc.) is explicitly about the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Which WHO report are you thinking of? The 2021 WHO report called the lab leak possibility “extremely unlikely”. This more recent report from 4 months ago merely calls for more investigation into laboratories in the area and more transparency: https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/scientific-adv...

If you are interested in Covid origins look at this NPR story from March https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/03/03/1083751...

Which refers to this paper in Science, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/

Maybe one of the people who works at the lab lives/works close to the market.

But you can do this too for the Chinese version of the conspiracy too.

——

Emerged after military games in Wuhan.

Where the US competed.

Who is a geopolitical rival of China.

With soldiers that work at a military biolab.

That had a major biosafety breach the same year.

And the US doesn’t let the site be inspected freely.

——

Each of these are true on their own, that doesn’t mean we can conclude the implied conclusion is true.

But the military games happened in October, the previously public database of the WIV was taken down in September a month prior due to "hacking" which why would someone hack a publicly available database is hard to imagine. And why has the database not been shared via database dumps or uploaded somewhere else since? Also if the outbreak occurred in the US there would have been major spikes in hospitalizations months earlier in the US than what happened in Wuhan.

Also animal-to-human viruses usually go over two phases: first animal to human contagion is possible but human to human is hard, then human to human gets easier as the virus evolves.

If Covid-19 started in the wet market it went over the first phase very quickly.

Part of fighting disinformation and conspiracy theories is also learning to distinguish when things are just lies (eg. sandy hook was an hoax) or truish but misused (eg. chemical waste in river does affect the sex of frogs).

It is also important not o make a strawman of the opponent. For some people the "Lab Theory" is "The CCP was trying to exterminate the US but failed" for others it is "A researcher got bit by a bat in a lab". The former is paranoid, the latter is completely plausible.

Overall there is good circumstantial evidence for both, and reasonable people can disagree.