Perfect, then it's unfalsifiable.

Unfortunately, unless whoever destroyed evidence screwed up (happens all the time, security services have enough idiots and slackers), or somebody kept some evidence and then will defect, yes, it is likely we'll never have the proof. That's why they do it.

Well then we don't need to look anymore - its 100% solved regardless of any new evidence to the contrary.

Not sure how you made this conclusion... But of course we need to look if there's new evidence - that's what I just said, that there could be new evidence, but if there won't be then we couldn't know for sure.

Because we can now say that there was any evidence we want but the totalitarian state destroyed it. We can now make any argument where the state destroying evidence fills in the gap of the theory.

Maybe we should stop supporting the study of dangerous viruses in facilities that don't maintain adequate levels of transparency.

Regardless of what actually happened in this case (FWIW I still believe a natural origin was most likely), the Chinese authorities covered up everything to do with the lab and destroyed potential evidence before a proper investigation could take place. In court cases we have a norm that evidence you destroy is treated as evidence against you, for good reason.

I'm not making an argument regarding this instance, but to have a theory that you can't disprove really makes it not a theory and impossible to engage with.

> In court cases we have a norm that evidence you destroy is treated as evidence against you, for good reason.

Destruction of evidence is considered only evidence of consciousness of guilt and cannot be used to prove guilt alone. The court also has to consider that an innocent person may commit destruction of evidence to avoid wrongful prosecution from situations that look damning.

Another point is that in the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2002-2004 the Chinese government acted similarly:

> Early in the epidemic, the Chinese government discouraged its press from reporting on SARS, delayed reporting to WHO, and initially did not provide information to Chinese outside Guangdong province, where the disease is believed to have originated.[19] Also, a WHO team that travelled to Beijing was not allowed to visit Guangdong province for several weeks.[20] This resulted in international criticism, which seems to have led to a change in government policy in early April.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002–2004_SARS_outbreak

There was no BSL4 lab in Guangzhou and they didn't sterilize the market there right away, so in that case they were able to eventually track the virus to its origins--yet the reaction of the Chinese government was basically the same.

Americans have a fairly severe problem with assuming that other nations and people's will react with transparency to the US if they have nothing to hide. This is the same problem we saw with Hussein and the way that he tried to block the weapons inspectors and it turned out by his own admission that it was due to him not wanting to appear weak in the view of Iran and Hussein was preoccupied with Iran: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/02/saddam-hussein...

The circumstances that make the theory unfalsifiable (lack of transparency/controls in Chinese biological research) are the issue here. Due to the lack of transparency we will likely never have definitive proof for the origin one way or the other.

At a minimum the US government should not be funding any biological research in places without adequate transparency/controls.

It's not, because all it would take to falsify it would be to do an exhaustive search of the lab's documentation and a comprehensive interview of lab employees.

We can't do it because of the CCP, not because of epistemological reasons.

How would that falsify the theory? If you find no evidence you can just claim that the state destroyed it.

The effort required to culture virus like this is fairly large, and it requires them to keep it secret in 2019 before there was any need to keep it secret. Nobody talked about it to collaborators, no sequences were leaked out, etc.

They somehow had tighter controls than Apple developing a new iPhone, before they had any reason to.

Again, you think keeping something secret needs a reason. That's not how totalitarian state works. In such state, not keeping something secret needs a reason. Everything else is secret by default. And the standard mode of action on any disaster is to deny it, lie and hide the evidence. It's not special for pandemic, it happens every time. Yes they absolutely have tighter controls than Apple, and the reason is they live in a totalitarian state and Apple doesn't.

We know they constructed Chimeras of the WIV1 SARS-1-like virus because they published it:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517719113

Pretty bad secrecy.

We knew WIV1 existed as well because they published it 3 years earlier:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5389864/

How long had they been working on either of those before publishing? You're giving the end points of the research, the person you're replying to is saying the end point wasn't reached, hence it was still secret.

See if you can determine that for yourself by e.g. reading the second paper as far as the first sentence of the second paragraph and then looking at the publication date.

I'm not interested in reading those papers, especially as what's relevant are the dates, which means the burden is on the person presenting them to get the dates right, no one else. More importantly, they were missing the point, which was my point.

Your point? I'm not sure if you had one. Next time, just post the date up instead of some snarky RTFM that doesn't even fit the thread.

It's not like the 2016 article was some kind of a spy leak. They were allowed to cooperate on things that lead to this publication - because in 2016, there was a reason to allow it - NIH grants alone would probably be a good reason. As soon as they learned about the screwup (that likely happened somewhere in 2019) all evidence of the works related to the leak that hasn't been published has been hidden or destroyed. Thus, we can't expect any publications about that work, at least not from 2019 onwards. You're fishing for some contradiction, but there's none - publications do not suggest absence of censorship, publications only suggest the censors had no problems with it being published. And indeed, they couldn't know in 2016 that their research in 2019 would lead to a massive screwup with a global consequences. If they were an open society, there would be a constant trail of evidence leading to the moment of the screwup - communications, orders, articles, chats, etc. In a totalitarian society, all these were under tight control by default - and as soon as it turned out they are dangerous - which became clear sometime in 2019, when the Chinese government learned about the possible leak - all this information, already tightly controlled by default anyway, was disappeared or at least made inaccessible to outsiders. It is possible it still exists somewhere in the dungeons of the Great Firewall - who knows. The point is this is why information control exists - to make such things possible. In an open society, this would be completely infeasible - tracking back everything connected to a certain research program and making it as if it didn't exist. In a closed, tightly controlled society - yes, plausible.

there are millions of people who want to know what Apple is doing