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I think this is a statistical fallacy of the same sort as "John Q Public just won the lottery! But the odds of that happening without him cheating were only 1 in a billion. Therefore we know with p<10^-9 that John Q Public must have cheated." This only makes sense if we had some prior reason to focus on John Q Public; but if he was just the person that happened to win the lottery of the millions who played, then this cancels out the p-value, leaving us with no particular reason to believe that he cheated.
Similarly, if we assume natural origin, whatever sequence of events ends up creating a successful virus is going to seem fantastically unlikely, but we also have to consider all the plasmids that didn't go viral (i.e. the losing lottery tickets). We had no prior reason to focus on any particular combination of human/animal interactions; that was just the ticket that happened to win.
(I don't actually know where the idea that pangolins were involved came from. Maybe they weren't. But if the reason for the scarcity of pangolins is because they're all being hunted for sale at the Wuhan wet market, well...)
Off the top of my head, Africa gave us HIV and Ebola. Can't think of any from India - maybe it's because people in India are vegetarians and so they don't have markets where hundreds of different animal species are all concentrated in close proximity? (I'm really just spitballing here to be honest.) But China has very high population and density as well, with mediocre health and sanitation, so a virus coming from there is no big surprise.
Here's a better analogy.
John Q and the lottery director conspire to create a way for John Q to win the lottery that spells out in exact detail how they will do it.
The lottery directory says, "no, we won't actually do that" but John Q continues researching lottery hacks anyway
John Q wins the lottery
Anyone who questions John Q winning is a conspiracy theorist
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But if you know John is a criminal involved in fraud that changes your calculus
The only reason we "know" that WIV was doing gain of function research on-site is that a virus leaked and caused a pandemic. There is weak circumstantial evidence that they were doing gain of function, but officially they were only collecting the virus samples and the dangerous work was happening elsewhere.
If John is known to hang out with fraudsters, this is Bayesian evidence that his lottery win is fraudulent, but it is much weaker evidence than knowing that John is a criminal himself. The lottery operator would need something better than "While not a known criminal, John hangs out with fraudsters, so his lottery win is probably fraudulent" to deny a payout.
That’s just not true. We have the bat lady at WIV along with Barrick talking about doing GoF there. Fauci in his own emails stated they were doing GoF at WIV.
This became a political football because Fauci perjured himself. But even Fauci’s definition was GoF (ie they were doing things to viruses to see what would happen but weren’t sure it would gain function).
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No, it's worse than that. The DEFUSE plan from 2018 explicitly proposed gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses modified with human-specific cleavage sites and that this research was to be conducted in part at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The whole plan is spelled out.
This is more than "hanging around with fraudsters". This is "making a specific plan to defraud the lottery".
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Cholera originates in India. That the most famous Indian disease is a water-borne bowel disease whereas the most famous Chinese diseases are respiratory may say something about the difference between the two countries.
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