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Nothing in this article is going to come as news to anyone who's been active in centrist and center-right-leaning media spaces for the last two years but the origin of it might.
What really went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted
Long story short the UK Sunday Times, the Newspaper to which the New York Times' name is an hommage, and as I gather from other british media the de facto voice of the establishment in the UK has endorsed the Lab Leak theory and I'm kind of surprised that no one's seems to be talking about.
The article doesn't mention Fauci by name but his ties to EcoHealth Alliance have been well documented elsewhere, and the article does acknowledge the existence of US health officials desire to bypass US safety and reporting regulations. The article also notes that while release was likely accidental, the Chinese military and intelligence services had expressed interest in using it as a weapon and had begun working on developing an inoculation for the virus over a month before it first appeared in "the wild".
I personally don't have a whole lot to add to the article itself, but I do find myself wondering what now? I expect the US media to try and bury this. After all Fauci is their golden boy, the poster-child "trust the experts". At the same time, he his, along with the behavior of many within the media itself (looking at you Yglesias) the reason that experts are not to be trusted.
If a singular person (small group of people) is revealed to have been responsible for all the death, of all the suffering, of all the economic disruption and all the curtailment of simple human livelihood that resulted from Covid 19 and the associated panic, what crime can you charge them with? Assuming you could find a court even able to try it, what punishment can even approach being proportional?
I read that article and I'm not clear on what they're claiming is the new information. The Wuhan lab for studying coronaviruses was studying coronaviruses isn't news; of course they were working with SARS-CoV-1-like viruses and how to make vaccines for them, that's their job. Nor is the fact that China actively covered up any research into the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
The article makes no attempt to engage with the evidence for the market hypothesis (link is to a podcast discussing the papers, but there's also links to the papers): (1) the market is epicenter of the early cases and (2) there were two separate introductions to the market weeks apart of two separate lineages of SARS-CoV-2. It's certainly possible that SARS-CoV-2 was twice introduced to the market and nowhere else via two separate lab leaks that coincidentally happened near the specific stalls where the animals hypothesized to be most likely the source of a spillover were sold (maybe someone at the lab sold an infected animal to someone who then sold it at the market? Maybe the market is just the busiest place the accidentally infected people from the lab went, and they quickly realized they should isolate so the market spread swamped any other spread, and the position within the market was coincidence?), but that requires more evidence than "look over there: scary virus lab with military funding".
And, as I've mentioned before on this topic, China desperately wants the cause of the pandemic to be anything but a market spillover because the market hypothesis puts the blame squarely on China for stopping enforcement of the post-SARS measures they had in place to prevent exactly that from happening.
This shows spread occurred at the market; it does not show the disease originated there. If you look at the early cases it looks rather like a population map, which is not surprising.
Even if true, this is not evidence which distinguishes a lab leak from a market event. I see no reason to believe that "two lab leaks" is less likely than "two separate natural zoonotic events at the market".
This is ridiculous. A leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology puts even greater blame squarely on China. There is no way they prefer a lab leak hypothesis (at least not a leak from a Chinese lab; they already tried to blame the US Army) to a market hypothesis.
If I’m understanding @token_progressive’s point correctly, shouldn’t we expect “two separate lab leaks that spread directly to the same market” to be less likely than “two separate natural zoonotic events at the market”.
The latter only encodes information regarding origin, while former encodes information regarding origin and spread.
As we add more stipulations, the probability must fall, no?
I don't see why. We don't know any of the probabilities involved. Most particularly we do not know that the "probability of two separate natural zoonotic events" is less than or equal to the "probability of two lab-created zoonotic events".
Then I recommend following up on the sources I linked. I am not a scientist with expertise in this area; I am just doing my best to link to them and summarize their arguments.
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