Wade on the Lab-Leak Theory of COVID

ADDED: I first started writing about the Lab-Leak Theory in April last year, giving its likelihood a "Big Maybe", and since then noted that it had never been falsified. I've said "denial" is not "debunking". Referring to the denials by the Chinese, which many in the west decided was enough for them. For various reasons. My posts on the Lab-leak hypothesis.

Nicholas Wade is not an alarmist, and not a conspiracy theorist. He is one of the most eminent science journalists in the country, having done stints at Science and the New York Times, and he has released a very long, technical, and (if you’re into that sort of thing) riveting article on Medium weighing the evidence on the origin of COVID-19. Did it emerge naturally from an animal species to infect people in Wuhan, possibly at a wet market? Or did it leak out from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

Where I think it is most convincing is in describing the lack of plausibility of natural emergence:

No one has found the bat population that was the source of SARS2, if indeed it ever infected bats. No intermediate host has presented itself, despite an intensive search by Chinese authorities that included the testing of 80,000 animals. There is no evidence of the virus making multiple independent jumps from its intermediate host to people, as both the SARS1 and MERS viruses did. There is no evidence from hospital surveillance records of the epidemic gathering strength in the population as the virus evolved. There is no explanation of why a natural epidemic should break out in Wuhan and nowhere else. There is no good explanation of how the virus acquired its furin cleavage site, which no other SARS-related beta-coronavirus possesses, nor why the site is composed of human-preferred codons. The natural emergence theory battles a bristling array of implausibilities.

Wade weighed up what kind of evidence we do have about the virus itself, the lab, the safety protocols, and the grants funded by the NIH and NIAD, under Doctors Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci. They, and common sense, all point in one direction: [Here to read on...] [Internet Archive]

RELATED:

• How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory. Donald G. McNeil Jr
• Not so batty. Matt Ridley
• Here’s a look at explaining the Wuhan lab leak theory. New York Times. And: 
• Suddenly talk of the lab-leak theory is everywhere