It’s a conspiracy theory if there isn’t any good evidence. The fact that labs have accidentally leaked pathogens before is not evidence that all future new pathogens are leaked from labs.
I find it.. peculiar that giving merit to a theory about the Chinese government trying to cover up a lab accident is labeled or treated the same as other theories about Soros, Clintons, Illuminatis et al. There are data points which point to this. There is proof of doctors disappearing, active government censorship and prior accidents from China. Not to mention the statistical impossibility of their official epidemiological numbers. Why doesn't this merit at least the thought of an investigation? Or a non-zero probability? As someone who grew up in a communist state with a totalitarian government, I lived through 'manufactured realities' way more obscene than what I just described. This is peanuts.
It's interesting because whenever something like ^ appears online on reddit or (recently Blind), an army of people appear with one of the following arguments:
- I'm trying to deflect from the current US administration's incompetence. This IMO is an orthogonal problem
- the NY strains have European origins so why are you talking about China
- China was the only country to properly contain the virus
- tinfoil hat much?
-A lot of chinese papers have been published through the years on the topic, during multiples waves of sample collection over all the chinese mainland. Showing there was/is a notable interest about this pathogen issue.
-One can also easily spot which research center were/are the most active on the topic and its related research teams. Wuhan research center is not excluded from the list as some others main big labs.
-Each entry sequence in the database is dated with a location, publishing team and associated paper. It is useful for following the pathogen evolution building phylogeny trees.
-Aligning a lot of sequences clearly show that this strain is separated from the rest of the others mains strain. The only related sequences are the one released by the chinese team.
-The closest related sequences are 2013 year dated and other from 2015/2017/2019, which per se does not provide a lot of information about the real pathogen evolution.
-The different gain of function that this pathogen got compared to its predecessors is quite remarkable and hard to overlook.
-The overall AT/GC sequence content have also evolved from its predecessors showing rich AT content that is generally related to higher host habit and expression.
So yeah, knowing china is not smiley kind shaped, one can still question the research and lab habit as one would do for any other country. A theory based on excessive and unregulated animal sampling could have exacerbated the real cross-transmission issue is as valid as the one about pathogen leaking from the lab or simply by natural evolution.
Anyway one can clearly take a moment to question the overall package, along the safety lab practices deployed around the world when dealing with potential pathogens.