Geraghty:
> And none of the above is definitive proof that COVID-19 originated from a bat at either the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Definitive proof would require much broader access to information about what happened in those facilities in the time period before the epidemic in the city.
> But it is a remarkable coincidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was researching Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses in bats before the pandemic outbreak, and that in the month when Wuhan doctors were treating the first patients of COVID-19, the institute announced in a hiring notice that “a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.” And the fact that the Chinese government spent six weeks insisting that COVID-19 could not be spread from person to person means that its denials about Wuhan laboratories cannot be accepted without independent verification.
Engber:
> Arguments in favor of the “lab-leak hypothesis” remain grounded, as they ever were, in the mere and highly suspicious fact that a coronavirus likely borne by bats, likely from a cave in southwest China, emerged 18 months ago, quite suddenly, in a city very far from southwest China—where researchers had assembled an archive of cave-bat-borne coronaviruses.
As Geraghty recounts yesterday (https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/even-xavier-...), many in the media, rather than assessing the facts themselves, just resulted to name calling against a conservative-leaning but measured writer. I also haven't seen Geraghty (and again, other more measured writers) claim to have definitive proof of the lab-leak theory (as some conspiracy theorists might claim), only that it is a possibility that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. It is illogical, irresponsible and unscientific to say "well, this theory was picked up by racists, therefore we should dismiss it" rather than evaluating a possibility on it's own merits.