The deletion of the bat coronavirus database at Wuhan institute of virology prior to the pandemic is an undisputed and central fact. Your quotation marks do nothing to diminish this fact alone's inherent demand that Occam's razor be inverted.
Spell out specifically what you think a deleted database proves and the sequence of events that would lead to it being deleted.
The timeline of this stuff is extremely important to disproving some of the sillier claims. This database that's a "Central Fact" was deleted several months before the first case of a virus with an unmitigated R0 of >5.
They would have to know there was a novel coronavirus spreading for months before the rest of the world. Aside from the rest of the obvious ways everyone else would know, DNA phylogeny of all known cases disproves this.
The conceit falls apart immediately.
Their story for why they took it offline has also changed over time.
And at least as of the beginning of this year, it's still not been made available to other researchers.
Lack of transparency in China is no proof, it's standard operating procedure. They'll try to CYA even if they didn't do anything wrong, maybe especially then.
The simplest and most probable way the pandemic started really is the way pandemics usually start: by a pathogen jumping from an animal species to Humans, without passing through a lab whatsoever.
> In this we are in line with the US government, the G7, the World Health Organisation and the general public, all of whom are on record as saying that they think a leak from a Wuhan virology lab is a strong possibility that deserves to be investigated. The latest WHO report two weeks ago confirms this, saying that it is important “to evaluate the possibility of the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into the human population through a laboratory incident”.
China's behavior is suspicious, but as you point out there could be any number of reasons for this. However, that's hardly a basis for exoneration. In either case, China's behavior is surely a confounding factor in understanding what actually happened.
Of course it is not extremely unlikely that a virus escapes from a lab. To me it seems very unlikely that this particular virus first escaped from this lab and especially that it wasn't a threat before being collected.
Is that a complete sentence? What are you saying? Are you dismissing out of hand the possibility that gain of function research was being done at the time of the first discovery of SARS-COV-2 on the same type of viruses?
"Lab leak hypothesis" sometimes includes the "gain of function" theme and sometimes it doesn't. I find neither very likely, neither has any evidence to back it up. I still think the zoonotic hypothesis is the most likely truth, if not for the fact that we know this has happened so often in history. Any other hypothesis needs extraordinarily good evidence to convince me otherwise.