Gain of function research did not cause Covid-19

Again, go with the “wild” scenario in which a lab worker in the only lab in the city (country? World?) which studies Covid, got infected, and went to the wet market, just 800M away, and infected other people/animals.

Now, given that’s the reality in this “hypothetical” scenario, what would the data look like when analyzed by the talking heads in the YouTube videos?

Again, they would come to the same conclusion - that it was impossible. And you would still say that satisfiability and reality are orthoganal, even though, in this hypothetical scenario, this was reality.

Clearly their brilliant deductive approach would have been wrong in this scenario, and your dismissal would have been equally wrong.

Now let’s talk about another scenario, in which the Covid epicenter started not in Wuhan, but in some wet market in Laos. No Covid research center within 800M of this wet market. No Chinese government trying to avoid international embarrassment of causing the pandemic, and attempting to cover up. Would I suggest that a researcher from the Wuhan Covid lab caused the infection in the Laos wet market? Of course not. In that scenario, naturally infected animals are the most likely cause. But, just for amusement, let’s think about the reality where it actually was caused by a worker in the Wuhan Covid lab. They got infected in the lab, travelled 2000 miles to Laos, went to this specific market, and infected some people and animals in the market. In this scenario, that’s the reality. The person had to travel for likely days, and not infect anyone else. The person likely only had dense public transport to get from A to B. They would have encountered thousands of people, for a collective tens of thousands of “interaction hours”, and nobody else got sick. The probability of this happening is extremely low.. but in this scenario is did happen.

What’s the difference in these two scenarios? The distance and time to travel between the Wuhan lab and the respective wet markets, which then results in more interaction hours, and the number of times a worker from the Wuhan lab visits each of these wet markets. How many times has a Covid Lab worker visited a random wet market in Laos? Once? Twice? How many times has a Wuhan Covid lab worker visited the specific wet market 800 meters away from the lab? I’m going to go with more than once or twice. Probably thousands of times.

I don’t live in Wuhan, or any city likely close to the same density, but I can walk out my front door, and walk to one of two coffee shops. One is 500 meters away, the other 800 meters away. There are some days in which I can walk to the coffee shop and not pass a single person. There are other days in which I pass 50 people. It takes roughly 5 minutes to walk to either coffee shop and the interaction with each of those 50 people take less than 2 seconds, for roughly 100 interaction-seconds. During the entire Covid lockdown, I make this walk daily, likely passing people with Covid, and never got infected.

An infected Wuhan Covid lab worker could walk from the lab to the wet market, and not infect anyone along the way.

While they were in the lab, wearing their faulty PPE which allowed them to get infected, their coworkers were properly using their PPE and were protected.

The worker walked to the wet market, infecting nobody along the way, because it was a walk outdoors, and there was a breeze, and it was an unusually empty time of the day, and he/she only passed a few people and only briefly.