It’s as though we would trust [athlete accused of doping] of publishing results from a blood test they performed on themselves to confirm the accusations.
3rd party lab inspectors were restricted from the lab for a significant time.
I don't know what the chances of a catastrophic viral outbreak being located next to a BSL-4 lab is, but it must be absolutely astronomical considering China has only 2 such labs in a country that spans 3.6 million square miles.
EDIT: Correction, looks like there's 4 (now?) BSL-4 facilities: https://www.globalbiolabs.org/map
My point still stands
Much higher than random. The location of the laboratory was close to the researched organisms, specifically bats. It also means that people had close contact with bats, on purpose, much more than in other areas.
This does not make any source more likely by itself. But there's a decent correlation why we see research on X right next to where we find X.
In any case, it's completely wrong. Dr. Shi herself didn't expect natural spillover anywhere near Wuhan:
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210727042832/https://www.scien...
She could be wrong, but the idea that she chose her work location based on the natural abundance of sarbecoviruses is unequivocally false.
The BSL-4 also isn't very relevant. As described in the link above, the WIV worked at BSL-2, with correspondingly greater risk of an incident if one of their viruses turned out to infect humans. The point of extraordinary coincidence is their collection of novel sarbecoviruses, which was the biggest anywhere in the world.
It's certainly possible that other labs are deliberately located close to natural populations of the other organisms they're studying. That's not relevant in a discussion of the WIV and sarbecoviruses, though. There's no reason except obfuscation to shift focus to some broader question when we have facts specific to SARS-CoV-2.
In case you wish to clarify: Do you agree that specifically as to SARS-CoV-2, the probability of natural zoonosis near Wuhan was no higher than (and actually lower than, per Dr. Shi) random?
Most unversity cities have virology groups, and coronaviruses became a popular research subject after SARS, particularly in China. The probability of finding a coronavirus researcher group in any large Chinese city was probably fairly large in 2019.
The WIV had also proposed collaboration with UNC to engineer a virus structurally similar to SARS-CoV-2, a chimera of two novel sarbecoviruses with a human-designed FCS. This wasn't funded, but an unconfirmed leak claims the WIV continued this work alone:
> The investigators spoke to two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak. They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/inside-wuhan-lab-covid-p...
This should give you an idea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
The Chinese government even routinely lies about their GDP.
EDIT: When it released, seems like they have not published yet