Just an opinion piece, but the evidence is quite convincing - and of course, China won’t cooperate on it.
What I don’t get is the initial research idea. How could the initial researchers have thought that they could immunize bats so that they wouldn’t infect soldiers with Covid?
“One of the great challenges in this world is knowing enough about a subject to think you’re right, but not enough about the subject to know you’re wrong.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson
This is a problem for most of us, including the author who is a journalist, not a scientist. Overlay political bias, especially of the WSJ opinion page, and you really have to question its validity.
These “theories” have been addressed by Paul Offit in his new book, Tell Me When It’s Over. I’m not a virologist, but I don’t think there’s much to see here.
As a side note, when did we lose our critical eye when reading stuff like this. Shouldn’t the very first sentence “In the four years since the SARS-CoV-2 virus was unleashed on the world…” make you question the objectivity? How about this…“given the mainstream media’s sustained inability to report the issue objectively”? Or this “Editors have failed to think beyond the extreme politicization that requires liberals to oppose the lab-leak hypothesis.”?
It’s possible, but Wade has published articles since 2021 saying the same. The smoking gun maybe something else entirely.
@eyemgh , yes, I very much noticed the line about “liberals.”
So much for the “smoking gun”. 
Hmm, wonder why Wade didn’t mention that? Would his editors require him to think beyond the extreme politicization that requires him to support the lab leak hypothesis? 
The reality is that it’s easier for the lay public to accept the lab leak hypothesis than it is to accept natural zoonotic spillover. It takes a long time to find the links. They want easy answers, to do their “own research.”
Nicholas Wade’s extensive inquiries can take hours to read thoroughly. I doubt anyone seeking easy answers would pursue the topic this far. Along these lines, when Wade’s early paper on this topic was mentioned, somewhat experimentally, on CC in 2021, the comment (Vaccine reluctance & General COVID Discussion - #2397 by merc81) drew no interest.
It’s not that he hasn’t put in the time, but tespectfully, he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. That’s the problem with journalists acting like they are scientists.
Same guy, writing about “science”?
There is now abundant evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was an animal-to-human spillover event that occurred in the western section of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market that housed several live animals that were susceptible to the virus.
Which animal and what evidence?
It may or may not be raccoon dog. The evidence is very strong for all early cases tracing back to the market though. Furthermore, there’s NO evidence for a lab leak, but rather only wild speculation.
Zoonotic transfer is complex. It took ten years to find the “missing link” in SARS, and it has yet to be identified in Ebola. That doesn’t mean they were engineered.
You’re such a killjoy! It’s more fun to think that shadowy lab workers “unleashed” a deadly virus. Seriously though, I am always fascinated that people will look for reasons to justify the most implausible theory.
I infuriated someone when discussing the fires In Hawaii last year. I mentioned how we think of Hawaii as being tropical and yet dry conditions enabled the spread of fires. Big mistake. I didn’t realize this person didn’t believe in global warming. They were sure that the government erected barriers around the smoldering ruins of Lahaina to keep us from seeing whatever shady business they were trying to hide, rather than hiding devastation and death from lookieloos.
People want someone to blame, which I guess is a human reaction. It’s hard to be furious at animals.
Actually, even without the genomic evidence, the fact that the outbreak began so close to China’s single and highest level virology research institute (opened only two years before the leak https://context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/documents/109d57ba-42dd-4215-9f4e-39d068ceed31/note/4f90a905-2b3f-44e0-8cb5-2d9ea5dfc62a.) was more than enough to assume that it came from a lab leak, probably inadvertent, and that the staff there had been tweaking the virus - which doesn’t mean that they had been intentionally weaponizing it. Add in how China tried as hard as they could to cover it up, how they have stymied any investigation into the origin of the outbreak, how the Wuhan lab had been noted to have inadequate precautions in place, and it’s pretty obvious what happened. By far it is most likely that a lab worker was infected while working with the virus which the institute had been modifying, and they then inadvertently brought it out into the community in Wuhan, and it spread. We already know that the virus is easily spread airborne. Since China won’t cooperate with the investigation, there’s no way to pinpoint patient zero, but China knows what happened. The world will only find out definitively when someone from that lab, who was in a position to know, leaves China (with their entire family) and tells the world what happened. That will happen someday, unless China disappears everyone who was involved, or who knew.
China is enormous, both in land and population. What are the chances that the virus would coincidentally have begun in a market blocks away from China’s highest level virology lab that was doing research on that virus? Come on.
I am agnostic on this. I need to read more evidence from both sides. I don’t think the lab leak theory is implausible or should be dismissed immediately. At the same time I am not suggesting it was intentional, or definitely happened. But until we have more definitive evidence in support of either theory (which may take decades), I am not going to jump on the bandwagon of “no way this could have been a lab leak” or “this was definitely a lab leak”. I am going to stay on the sidelines and watch.
We absolutely cannot assume. Correlation does not equal causation. Without evidence, this is a theory, and not the most plausible one, given the compelling evidence that indicates the animal origins of the virus.
I actually just thought you were posting the WSJ article out of interest. We will have to agree to disagree.
When I posted it with the free link, of course it was out of interest. I didn’t do a deep dive on the reporter’s background, or the science. I just shared the free link. But that doesn’t change the fact that common things happen commonly, and to anyone who studies medicine/science, the fact of an animal to human jump happening right nearby a problematic virology lab studying that very same virus made it obvious from the start what had occurred. We don’t have every last piece of the puzzle… but that’s only because China has actively hidden the puzzle pieces.
The chances of Covid 19 having coincidentally begun from animal to human transmission in a live market very close to China’s only level 4 virology lab, where they were known to be working on the virus, and where major concerns regarding lab technique control had been repeatedly raised, would be like the chance of smallpox having miraculously been released and reactivated from a Siberian cemetery’s melting permafrost - in the same town as the only known repository of smallpox virus in the former Soviet Union, where lab scientists had been working with the smallpox virus.
Really, I’m no conspiracy theorist, and I don’t believe that there was nefarious intent in China’s working with the Covid virus at the Wuhan lab. I believed from the start that it was an accidental escape via an infected lab worker, the minute that I heard early on in the pandemic that China’s only level 4 virology lab had recently opened in Wuhan - back in the days when the South China Post out of Hong Kong could publish without Chinese censorship. It’s all a moot point by now - Covid 19 has become less virulent, and more contagious, and has forever joined the other Covid viruses that infect humans. China will never be held responsible, even if they were to at this late point allow an open investigation into the lab and the origins of the virus. Even if it were known what had happened, I doubt that it would be enough to bring down the authoritarian “communist” government of China, which is as securely in the hands of Chairman Xi as it was in Chairman Mao’s.
But yes, I really did share the free link to the WSJ opinion piece (which I stated in the title was an opinion piece) out of interest.
If you knew more about zoonosis, the question you’d actually be asking yourself is why doesn’t it happen more often?
Where did swine flu come from? Bird flu? Spanish flu, that actually originated in Kansas, and is now influenza A? Ebola? SARS? MERS? They were all things that mutated in animals to become infectious to humans.
I haven’t ruled out the lab origin theory. It’s just that there’s no evidence to support it. There is a lot of evidence behind spillover.
Let’s assume though it did come from a lab. There’s really only one way it could have happened. It’s too complex to have been engineered. That’s been well established. Plus, even if we had the technology, and we don’t, why would they engineer such an innocuous virus? It would have to have been discovered in the wild, isolated to be studied, without having infected any humans while being discovered, only to escape later into a human through a lab accident. Possible? Sure. Probable? No.
The problem with that article and with many people analyzing the problem is that they want it to be a lab leak for political reasons. They are clouded by seeking evidence for the outcome they desire.
I haven’t heard about the smallpox lab, but Siberia is not like Wuhan, with over 8 million people and active markets selling many animals, alive or dead, for human consumption.
I know nothing about virology, etc… Many other viruses have transmitted from animals to humans. I don’t find it hard to believe that covid 19 did the same. There is a lot of evidence to support the theory. Wade seems oblivious to it.
Maybe it escaped from a lab. China will absolutely never cooperate. They are not good guys. I wish they would cooperate because we would all like scientists to definitively understand the origins.