Emerged in Wuhan.
Down the street from a virology institute
That was studying coronaviruses
That was studying novel bat Coronaviruses
That had multiple breaches of safety protocol in the years leading up to it
Is not where the virus originated?
Skinner: Um yes
"Can we inspect the site freely?"
"No"
"CCP a global pandemic is destroying the world."
"That's just misinformation mother"
——
Emerged after military games in Wuhan.
Where the US competed.
Who is a geopolitical rival of China.
With soldiers that work at a military biolab.
That had a major biosafety breach the same year.
And the US doesn’t let the site be inspected freely.
——
Each of these are true on their own, that doesn’t mean we can conclude the implied conclusion is true.
If Covid-19 started in the wet market it went over the first phase very quickly.
Part of fighting disinformation and conspiracy theories is also learning to distinguish when things are just lies (eg. sandy hook was an hoax) or truish but misused (eg. chemical waste in river does affect the sex of frogs).
It is also important not o make a strawman of the opponent. For some people the "Lab Theory" is "The CCP was trying to exterminate the US but failed" for others it is "A researcher got bit by a bat in a lab". The former is paranoid, the latter is completely plausible.
Overall there is good circumstantial evidence for both, and reasonable people can disagree.
So the lab-leak hypothesis is: this virus created at the lab accidentally escaped to someone who subsequently only infected people on the other side of town.
It’s certainly a possibility (viral transmission is irregular with high variance, and people can easily travel that distance), and the lack of transparency by the government is alarming (though not particularly surprising to folks studying China), but most of the experts who have studied it still think it’s relatively unlikely.
But this isn't necessarily how it works, at all.
The Wuhan market is one of Wuhan's most population-dense areas, in close proximity to three hospitals where the first cases were identified, and was therefore the concentration for infection-tracing.
In other words, the dataset for early cases was based on a belief that the market was where the infection was spreading, rather than the location of a spreading event that came from elsewhere in the city. Even pneumonia cases that were reported were only post-hoc assigned as probably covid if they were in close proximity to the market.
The possibility hasn’t been incontrovertibly ruled out (and maybe never can be at this point), and it’s important to do independent investigations and examine the lab’s research, etc. It’s just not considered by most experts to be the most likely possibility.
As a geographical comparison, it would be like having a new disease outbreak where all of the known cases for the first several weeks were in Brooklyn, NY and concluding that the source could have been a lab in Newark, NJ. It’s possible, but not the first place to look.
It does not refer to the WIV as you think, again as per the WHO report.
Which WHO report are you thinking of? The 2021 WHO report called the lab leak possibility “extremely unlikely”. This more recent report from 4 months ago merely calls for more investigation into laboratories in the area and more transparency: https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/scientific-adv...
If you are interested in Covid origins look at this NPR story from March https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/03/03/1083751...
Which refers to this paper in Science, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/