Trevor Bedford is one scientist at the Hutch. He is certainly qualified to have an opinion, but his opinion is not the conclusive determination on the matter. O

Trevor Bedford is one scientist at the Hutch. He is certainly qualified to have an opinion, but his opinion is not the conclusive determination on the matter. Other scientists whom I respect have different opinions: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1 The other links you provide are rebuttals of particular arguments, but in no way settle the entire question. Knowing that bits of HIV weren't inserted into SARS-CoV2, for example, tells you nothing about whether this virus may have emerged from natural selection experiments in the lab. There are good arguments on both sides, but Twitter, in particular, seems stuck on the pronouncements of early 2020, when nobody knew much of anything about the virus and a certain prominent politician was speculating wildly, thus setting up a left/right polarization over what should be a factual debate. We need to stop this hostile form of "scientific debate" where one person's opinion is held up as "the science", while all other voices are dismissed as fringe.