> But her actual tweet notes "To have the virus originate at the lab under any circumstances, the lab has to have the fucking virus!" That seems to be a logical

> But her actual tweet notes "To have the virus originate at the lab under any circumstances, the lab has to have the fucking virus!" That seems to be a logical conclusion, which your framing dismisses. No, it doesn't. The point I was making is that she can't know what she's claiming to know (and also that she was being incredibly rude). > Rasmussen continues by stating "Not only did they not have intact, infectious, replication competent RaTG13–which, again, is not SARS-CoV-2–at WIV, there’s no evidence they had any ancestral proto-SC2 virus." The first point was explained by the tweets above that one The tweets prior to this one in no way support that assertion. In those tweets, she makes a hand-wavy claim that RaTG "is not ancestral" to SARS-CoV2 (this is Not Even Wrong -- it's just a fundamental misunderstanding of phylogeny), and further, that it could not become SARS-CoV2 "even through engineering", which is a truly bizarre, bold claim. Then she advances that the Laos viruses are somehow better in this respect, even though they are also separated from SARS-CoV2 by many mutations, and have the same basic problems. What Rasmussen is doing here is trying to assert that because "there's no evidence that they had RaTG13", it means that they didn't have it, and Yglesias must be wrong. But that's the whole question. It's a truism. Did they have it? We don't know. The Chinese aren't saying, and as far as I know, Angie Rasmussen didn't work at the Wuhan lab, so she can't pretend to know either. > The abstract clearly states: "Together, these analyses provide dispositive evidence for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 via the live wildlife trade and identify the Huanan market as the unambiguous epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic." Yeah, abstracts say lots of things that are unsupported by the data below them. They don't prove those claims, and the use of the words "dispositive evidence" is the sort of phrasing that should make any scientist skeptical, unless said evidence involves a warm body and a smoking gun.