This has gotta be one of the dumbest, most self-negating arguments I’ve seen so far. ‘I asked Nature to request that Shi publish several SARS-related coronaviru

This has gotta be one of the dumbest, most self-negating arguments I’ve seen so far. ‘I asked Nature to request that Shi publish several SARS-related coronavirus sequences that had been reported in the journal. Within days, she provided them. The result: no smoking gun; they were all much more distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13.’ Let me get this straight - you are asking a scientist with the most to lose from this potential debacle to hand over evidence of her own central involvement and then using that to refute the lab leak? I’m just boggled by how naive some of these supposedly intelligent scientists are. If you are going to prove or disprove the lab leak hypothesis you cannot rely on evidence provided by the lab because the lab and the government that runs it have a massive conflict of interest with respect to this issue. They may well be telling the truth, but you have to find that out through evidence that wasn’t provided to you by them. Duh. It’s like asking a suspect to hand over the murder weapon. Don’t be surprised when what they give you implicates someone else.