It's a long and meandering piece, but here's something like the core argument: > And all these assumptions rest on the biggest assumption of all—that a live sa

It's a long and meandering piece, but here's something like the core argument: > And all these assumptions rest on the biggest assumption of all—that a live sample of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (or its proximal ancestor) was actually inside a Wuhan virology lab in the first place. Nobody has yet provided any evidence that it was (or that it was inside any laboratory anywhere in the world) prior to the discovery of a novel pathogen in Wuhan in December 2019. Until this is demonstrated, all subsequent assumptions can be chopped away with Occam’s razor and discarded. But no research group in the world has published literally everything it's ever worked on. Even with no deliberate attempt to conceal, it takes time to write stuff up. The WIV had at least one unpublished coronavirus[1], which independent researchers were able to assemble from contamination in sequencing equipment shared with published agricultural samples. That merbecovirus couldn't possibly be an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2; but if they had one unpublished virus, then it's hard to dismiss the possibility that they had two. The author then seems to take a natural-origin pandemic as the "null hypothesis", to be accepted in the absence of strong evidence otherwise. But research related to a flu vaccine almost certainly caused the 1977 flu pandemic[2], with 700k dead, and smaller-scale biosafety accidents are sadly routine. I'm amazed by the number of people that virological research has managed to kill with no significant public backlash--Bhopal and Chernobyl are famous, and both prompted significant political reforms, without even a tenth of the death toll. 1. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v1.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v1.... 2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26286690/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26286690/