Yeah mostly I agree. Whether it came from a wet-market, a captured bat in a cage, a coal miner, or a genetic engineering experiment-- it sort of doesn’t matter because we’ve already said before that these things are “bad”, and aren’t really changing our actions.
I don’t completely agree.
Lab-leak seems very important as it means we need better safety protocols.
Wet markets is potentially important if there is a way to mitigate that risk moving forward.
I recall with bird flu (I think… some virus that made the jump from birds to humans anyway) there was official advice from health departments to please stop sucking the snot from your game cocks’ nasal passages with your mouth… that’s literally how that disease made the jump to humans. 
(Maybe not exclusively… but it was a recurring problem with people getting bird flu directly from birds that way.)
If we know how it made the leap to humans maybe we can offer guidance on reducing further risks???
The bird flu is also when we officially decided it might be a bad idea to genetically engineer a super-virus just to see what a super-virus looks like.
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I agree with this part of your post. The rest of your post builds a strawman.
Evidence justifying the claim of a lab leak during Q1 2020:
There is a Wuhan Lab that has been studying coronaviruses in bats for many years.
Lack of transparency in Chinese investigations.
Chinese misinformation and withholding information early on regarding the # of cases, deaths, and all things Covid.
This is enough to justify a claim that COVID-19 spread due to a lab leak. It doesn’t mean it was scientifically engineered or the leak was intentional. I can’t see how people wouldn’t think this scenario was possible at the time. I do not care about one’s political motives regarding the origin.
I don’t know how i built a straw man when i specifically said that i don’t remember what the stated evidence for the claim was.
Everything you just listed is not really evidence at all in my opinion. It can all be true, and still a natural jump from bats to humans could be responsible. And it can be at least somewhat false, and still a lab leak could be true.
Eh, I would say that it’s enough to justify a claim that Covid-19 might possibly have spread due to a lab leak.
I think the bolded words are an important qualifier. We shouldn’t assert certainty where it doesn’t exist. (And certainly there have been errors on both sides regarding certainty.)
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Eh, i feel like it’s closing one barn door when there are thousands of other barn doors out there.
So his claim that you built a strawman was a strawman?
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(2) and (3) are less significant, to the extent that we expected such actions from the Chinese government.
(1) is where it was at, however the default assumption was a wet market because SARs came from a wet market, and we have been half-expecting another Coronavirus to come from another Chinese wet market for years (which is why China has a few labs). And the wet market hypothesis was then ‘confirmed’ by the early cases.
Really, I think few people had opinions in Q1 2020. Everything was still on fire. People waited a year to have opinions, and then most people pulled their opinions from either the MSM or the anti-MSM, with little in-between.
It’s strawmen all the way down
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In this sense, it would be wrong to “claim” that COVID-19 came from the wet markets in Wuhan. It is incorrect to “claim” COVID-19 originated from any source. What was the “evidence” at the time? Who was communicating “facts”?
COVID-19 might possibly have spread from the wet markets or the Wuhan lab (or something else). If people have an issue with my prior use of the word “claim”, so be it. I would have said the same thing had COVID-19 originated in the US with a coronavirus lab near a US wet market.
The 2 paragraphs were completely irrelevant to any argument. Your first paragraph stood on its own. There was no logical point to building your 3 examples of poor justifications.
The second paragraph was an example of supporting the lab leak in a way that still deserved criticism because it did not refer to evidence about the lab leak and also showed racist or at least xenophobic thinking. It direct supported my point.
The third paragraph reflected my gut “feeling” or memory about some of the original claims made about the lab leak. There were meant to be my subjective state at the time, and not a factual statement. It reflects the perspective and thoughts that lead to me writing the first two paragraphs, and also to disclose some of my own possible biases since i don’t remember well enough to know if those subjective feelings about the history are accurate.
In any case, the GOP House is going to start a COVID hearings soon.
It will be interesting whether they manage to make it about COVID, or just innuendo about Fauci.
i suspect they will not stop at innuendo.
Yeah, the language should be couched with terms like “seems likely to have originated”. IIRC, I think sometimes this wording was used and sometimes it wasn’t.
In COVID/vax-hysteria discussions on another forum, I’ve hypothesized that some of the distrust in public health decisions has come from messaging and public discussion that were imprecise/sloppy in their wordings, inviting discredit when reality turned out to be different than what would have been expected if you weren’t aware of the nuances behind the imprecision.
I’d take the evolution in theories about the source of the COVID virus, and reaction to that evolution, to be another manifestation of the same phenomenon.
I think it’s mostly just bad luck that Fauci was part of the GoF argument before becoming the public face of the vaccines, masks, closures, etc. And of course bad luck that we ever elected Trump president.
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say I just want the origin of COVID to be exactly like the opening scene in The Stand. The 1994 miniseries version.
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What is the GoF argument ?
Never mind I assume it’s gain of function.
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