Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Opinion | The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak

So to add to that tweet. ... The opinion piece above ran in the WSJ over the weekend.

Talking to someone who understands the science way better than I could, "the science" does not suggest a lab leak. Despite that headline. It suggests that it could have been a lab leak.

But it's not definitive, despite how convinced the two guys who wrote this sounded.

Here is where people doing this are going wrong. ... they are focusing entirely on the sequencing of the virus, as Scott Gotlieb said in an interview I was listening to this morning. And depending on what you want to conclude, looking at the virus that way can suggest that it came from nature or it can suggest that it came from a lab. You are essentially looking at the sequencing and saying, "This is consistent with" or "This is similar to." The problem is, that isn't definitive proof of anything, and the same way you can focus on one thing about the virus' sequence, there may be 2 or 3 other things that are consistent with the other conclusion, which you are just ignoring.

If you are looking for evidence that it came from a lab, you are not going to know from that sequence. As Gotlieb said, the people in that lab who supposedly got sick, coupled with the fact that the Chinese won't transparently produce the information that would exculpate (or prove their guilt) the lab are more damning than these opinions coming from scientists (even if they are better informed opinions than any of us would have). It's still not proof of the origin of the virus, though.