Galloism wrote:Nilokeras wrote:
If your theory hinges upon a conspiracy for which there is no evidence but your own suspicion it's not a very good theory.
Again, these are based on observable known things.Galloism wrote:There's actually a fair bit of circumstantial evidence. It wouldn't be enough for a conviction, but it would be enough for a search and seizure warrant and to go looking for more evidence (if there were any or, perhaps, were any left).
1) Wuhan institute was engaging in coronavirus gain of function experiments at the time of the outbreak. This is a form of accelerating evolution of a virus to see what it might evolve into later.
2) They were explicitly re-engineering coronaviruses from bats to be infectious to humans by modifying the spike protein
3) We have seen photos and video - and read reports - documenting the extremely insufficient level of security and containment procedures at the Wuhan institute
3) The outbreak started in Wuhan
4) The bats that were considered the "origin" are 2000 miles away from Wuhan, and we have no evidence of any infection between those two points prior to the outbreak in Wuhan
5) Wuhan scientists from the institute did travel 2000 miles to those bats in particular to collect coronaviruses for their gain of function research and then returned to Wuhan
6) And now (allegedly), we have several scientists hospitalized with severe flu like symptoms just prior to the outbreak in Wuhan
Is that proof positive? No, but there's enough circumstantial evidence that I could get a search warrant out of it. It definitely hits probable cause.
Also, it's not "another investigation". It's a "first investigation". We never got to have an investigation the first time because... well, China.
I did mistake miles and kilometers in the original post, full disclosure - it was 2000km not 2000mi, which is a 40% error. But it's still pretty decent. Add to that they denied WHO from visiting the lab back in January, and... again, it's not enough for an arrest, but in any judicial system in the world, it would be enough for a search it, seize all the documentation, test everything search warrant.
The part where it fails is that the reported genomes do not match Covid, and are Infact relatively distantly related. The assumption inherent in this is that they did collect Covid in this expedition, which happened in 2012 nine years ago, and experimented on it before it escaped. They then destroyed that evidence to prevent knowledge of this work from getting out. That fundamental conspiracy has no evidence beyond your inherent suspicion of China, since there's a number of reasons why they would deny it ranging from wanting to hide incompetence in the initial response to Covid to not wanting to give ammunition to anti-China hawks.
Beyond that there are other holes. Like the nine year gap, the lack of evidence of experimentation on the genome of Covid, and the fact that bats do not need the additional help from virologists to come into contact with humans on a regular basis, and that the sampled viruses from the Yunnan cave represent a tiny fraction of the coronaviruses present in bats.