The author appears to have the honest intention of analysing this question as thoroughly as possible.
If there is some other website or paper that goes through this in more detail, it would be good if someone could post a link to that website.
It could be that next week someone discovers the intermediate host (like the civet cat was for SARS), and the whole discussion becomes moot. But for the moment I think we are still in "don't know either way" territory.
Also we may eventually come to a deeper understanding of the nature of zoonotic events, and whether it is at all possible that a scientific laboratory could accidentally become part of the chain of transfer.
For example, it might be that a coronavirus only rarely and temporarily exists in a state where it infects the source host and is capable of infecting the destination host. In which case such a transfer will only ever occur in a situation where large numbers of indidivuals from both source and destination species exist, ie in rural areas where wildlife mixes with people, or in farms, or some combination of those two.
Another thing I would note is that all the examples of laboratory accidents were of organisms already known to be dangerous human diseases. Those types of accidents can and do happen. Whether it is at all probable that such an accident could generate a _new_ dangerous human disease is not so obvious. This comes back to the question of what probabilities are involved in the events leading up to a typical zoonotic event.
The alternative to me will be a rural farmer caught the disease through extensive farming. Contamination from a wild animal, directly or through livestock.
It then kicked around for months in a rural location, a lower R perhaps, with better weather conditions and less networked people. People died and family's moved on.
Until someone on a trip to the city passed it on.
Perhaps selling at the markets or perhaps to family there who then took it to the market through work or just shopping.
I would not write off the Lab theory, it's better than bats at a market, but there are other logical theories as well.
While I was building the my covid 19 tracker https://visalist.io/emergency/coronavirus , I stumbled upon this and was taken aback. These are some hard hitting evidence. What does it mean, what repercussions this can have on the World? So china has finally won the world war 3?
Hacker News has officially lost the plot. Instead of flagging this and moving on we are now debating not whether or not to ban project-evidence on sight but whether or not the release was intentional or not.
Can we all come to our senses please? What are the chances that you'd find out about this from some github.io pages instead of from all the intelligence services in the West who would have been on this like flies if it had a snowball's chance in hell of being true.
A large amount of evidence collected to make a certain narrative look plausible is not worth to be debated on its merits. There is evidence that Martians created our moon because gravity is real. Try refuting that.
They present this as a conspiracy, but whether it escaped from the lab is a bit of a whatever in comparison to the coverup and the damage of suppressing the initial epidemic and playing it down after they were found out.
No one is really saying it was intentional; and while risky, the research into coronavirii that could trigger a future pandemic was valuable. But it was a screw-up; someone made a mistake or took a shortcut and here we are.
China is going to be under pressure regardless to either open up that research facility, or shut it down so it doesn't happen again there, or anywhere else in the world.
Evidence is of two types: circumstantial or direct. This thing only has the first, and doesn't try looking for evidence of the contrary.
At least they acknowledge this inconclusiveness at the end.
An interesting read.
They present evidence of 2 labs in Wuhan, and each lab was doing work with bats with a high degree of likelihood of having this virus.
This puts the virus at the scene of the crime, so to speak.
This is opposed to the wet market theory which has no evidence of said bats at the market, or explanation for how bats from 1000 miles away ended up there.
Writing standards for conspiracy theories are on the rise, huh?
Didn't read all of it, but I'm not sure what a GPG key is doing there.
I have my own conspiracy theory that some group with a financial stake in wet markets or the general trade in wildlife meat/products is manipulating right wing racists to push the theory that the virus originated in a lab rather than due to unsafe handling of wild game meat so that the Chinese government won't feel pressure to further curtail wild game markets.
My hard hitting github of evidence will include the fact that wet markets exist in China and also that racists exist in the US and other western countries. QED.
Haven't read much yet. But the first point already doesn't inspire much confidence. "This market is less than 9 miles away from The Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences". 9 miles away means that it's at the opposite of the city.
I mean, that text is trying to make it seem like they are close to each other when actually it just means that both are in the same city. 9 miles is not a small distance in a big city like wuhan.
It's like saying that Queens is next to the Statue of Liberty.