| > You're mad at the author for not pointing out the WIV Yes, an article comparing two possible originating locations should obviously show both on that graphic (especially when both places are well-within the frame of the image); I can't see any good reason for the author to have omitted that. > but then you also grant that it looks like the market was the center of spread Yes. And that's not contradictory to the lab leak idea, because people aren't trees and they go places after work. I think it's entirely reasonable to hypothesize that the virus escaped from the lab on a person and ended up successfully taking root in a less-than-sanitary wet market just across the river. If two-headed turtles started showing up at a Popeye's 20 minutes away from the Turtle Experiment Laboratory, would you say that Popeye's was the source of the two-headed turtles? > You still need to explain how there are two distinct lineages at the market among the first cases! Again, there's no reason both theories can't be true here. The caged, dirty animals definitely seemed to be the virus' first stronghold, but that doesn't mean that the new bat virus couldn't have come from the New Bat Virus Laboratory 20 minutes away from the wet market. > Picking and choosing one data point to be skeptical of is useless, the totality of the evidence needs to be weighed. My point is that it made the bias of the author nakedly apparent. It's an pro-wet-market argument piece, not an objective look. |