[Consultant32452]

Evolutionary theory SUGGESTS it is a lab leak. When a virus "makes the jump" from animals to humans, it tends not to be very good at first. Then, over time, the virus would evolve to get better and better at spreading among humans. You'd have likely years of the virus spreading fairly slowly. You know how each progressive strain has become more capable of spreading but less deadly compared to the generation before it? One would expect to have seen strains prior to alpha which would have been significantly less infectious.

Covid, conversely, was EXTREMELY good at spreading among humans right from the start. This experience coincides with the exact category of experiments we know were funded in Wuhan, which include using directed evolution to get bat corona viruses to be able to infect human cells. They literally trained these corona viruses to be able to infect human cells.

Is this definitive? Of course not, nothing is definitive.

If you're interested in how these types of coverups play out in the real world, I recommend investigating the 1977 influenza pandemic. 700,00 people died due to a Russian lab leak and the entire scientific community kept it a secret from the public because they didn't want to embarrass Russia during the cold war. It took 30 years for the scientific community to come clean.

[boxed]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu

Sounds like you're vastly overstating the confidence of the 1977 flu being a coverup.

[Consultant32452]

Wikipedia is not a good source.

The 1977 flu pandemic was unique because it killed the young more than the old. This is because the old people had been through the 1950s H1N1 outbreak and had immunity.

This study from 1978 shows that the 1977 flu was genomically very similar to the H1N1 from the 1950s. This strain vanished off the face of the Earth for 20+ years and then re-emerged largely unchanged. The odds of that are basically zero. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/?page=1

This 2014 report from the center for arms control and non-proliferation reveals that relevant scientists in the late 70s knew it was a leak but hid it.

https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Esc...

As this paper reports, the academic community didn't begin to acknowledge the lab origin until around 2008 and didn't begin to do so in an official capacity (academic papers) until 2009. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/