[actually_a_dog]

You don't need to "discredit" the hypothesis very much, because it shouldn't have any real "credit" to begin with. The only evidence for it at all seems to be the proximity of the Wuhan lab to the first known outbreak, plus the fact that 3 researchers got sick in November (i.e. flu season) with some unknown virus. If you ask me, that plus $5 might buy you a cup of coffee.

[ikrenji]

it's a hell of coincidence that out of all chinese cities the outbreak started in the one city housing the premiere institute dedicated to researching coronaviruses... so there is no smoking gun evidence, but it's a reasonable hypothesis... anyway, no one apart from the chinese ministry of state security will ever know for sure one way or another

[yibg]

Isn’t that mixing causation with correlation. The lab is there because there are lots of virus sources there.

[MichaelZuo]

This is definitely the most sensible explanation, since it's quite well known that Wuhan is the most important transportation hub in China since even before the lab was a distant dream in some postdoc's imagination.

And China does have the world's largest annual human migration, in the Spring Festival.

If I was in the planning department at whichever ministry that made the final decision on placement, putting the most prestigious and well funded lab studying dangerous human transmissible viruses at the world's most likely place to originate such a virus is an obvious choice.

i.e. during a few weeks every year Wuhan could easily be 10x more likely to be ground zero then any other city ever.

[mwbajor]

Wow, you did quite the somersault there.

[MichaelZuo]

Account created 22 days ago with the profile description: "Long time lurker, only made an account to comment about FPGAs..."

So this seems like low-effort trolling.

[himinlomax]

> The lab is there because there are lots of virus sources there.

That's patently false.

[actually_a_dog]

I don't see any evidence in either your or the GP's post.

[selfmodruntime]

So you discredit an incredibly likely theory that a rapidly spreading epidemic from an origin city in a totalitarian state with a highly specific lab focusing on coronaviruses, based on lack of credit?

I don‘t know what to say.

[actually_a_dog]

It's called "lack of available evidence." You can't use the fact that there isn't evidence of a thing happening in order to give the theory weight. When the evidence comes out, if it exists, and if it ever does come out for general consumption, then my opinion is subject to change.

Why not just say it came from North Korea? There's just about as much publicly available evidence for that as there is that it came from a lab leak in China.

[selfmodruntime]

> You can't use the fact that there isn't evidence of a thing happening in order to give the theory weight

I can and I will, because of the fact that there is some evidence that the Chinese Government made efforts to hide evidence around Covid 19’s origins and their history regarding uncomfortable truths.

You can not argue in good faith on grounds of evidence or no evidence if not all parties are playing open and fair. A totalitarian Government with an overarching system of controlling it‘s population and information is certainly not supporting good scientific research and discovery.