The Next ‘Lab Leak’
There are many variations of the &quot;lab leak&quot; theory for Covid-19. For example:<p>1. Was the sample found or engineered? Or found then engineered?<p>2. Was it a deliberate leak or accidental?<p>Here are some open questions that haven&#x27;t been answered or examined (at least publicly) to a sufficient degree:<p>1. If Covid-19 jumped from an animal species to humans, possibly through another animal, then why hasn&#x27;t it been found in the wild? For example, SARS was relatively quickly found in the wild. To date there&#x27;s been no equivalent discovery of the lineage of human-transmissible Covid-19. An alternative theory, that Covid-19 spread to humans at a wet market, would strongly suggest that Covid-19 would be found in the wild;<p>2. The Chinese had a database of Covid strains that was taken offline in late 2019. To the best of my knowledge, no independent third-party has been able to examine the contents of this database and see if it relates to Covid-19;<p>3. Covid-19 seems to be related to bat coronavirus strains from hundreds of miles away. How was the jump made? Through what species? and<p>4. We don&#x27;t really know who Patient Zero was.<p>None of this adds up to positive evidence of any variation of the &quot;lab leak&quot; theory but given that there is no alternative theory that holds up to serious scrutiny or doesn&#x27;t have serious flaws or unanswered questions, it has to stay in the running.<p>My suspicion is the Chinese government doesn&#x27;t know either but, more importantly, they don&#x27;t want to know because absolutely no good can come from that becoming public. There is literally no upside. This applies on the individual level too. If you&#x27;re a manager of a lab or even just a lab technician, do you really want to be held responsible, even just in the public eye, for &quot;starting&quot; Covid-19? God, no. That may well be bad for you, your family, the government and countless others.<p>So there&#x27;s a concerted effort to not know.<p>And the WHO&#x27;s response to all this has been utterly anemic from the early days of the pandemic where China&#x27;s pronouncements were taken at face value to the late joint investigation with laughably narrow frames of reference.