It seems that proponents of the lab leak theory wants to turn the burden of proof upside down: I am claiming conspiracy starting with Anthony Fauci and ending up in a Chinese lab. It is up to you to provide hard evidence on why it is not so.
Sure you can do that as in freedom of thought and speech. But honestly; this is not really a constructive way to go about things.
Did you read the article. The investigative group is compromised. The doctors who were part of the group have strong connections and even experiments running in the same lab.
I agree that compromised isn't a smart word to use about this, but even if you think all these questions have been settled, I'm surprised you don't agree that it is bad optics to have the investigator to be the funder of the research being investigated, and even worse when he says things like: well, we asked them and they said no, so that's that. The conflict of interest couldn't be more obvious.
It's the media's job to investigate conflicts of interest, so the fact that they didn't looked into that, and that they took Daszak's original so-called debunking at face value, is bad optics on another level. It has left a credibility vacuum, so it's unsurprising that articles like the current one are coming in from the margins.
What is least likely? A group of scientists in a quasy communist country do a shit job of safety and end up endangering the worlds population or that a virus that coexists with Bats, somehow and for no (direct) evolutionary benefit, becomes able to infect humans?
It is, on the whole, but not immediately. It is kinda like the idea that while having eyes is a huge evolutionary benefit, having just part of the eye confers none. Or like guessing a password by random chance. If you get some immediate feedback by being partially right then it is pretty easy, but if you only know if the password is right or wrong, then the odds of guessing the password rounds to zero.
Based on what we know about the history and ecology of pathogens, the latter is far more likely. I say this as someone with training in the biological sciences.
It seems that proponents of the lab leak theory wants to turn the burden of proof upside down: I am claiming conspiracy starting with Anthony Fauci and ending up in a Chinese lab. It is up to you to provide hard evidence on why it is not so.
Sure you can do that as in freedom of thought and speech. But honestly; this is not really a constructive way to go about things.