I’m a college dropout. Not a scientist. Let alone a biologist or epidemiologist or whatever other ologist I would like to include in a fantasy panel to help me reconcile my interpretations of the news with what their expertise, regardless of their preferences, might inform.
I’ve been aware of the credible strains of the “Lab Leak Hypothesis” from near the beginning, which now have fairly widespread recognition. (And all the words mean something, right? Hypothesis == something to be proved or disproved.)
What I feel like is missing is a middle ground in what otherwise seems like a dichotomy. Either its from the wild or it was “created” (modified/magnified) in a lab and got out. It seems like the middle ground is, for a lab that might be collecting samples to then study (and perhaps modify, say through alleged “gain of function” explorations, etc.), that a yet to be modified strain of something collected might leak, if a leak is a possibility.
And then it would have no markers of its own that would necessarily indicate human intervention. Right?
The folks who dismissed a lab leak given their belief in the ostensibly far lower odds (but now widely recognized as yet to be actually precluded odds), always, I think, seemed to really speak to their judgement in natural origins of the SARS-CoV-2. But that wouldn’t preclude the scenario above.
I am not even sure this is an original critique. I might have picked this up somewhere and my brain is spitting it out because it hasn’t seen it incorporated clearly into the new reporting that legitimizes the broader theory as still being a possibility.