Matt Ridley: "The Case for the Lab-Leak Theory Grows Stronger by the Day"

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   Of course it requires a certain amount of expertise even to evaluate such arguments. For one thing, you've got to know enough information to know where obvious material objections arise. Ordinary intelligent people can see that there's a strong case made here. But we don't know enough to raise relevant material objections on our own. For that we'd need to see expert criticism. 

   OTOH, it's been obvious what's going on here from the beginning. The strongest case is for the lab-leak hypothesis, but the (progressive) establishment--science, media, academia, bureaucracy--has decided to fight LLH--probably not to the last shred of credibility, but at least long enough to take the edge off when the truth finally does come out. This is, yet again, Lysenkoism / political correctness. Why exactly the progressive establishment chooses to promote some of its theories and why it chooses to anathematize others is often a mystery. I've long contended that it's their general pro-China/pro-CCP attitude...the flip side of their general anti-Russian attitude. (Not to both-sides the thing, but there's a pro-Russia and even pro-Putin view in part of the righty fringe. But the pro-China/CCP attitude isn't that fringey on the left.)

   Also, of course, the left performs a kind of free-form literary jazz when such issues come up. It's often extremely impressionistic, and could have gone the other way. It decided that there was something something Wuhan something something racism going on. So they did their normal thing: they declared some words--e.g. 'Wuhan virus' racist, pretended it was merely the words they objected to, then promptly shifted the "racism" they'd invented onto the actual, substantive hypothesis that the virus originated in the lab. They've even worked to argue that it didn't originate in Wuhan--or in China at all. If not for LLH, they'd be arguing that focusing on the wet market was racist--in fact they did argue that early on. But at least an accidental origin in the wet market is, they seem to think, better than an intentional or quasi-intentional origin in the WIV...

   Anyway.

   As usual, the real point here is that inquiry is being politicized by the left, and that must be fought and stopped.

   How the specific question of the origin of the Wuhan virus turns out is small potatoes compared to that. The important point is that science must be conducted apolitically.

   But my money is still, as it has been most (but not all) of the time, on LLH.