There are a lot of bats in Wuhan. There are a lot of bats carrying coronaviruses. Coronaviruses have triggered past epidemics. Ergo, there’s an institute for virology in Wuhan.

Listen starting at 6:30 in the podcast I posted from Nature. There is indeed strong correlation but no causal relationship established.

Except everything I've read indicates the bats carrying the most closely related virus are not in Wuhan, not even close:

> The SARS-CoV-2 virus is most closely related to coronaviruses found in certain populations of horseshoe bats that live about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away in Yunnan province, China. [0]

[0] https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-wuhan-lab-complicate...

So why would the virus so strongly appear to originate in Wuhan, and not in another city, closer to the bats' native regions? Appears quite statistically unlikely.

For example, there were cases as early as December 2019 that did not come from Wuhan. Wuhan was no doubt a key early hotspot.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market...

There has been rigorous scholarship done on this question. I recommend reading it given your interest in the subject.

I read the article, but it only states that the first case from December was not linked to the seafood market ("wet market"), but not that it occurred outside of Wuhan. Did I misread something?

By the way, early on I believed that the virus jumped to humans at the seafood market, which was the prevailing theory at the time, it seemed. But as evidence like the above article came out - noting that many early cases had no link to the seafood market, while still being in Wuhan - it raised suspicions, and lent credence to the lab-leak theory.

> There has been rigorous scholarship done on this question. I recommend reading it given your interest in the subject.

I do, but I'm not convinced. A lot of reporting either relies on appeal to authority ("I'm a PhD, and this couldn't possibly happen, so don't question it"), or is purposely obtuse, confusing lab-leak with lab-synthesized, and by dodging the point, hardly alleviates suspicion.

You must understandably excuse me for being a sceptic. I started wearing masks back in February or March, against the advice of the CDC who was telling me masks increase the rate of spread. At the same time I believed that borders should be closed to limit the rate of spread, while the WHO was telling me that closing borders would do no such thing.

So I am not going to believe something just because an expert tells me to, nor do I find it at all scientific to dismiss politically inconvenient possibilities.

>The Lancet paper’s data also raise questions about the accuracy of the initial information China provided, Lucey says.

If anything, this source strengthens the possibility of lab leak hypothesis.

No.

This isn't deducible from the article YOU linked!

Not having a link to the seafood marketplace in Wuhan != originating from outside Wuhan.

> The paper, written by a large group of Chinese researchers

> Their data also show that, in total, 13 of the 41 cases had no link to the marketplace.

> the virus possibly spread silently between people in Wuhan—and perhaps elsewhere—before the cluster of cases from the city’s now-infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was discovered in late December.

Chiefly, it says that there is evidence that not only did the virus NOT originate from an animal source in the seafood market, but they suggest that Chinese officials knew that it did NOT originate in the Market, yet they issued statements saying that it did anyway.

Then you ought to know that seeing more circumstantial evidence for A than B does not imply that A is more likely. What would imply that A is more likely is if you find more circumstantial evidence for A than whatever amount you would expect to find if A didn't happen.

That's why good Bayesians place so little weight on circumstantial evidence: because it's difficult or impossible to predict the expected amount of circumstantial evidence for something that didn't happen. It would involve answering questions like, "When a novel coronavirus moves from the animal population to humans without a lab accident, what are the odds that it will happen within X miles of a lab studying such viruses?" That's pretty difficult to answer, given that we don't know a lot about how or why that happens yet.

And it shouldn't even need to be said that this all goes double when the thing being argued over is political (because, even if you personally are unbiased, the people gathering and publishing the evidence you rely on may not be) and treble when the evidence is technical and outside your area of expertise.

And I am not ready to dismiss the theory but I am always open to hearing evidence to exclude the theory.