Read the whole thing and remain a lab-leaker challenge.
I know the rationalist discourse can be off-putting for some, but this is worth it.
Great substack. Amazing. But it still doesn’t answer the simple question of: Did an unknowningly infected lab worker go to the wet market and start the spread. We’ll never know. But Jon Stewart eventually gave all of his people permission to adhere to the lab leak hypothesis. Good enough for me.
Read the whole thing and remain a lab-leaker challenge.
I know the rationalist discourse can be off-putting for some, but this is worth it.
I read enough of this to deduce that the win was a result of superior debating skills, not the truth.
For example, one of the key arguments against the lab leak scenario was that the odds of it being a lab leak and then the first major breakout occurring at the wet market was 10,000 to 1.
It took me less than 5 minutes to destroy that 10,000 to 1 premise.
Here's how the virus could resulted from a lab leak but only surfaced first at the wet market.
1. The reason the original virus wasn't the most likely way a lab would modify a virus is that the lab was most likely experimenting with different ways to make the virus more contagious to humans. The virus that escaped was one of these modified but inferior versions.
2. A young lab worker made a negligent mistake and was exposed to the virus. A young, inexperienced lab worker would be more likely to make a mistake than an experienced scientist.
3. Chinese are marrying later in life so it wouldn't be unlikely at all for this worker to be single and live alone. Thus, there was no immediate family to spread it to.
4. He got sick but he was extremely careful around coworkers at WIV because he knew he would get fired if it came out that he got infected from his negligence at the lab. Because he is extremely cautious at the lab and tells no one that he's sick, he infects no one at the Wuhan lab.
5. Because he felt sick, he didn't socialize so he didn't spread the virus around town, but he still had to eat.
6. He bought his food at the Wuhan wet market. While at the market he infected a wet market worker who was far less sanitary then the Wuhan lab worker.
7. This infected wet market worker spread the virus to some of his animals and many of his customers, making the Wuhan wet market the site of the original outbreak.
You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to apply Occam's Razor to see that the lab leak is far more likely than a spread from Raccoon Dogs.
Heck, the Raccoon Dog theory provides NO premise on how the Raccoon Dogs got COVID in the first place. If you can't make a compelling case for how THAT happened, then the whole Raccoon Dog theory falls apart.