It would be interesting to know, from a “how can we prevent similar outbreaks in the future?” standpoint.
But that doesn’t really seem to be the Fox’s angle. It seems to be about nothing more than laying blame and justifying early reporting that was along these lines, but with much less evidence.
Consider yourself backed up!
The following day (today), Doocy needed a refresher course. “Does President Biden think these conspiracy theories we hear about now, that Covid -19 may have been manmade and escaped from a lab in China, are a whacky conspiracy theory … or does he think that’s possible?”
Well, you yourself called it a conspiracy theory, so apparently you don’t think it’s possible.
When should the White House “suggest” to Fox “News” that they send a reporter with a semblance of a clue to the briefings instead of Doocy?
This conspiracy theory is more dangerous than you might think.
Corona and influenza viruses will keep involving. They live(*) in a broad and varied reservoir and new and possibly dangerous new strains will happen in the future.
We want to be prepared for that and one thing that is essential is a free flow of data and research between countries through the WHO. But the more we push China on the defensive, and the more we do it with stupid conspiracy trash that they can easily ignore the more likely they are to clam up again next time.
(* Let’s have that debate sometime else.)
…Jen Psaki is by far one of the most fun and fascinating White House Press Secretaries we’ve had in recent times, if not ever… Get real. No one will replace Sean Spicer. So many highlights, from his first lies about crown size, to hiding in teh bushes, to dressing as the Easter Bunny. Love Jen, but not on the same level.
In best Foghorn Leghorn voice:
That boy is dense. Dense I say! Brickwall dense.
I don’t see this, and I am not sure William of Occam would either. This is worrying for me, as you are presumably a rational BoingBoinger, and it makes me wonder how many others are following your path.
simple explanation
Covid jumped species. Viruses have done that before, and doubtless will do again. It possibly happened around Wuhan, which contains a virus lab, a live animal market, and probably many millions of bats living in the surrounding countryside: these and all sorts of other factors may have played a part.
complex explanation
Covid jumped species because of work in a lab being released into the surrounding city. I see little evidence other than that the lab exists. There are probably many, many more animals outside the lab then inside it, living in more varied conditions, close to people who are not taking any special precautions against infection. Was it released on purpose? Was it an accident? Did they know it had got out and tried to cover it up? If they were working on it, wouldn’t they know what it was, and be closer to a cure? Did they have to pretend the didn’t know what it was, and keep the cure secret?
To my mind this is much like the problems that Occam’s razor was applied to. For instance…
The planets move in orbits.
The planets move in orbits on invisible crystal spheres, guided by angels, to fulfil the timeless plans ordained by GOD.
The first one is a simple unadorned version of what we see; the second contains the same core as the first, but embellished by unprovable fancies required by the faith of the day. It is these fancies that Occam’s razor was said to trim away. He was not disproving the embellishments - just arguing that the essence of the statement does not need them.
Here’s the thing - Doocy got exactly what he wanted both times.
He got the “People are asking questions” debate fired up. He got mentioned. He got air time. He got to waste the time of actual reporters.
I want to note that I am not trying to argue one way or the other because I am not an expert. All I can do is read the various explanations that different folk have given. There seems to be a fair amount of evidence that people have been working on SARS related viruses to try and figure out how they jump species more easily than other viruses. There also seems to be some evidence of oddities that make this particular strain different to others that have jumped (although I confess that this may be a bit of technical flimflammery that is actually meaningless.) And some folk have argued that the wild spread of mutations might make more sense with a variant that was controlled until it ‘got out’.
In other words, there are enough new simple explanations that have been proposed in the last six months or so that it no longer seems like the complex explanation that it once was.
But again, I repeat that those explanations may all actually be complex ones that merely appear simple! And that this is not any sort of hill I want to die on. 
Where do your regular flu jabs come from? Probably China. Chinese farmers keep ducks with pigs. This may allow lung diseases to jump from birds to mammals. New flu strains tend to emerge in China. This gives us a year’s start on developing a jab before it comes over here en masse. Okay, I have simplified this a bit, but the outline is basically right.
Are the Chinese giving us 'flu? Would it stop if they separated there pigs and ducks? Or is it like forest fires, and preventing it will mean one will come along every 100 years and wipe us all out? Probably ‘no’ to all of these, but we can’t prove it. The real story is in the vaccines - we have learned a lot about this virus, and have some new techniques for fighting viruses in general. Yay Science!
That’s not a story that Peter Doody can use. He wants the Yellow Peril, and he’s going to go on until he gets it.
I suppose it depends on what man made means, fully assembled from nothing, or very possibly altered in gain of function experiments?
They were doing that in the wuhan lab, and the scientist doing that experimentation (who also published the first sequencing of the covid-19 virus, leaving out the bit that many scientists say really looks like an addition from GoF experimentation) was funded by the guy who wrote the first report stating that it most definitely was not a lab escape…
That said, China won’t give access to anything which would provide proof of this (or conversely, proof that is wasn’t the case) so it will probably remain in this grey area indefinitely.
Problem is, there’s little evidence backing up the simple explanation? No host animals found, no previous infections where the virus gains this function jumping back and forth between host animal and humans, and it doesn’t even infect bats in its current form. All of those pieces were found for the previous 2 SARS viruses, and usually within months of identifying the virus.
None of it is a smoking gun, it’s just a lot of circumstantial evidence that should be there, and isn’t, but actually is present for the more “complex” explanation.
So if you apply the razor, about all that remains is that the virus orginated in bats.
Can you give a reputable source for the gain of function allegation? I’m not saying it’s bunk, but I keep seeing allegations presented as fact on both sides of this.
ETA: I still cannot square how the government of China did not know or care about an outbreak at the lab but simultaneously had the wherewithal to make it look like the virus originated at the seafood market in realtime. Those would seem mutually exclusive.
Exactly. The reason the WHO is trying to find the source of the pandemic is not so that we have someone to blame but to make sure it doesn’t happen again
What he is envisioning is … I don’t even know what the endgame is with his proposed US-led investigation.
It’s also the height of arrogance to suggest a national investigation when every single country on earth has been affected by this and has the exact same interest in an investigation.
None of those people was fun or funny.
That’s an interesting article, most of which seems to rotate around what GoF actually, is, and whether the experimentation they did falls under the banner of GoF, which definitey isn’t clear, and I don’t think I’m qualified to make the call 
I’ll preface the GoF statement in the future.
As for your second question, that was the first person identified with the new virus (he was hospitalized I believe), however, knowing what we do now about asymptomatic transmission, it seems mostly coincidence, even the WHO has ruled it out as the point of origin. One idea that I haven’t seen for a while (and I guess it’s because the market doesn’t seem to be where it started) was that possibly lower level people from the lab were selling experimental animals to the market for extra cash, and the virus (modified or not) started infecting humans that way?
I’m pretty much certain we’ll never know certainly either way, although it would be nice, not to assign blame, but to as Doctor_Faustus says, to stop it from happening again.
It was a cluster of people around the seafood market, but you’re right that asymptomatic carriers could have brought it there and that’s where people with noticeable symptoms started showing up. We probably will never know for sure, but the answer is probably that we need to be more careful with lab safety and animal interactions.
You know, I’d be entirely happy if that was the outcome of this, studying dangerous viruses is important, but it really does need to be done with the upmost cauton.
