The bar for 'they withheld data' can always be moved. Some data will always be considered withheld.

There was no shortage of data that was consistent with the bush meat market outbreak.

It would be one thing if the outbreak started in a theatre or a mall, or some other place which did not regularly traffic in exotic diseases. It's another thing when it started at the only non-lab active reservoir in the city.

Given the preponderance of evidence and probability, the lab leak theory is a baseless conspiracy at this point. It stretches credulity to think that of all the places the lab leaked, it leaked to the one place in town which was itself a dangerous source of cross-species disease transmission.

If there was no such wet market in town, and if the outbreak didn't center in it, the lab leak would have been a far more probable hypothesis. But that's not the world we live in.

The director of the WHO— who is Ethiopian, not a US puppet—is on record saying that the lab withheld data and China has rebuffed multiple attempts to collect the data that the WHO feels was withheld. How is that not a basis for the conspiracy theory?

I'm not even saying that it's right, it just confuses me to hear you so fervently insist that there's no basis for the idea when the WHO director himself says that there is and that the investigation was inconclusive.

We on this forum of all people should know that you can present partial data that shows completely different conclusions what the full data would show.

Why is a wet market a more convincing explanation than a lab whose explicit mission is studying coronaviruses, one which has been publicly called out for being uncooperative with the ensuing investigation?

The jump between 'data was withheld' and 'there was a coverup of an incredibly improbable thing happening' compared to 'very probable thing that was also supported by data happening' is colossal.

Absence of data isn't a free pass that lets you fill in whatever blanks you want, to fit whatever improbable theory you want. Especially when a plausible, probable, data supported alternative exists.

At the moment, given what we know and don't know, it is dramatically more likely that it was a bush meat outbreak, and confidently and without quantification, asserting the contrary (as the ancestor post did) is nonsense.

Its correct to say that it might have been a lab leak. It's not in good faith to say that it was, or was probably a lab leak. Because that's not where the preponderance of evidence currently rests.

Sorry, I edited my comment to ask this as the conclusion:

> Why is a wet market a more convincing explanation than a lab whose explicit mission is studying coronaviruses, one which has been publicly called out for being uncooperative with the ensuing investigation?

It's possible that the widespread belief in this explanation is a failure in science communication and there's a good reason for this, but it's not a failure in critical thinking on the part of those who are skeptical of the official story. The official story has an enormous unexplained hole. I've yet to see anyone effectively communicate why the intuitively more probable answer is the less probable one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42513063 (See the astral codex ten link)

Thanks. That's exactly what I was looking for.

I don't think the desire to see the conspiracy and not the boring, mundane explanation is a failure of communication, scientific thinking, or critical reasoning skills.

I think it's simply the consequences of politically motivated reasoning. (At least, for people who have spent much time thinking about it.)

> I've yet to see anyone effectively communicate why the intuitively more probable answer is the less probable one.

I just communicated why the market leak theory is both more intuitive, and more probable.

There were two possible sources for the virus in the city, and hundreds of thousands of non-sources for it. The first detected source of it was the market.

If the first outbreak of it were in the lab, (but was hidden), probability and intuition indicates that the next place it would have shown up at would have been some randomly selected place of the city, which has nothing to do with viruses. A mall. A theatre. A ball game.

The fact that of all the possibilities, it showed up in the one particular place that is also a prime suspect for it's own viral outbreak means that the most obvious explanation (market leak) is likely the correct one.

When a swine flu outbreak is traced to a particular stall in a factory farm, we don't conclude (without further evidence) that actually it was caused by a university miles away.

Another explanation could be detection bias: it was tracked to the market not because it originated there, but because vastly more resources have been expended on investigating the market compared to any other place in the city.

You’re assuming “it was tracked to there” = “it originated there” but that’s a big leap.

> You’re assuming “it was tracked to there” = “it originated there” but that’s a big leap.

If the market were one of multiple second-generation infection spreader sites, we'd have had significantly faster growth in the rate of infections.

With the power of hindsight, the rate of spread of COVID is well-understood, and the timelines of people getting sick is consistent with one initial outbreak site. There just aren't any known cases where someone came down with COVID on day 1 of the outbreak, without also having gone to that market.

All of that is subject to detection bias as well. There’s a lot of uncertainty involved in tracking early cases. It’s not anything close to solid evidence.

It would be a damn weird form of bias when every early case that could be accounted for was somehow tracked to only the market.

The location bias hypothesis would work if they looked at all patrons of the market, and checked if they got sick. That's not what they did, though, because they didn't have a list of all the patrons of the market. It doesn't have a guestbook.

They looked for people who got sick, and asked them where they went before they fell sick. And all of them turned out to have gone to the market - and not on the same day.

The exact methodology of how they found these people is very important, as there are many potential sources of bias, not to mention conflicts of interest.

I did some searching and it seems that you are perhaps basing your conclusions on this article/the studies it points to? - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...

> A geospatial analysis reports that 155 early COVID-19 cases from Hubei Province, China, in December, 2019, significantly clustered around a food market in Wuhan, China.

However, I couldn't find details on how these 155 cases were selected or what exactly "significantly clustered" means. 155 is a small sample, so the details are important.

Also important is whether the data on these cases was provided by government sources. If so, I would question how reliable or representative that data is.

The meat of the argument of the post was a restatement of the past three posts that I've made. I did lead with the argument, in somewhat less detail.

No, you didn't, you led with this:

> In 2024, this isn't fact, it's just baseless conspiracy.

> All evidence has ended up pointing to bush meat contamination.

This isn't science communication, it's a condescending rebuke.

That said, I'm done here. Thanks for clarifying in the end, and happy new year!