I'm pretty well sold on the idea that it wasn't
manufactured in a lab.
They fail to make a convincing argument that it couldn't have come from a lab where they were researching corona viruses.
That raises the first coincidence that would be needed for SARS-CoV-2 to come out of a laboratory: Scientists would have to find it in nature first.
If it wasn't manufactured in a lab, wouldn't it have to come from nature anyway? This could happen at a market certainly, but someone has to collect and deliver samples to labs and study them, and the ones a lab would want are ones more likely to be infectious.
Even if researchers stumbled across the virus, they would be very unlikely to get infected. When researchers collect samples, they take extraordinary precautions to avoid infecting themselves in the field, says Mazet
Yeah, we take extraordinary precautions to train employees to detect phishing scams and choose decent passwords, yet malware seems to make it on computer networks all of the time. If there's one thing the scientific research world can learn from from the world of computers, it's that any security system built on requiring everyone to voluntarily do even one thing correctly every time is a system that will fail eventually, and the last thing anyone wants to hear out of a person's mouth at that point is, "But we have procedures!".
Now it is possible for viruses to escape from a laboratory by infecting a worker. In the early 2000s, there were three documented cases of the original SARS virus escaping from a laboratory environment, according to Lim Poh Lian, a senior consultant at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases in Singapore. But the circumstances surrounding those escapes were vastly different.
Great. Well first of all since they don't know anything about the circumstances, they don't know how those circumstances could have been different and we know it's possible for it to escape from lab environments. It should be very difficult to spread if proper procedures are followed, but there's no way to prove that the proper procedures were being followed at the lab.
In any event, lab escape still gets a rating of "plausible" even if there's no smoking gun.
