The Covid19 Lab Leak Hypothesis: Round 2

David Robert Grimes notes that there is new respectability, in the US, for the (originally discredited) idea that the Covid19 pandemic originated from a lab leak (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/13/newly-respectable-wuhan-lab-theory-remains-fanciful). Grimes points out that scientists (and others) should generally apply 'Occam's razor', when they consider competing explanations for an event. The most fruitful thing to do, according to Occam, is to initially adopt the interpretation that depends on the fewest assertions and assumptions. Basically, keep it simple! Grimes records that human history has had many sudden emergences of devastating diseases. These include Black death, Spanish 'flu, AIDS, MERS, Ebola etc. These events are not only frequent but it is often takes some time before we understand each disease's genesis. The lab leak hypothesis is feasible. It requires, however, evidence a) that the virus was engineered (there is no evidence for this, in spite of some bizzare claims about amino acid sequences) and b) that the engineered virus was released by accident or by design. Grimes points out that the city of Wuhan had numerous wet markets but only one virology laboratory. There was plenty of scope for the virus to make the leap from animals to humans in a wet market. For the lab leak hypothsis to be true, everything would have had to gone wrong in that lab, at the same time, to achieve the same result. Grimes is of the opinion that conspiracy 'theories' (I'm not sure this is the right word) on the origins of the pandemic really don't help us to tackle the pandemic. I think the timing of the rehabilitation of the lab leak hypothesis is also pretty strange. It occurs precisely as the American government is trying to get its allies to focus on China as a 'new' collective threat. Perhaps I'm being a conspiracy theorist?