My present take: As an infectious disease epidemiologist whose expertise lies in the dynamics of infections a week or so after an initial spillover event, I am much more cautious with my opinions on the lab leak hypothesis than a lot of people who took a single biology class as a distribution requirement in undergrad.
Are you equally cautious with your opinions on zoonosis?
The problem is that huge swathes of the medical community politicized the pandemic for a specific political purpose, especially in the USA. For example, the Moderna vaccine trials were delayed 2 weeks to change the protocol to appease a political activist in the medical community accusing Trump of trying to ram an unsafe vaccine through. Naturally the trial results were available immediately after the election.
I have a question for you: do you trust the provenance, integrity, and completeness of data from the earlier stages of the outbreak in Wuhan?
"I have a question for you: do you trust the provenance, integrity, and completeness of data from the earlier stages of the outbreak in Wuhan?"
Nope.
And yes, I am equally cautious with my opinions about it being a zoonotic spillover event. I consider it the more likely of the two explanations, but far from definitive.
Given that epidemiology features no biology whatsoever, being these days purely a matter of playing with statistics, why would you feel qualified to discuss anything related to labs, leaks, or GoF research?
I read dozens of epidemiological papers during COVID - the ones controlling policy - and didn't see microbiology feature in any of them. They were all just various forms of curve fitting. Where are these epidemiology papers that are built on a firm foundation of microbiology?
