This is a really dishonest form of argument and I don't think you actually read my post for context.
There's a very large difference between the relatively small gaps in genomes between related virus species and the grand canyon sized gap between COVID and it's nearest neighbor. The difference between omicron and delta is very small, delta and alpha also very small. These would be "expected" differences much like influenza changing to be a little different every single year. If we are to believe that a cave of bats cooked up a super infectious, lethal, extremely novel variant of CoV-SARS-1 then shouldn't other animal born diseases be the same? H1N1? Swine flu? Shouldn't they all have had extremely novel pathways given just how many animals it infected?
With the exception of certain hemorrhagic fevers I can't think of another virus that emerged from the wild with such extremely novel infection methods and I've been on this earth for a long time. Even H1N1, a big scare, wasn't THAT much different than it's neighbors.
Yet here we have a virus with basically never before seen infection pathways and virulence. Something that might have been created through scientifically tested and studied evolutionary pressure in a petri dish. It's not that hard to imagine. Get some lung cells, get some starter culture of a virus, and start beating it up with various methods until it evolves. Take those, and keep the survivors, and repeat ad nauseum. In fact, this is exactly how GoF research works. If you view it altruistically this allows us to create novel vaccines for novel infection methods. Unfortunately, it also means a leak will create a pandemic.
All of this could be cleared up in a month if China would allow regulators from the UN to investigate their lab and pull all the data associated with it. This is common procedure, and yet China appears to be railroading any attempt to do so going so far as to destroy related documents. Occam's razor, this isn't the action someone would take if it was a simple batch of bad bat soup. Logic would dictate you'd want to give up all the evidence of bad bat soup as fast as possible...yet 3 years later we have seen absolutely no evidence pointing to an animal borne infection pathway...
I think this is very wishful thinking, or deliberately choosing how to interpret "lab-made" to be "sliced and diced and recombined".
"Lab-made" still encompasses the whole of GoF research. That is, a virus can appear to have naturally evolved but have been evolved in lab under conditions by which it develops quicker, more efficiently, etc. If the virus was manufactured through some means then it was, by definition, lab-made. Even if it doesn't imply base-pair level manipulation by humans themselves.
It has been clear for ~1 year that not only did the NIH fund some GoF research it also funded research by a lab that was researching this exact virus. It is also clear that the Obama administration early on tried to kill this type research because it's glaringly obvious its extremely dangerous.
It is so unlikely such a novel, effective, and dangerous virus was created through bats sharing the same cave that it's not even worth considering. Similarly evolved viruses in nature rarely reach global pandemic levels. Even SARS v1 was weak in comparison. This all being said though, by the nature of GoF research, it would be impossible to tell anyway. At least as far as the MSM is concerned.
The only question now, I think, is malevolence. It's more likely a researcher was infected in the sub-par lab in Wuhan and brought it home than it is to be any of the cover stories given in the beginning: pangolin soup, BBQ bats, or what have you. I doubt the leak was malicious. I am certain the leak was from the lab. Finally, this isn't a new occurrence. This has happened several times here in the US and thankfully it was caught it time to stop it because we don't have a population density near what China has and the standard we hold our labs to makes carelessness with such research extremely hard to do.
There's a very large difference between the relatively small gaps in genomes between related virus species and the grand canyon sized gap between COVID and it's nearest neighbor. The difference between omicron and delta is very small, delta and alpha also very small. These would be "expected" differences much like influenza changing to be a little different every single year. If we are to believe that a cave of bats cooked up a super infectious, lethal, extremely novel variant of CoV-SARS-1 then shouldn't other animal born diseases be the same? H1N1? Swine flu? Shouldn't they all have had extremely novel pathways given just how many animals it infected?
With the exception of certain hemorrhagic fevers I can't think of another virus that emerged from the wild with such extremely novel infection methods and I've been on this earth for a long time. Even H1N1, a big scare, wasn't THAT much different than it's neighbors.
Yet here we have a virus with basically never before seen infection pathways and virulence. Something that might have been created through scientifically tested and studied evolutionary pressure in a petri dish. It's not that hard to imagine. Get some lung cells, get some starter culture of a virus, and start beating it up with various methods until it evolves. Take those, and keep the survivors, and repeat ad nauseum. In fact, this is exactly how GoF research works. If you view it altruistically this allows us to create novel vaccines for novel infection methods. Unfortunately, it also means a leak will create a pandemic.
All of this could be cleared up in a month if China would allow regulators from the UN to investigate their lab and pull all the data associated with it. This is common procedure, and yet China appears to be railroading any attempt to do so going so far as to destroy related documents. Occam's razor, this isn't the action someone would take if it was a simple batch of bad bat soup. Logic would dictate you'd want to give up all the evidence of bad bat soup as fast as possible...yet 3 years later we have seen absolutely no evidence pointing to an animal borne infection pathway...