I think that's called an "admission against interest."
There were all kinds of flags indicating that the investigations - including the one by WHO - were shams. Even the head of WHO, not known for challenging Beijing, said it was not sufficient. And that was months ago. It was never, as I now see it, a far fetched theory only held by Qanon crackpots.
A side story to this is that we thought that opening up China to the rest of the world, to the west, would change its internal policies. That economic liberalization would create political liberalization. That hasn't worked. Instead of changing them, it's changed us. The government - the Party really - is using this opening up to push its interest and make changes in us instead.
The Lab Leak theory can't be ruled out until we know more about how or when the virus jumped from animals to humans. However, there's not a shred of solid evidence so far supporting that theory.
The circumstantial evidence is obvious. A lab that studies coronaviruses happens to be located where the first major outbreak happened. But despite a year and a half of Intelligence agencies and scientists looking into the virus' origins, there's no solid evidence that it escaped from a Lab. Also, history shows that where a new virus happens to be discovered isn't always where the virus originated. For example, the Spanish Flu was discovered by Spain but originated in either Kansas or Mexico. It seems plausible that Covid originated somewhere else in China before finding it's way to a major city like Wuhan. There's genetic evidence and circumstantial evidence backing the view that Wuhan isn't the first place where Covid existed. It's more a question of, was the virus brought to Wuhan and released accidentally by Virus researchers? Or did it get there via the Wet Markets where exotic wild animals are sold?
The CIA in 2020 told the Trump administration that they had no evidence that the Chinese believe it leaked from a lab. By that, I assume they mean, Chinese officials aren't saying anything privately that contradicts their claim that it didn't leak from one of their Bio-research Labs:
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Anthony Ruggiero, the head of the National Security Council’s bureau tracking weapons of mass destruction, expressed frustration during one videoconference in January that the C.I.A. was unable to get behind any theory of the outbreak’s origin. C.I.A. analysts responded that they simply did not have the evidence to support any one theory with high confidence at the time, according to people familiar with the conversation.
The C.I.A.’s judgment was based in part on the fact that no signs had emerged that the Chinese government believed the outbreak came from a lab. The Chinese government has vigorously denied that the virus leaked from a lab while pushing disinformation on its origins, including suggesting that the American military created it…
In a statement released earlier on Thursday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that the intelligence community “will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
Intelligence agencies, the statement said, concur “with the wide scientific consensus that the Covid-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified.”https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/us/politics/trump-administration-intelligence-coronavirus-china.html----------
The Intelligence community's assessments haven't changed. Biden's ODNI says they don't know when or how Covid first transmitted to humans.
There have been Lab Leaks in China in the recent past but we know about them and they all were contained (as far as we know). There's no evidence that the previous Lab Leaks of SARS led to a pandemic.
The Chinese government is very secretive most of the time so their secrecy alone shouldn't be reason to assume they know more about the origins of Covid than they've said publicly. And I agree that the Chinese government doesn't help matters by spreading their own theories about how the virus may have originated in the US.
We can't ignore the fact that tensions between the US and China are as high as they've been since the 1970s. The Chinese likely don't believe the US is acting in good faith in the calls for more investigations.
It took 15 years or so for the Chinese to identify the source of the 2002 SARS outbreak and that outbreak had a connection to China's Wet Markets too. It could take as long or longer to find the source of the Covid-19 outbreak. Much of the research on that stuff happens in caves around remote parts of China. So while I find the Lab Leak theory to be plausible, it doesn't strike me as weird that the Chinese still don't know where the virus came from.
It's perfectly fine to speculate on the Lab Leak theory based on the circumstantial evidence. Lab leaks happen all over the world, including in the US and China. I agree that the mainstream media shouldn't have dismissed it entirely as a wacky conspiracy theory. Hopefully journalists and news editors learn lessons from this but I doubt they will...
