This is completely disingenuous. They correctly assert that there's no evidence it was deliberately leaked or engineered, but the question at hand is if it was leaked by accident after having been collected in nature. There's no way to determine that by studying the nature of virus itself. You'd have to study the lab itself and it's environs.

That’s a possibility, but these two ideas that come up in the lab conspiracy theories are incompatible:

1. The virus was collected in nature (i.e. in fluids collected from captured animals) and escaped from the lab.

2. We don’t know the intermediate species the virus jumped to humans from.

Please note this is not Forbes editorial content, rather content published on their "blogging" platform where almost anyone can publish.

Not “almost anyone.” The Forbes site is a mess, granted. The science blogs list only four contributors, two of them are Ethan Siegel, the author of this article. He has some science credentials, not a rando posting on the site.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Siegel

We can read and hear lots of descriptions for and against. Absent going into the lab ourselves with training, it seems like either could be the case, neither is convincing.

I've been listening to "This Week in Virology" (aka TWIV) (https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/) for more than a year, about 100+ podcasts so far.

This is a podcast about viruses. All of the people are fully qualified active or retired virologists. They have interviewed dozens of leading virus researchers and other viral-connected individuals (including Fauci).

In their professional opinion there is no possible way this virus was created in a lab.

The current speculation has nothing to do with it being created in a lab.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/lab-leak-t...

It sure is politicized from all possible sides. But we should be open to investigating the cause, so that we can create policies that can prevent future disasters.

Policies already exist but impossible to force agreement or compliance. Suppose clear evidence comes out this was a lab-grown virus, released either accidentally or maliciously. Then what? What agency will punish China? How would that knowledge affect global response to the virus?

I imagine every nation with sufficient capabilities has secret biowarfare research going on — no clean hands. Pointing fingers and speeches in the UN won’t change that.