In light of yesterday’s attempt to publicly humiliate NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, this post I wrote a few days ago about a fundamental problem with COVID the lab leak hypothesis turned out to be timely. Anyway… When it comes to people who entertain the COVID lab leak hypothesis–or who support the notion wholeheartedly that the pandemic began with a leak from a research laboratory in Wuhan, China, there is always a piece of evidence that is never raised, even though it was discovered during the early stages of the pandemic. That is, there actually were two origins of COVID (boldface mine):

Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic was seeded more than once. Analyzing the virus sequences revealed that two genetically distinct versions of the virus were circulating. Tracing the virus’ evolution showed that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over to humans twice, a week or two apart. If this were a lab leak, one person would have needed to have been infected with lineage B in the lab and then traveled at least 30 minutes on a crowded subway without infecting anyone else until they got to the Huanan market and went to the southwest corner, where they shed virus all over stalls where multiple potential live intermediate hosts were being sold. The same thing would then need to happen two weeks later – completely independently – with lineage A.

The paper cited is from January 2022, so this is not some new data that people haven’t heard about yet. It was in the news at the time, though it was ignored as it was inconvenient for the lab leak proponents. While I don’t expect full-blown conspiracists to change their minds, I would expect that certain Very Serious People, such as certain NYT columnists or analysts at intelligence agencies, at least would offer an explanation for this, as two outbreaks from a laboratory that mimic the patterns we would expect to find with spread from wild animals sold at the Huanan market does strain credulity, if not annihilate it.