I think a useful concept with this is the legal doctrine of adverse inference.[1] If one of the parties to a lawsuit conceals or destroys important evidence, it is assumed that that evidence would have been unfavorable to the party which concealed or destroyed it.
So, while we may not be able to know for sure how COVID-19 originated, we can certainly draw an adverse inference from the behavior of the Chinese government.
And arguably the CCP has lost far more face by trying to cover everything up, than if they'd admitted there was a leak in the first place, if there was.
In any case, they should have sent out the alarm, and worked quickly and cooperatively to halt it. For example, they should have cancelled outbound flights from Wuhan while the virus was raging there and they were barricading apartment blocks. It looks, at best, negligent that they did not.
This may or may not be true, but its the same sort of reasoning that was used to justify the Iraq War and we all know how that turned out.
Before the war, Saddam was acting unquestionable suspect by not allowing inspectors free access to locations and constantly moving material and persons around. In truth, it was a presence. A chemical weapons program was expensive, and hard to keep safely hidden so Saddam simply pretended that it existed by acting like he had something to hide.
As for China, it could be something as simple as regional managers hiding poor response times and safety violations that would have their heads rolling. It doesn't mean that there was a leak intentionally or unintentionally.
Disclaimer: I'm playing the devil's advocate here. Having a corona virus outbreak in the same city as your military installation studying corona virus is suspect.
But it wasn't an adverse inference in that case, at least not from Saddam's perspective. He wanted the world to believe he had WMDs, because he believed, not unreasonably (c.f. North Korea), that this would deter military action by the U.S. and his other enemies (Iran, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia).
But the author of this article is not an epidemiologist.
He is not an expert on infectious diseases.
He is a former Republican congressman and a retired plastic surgeon.
Since Republican leaders have consistently lied about the pandemic for their own political advantage, and this author has no particular expertise in the matter, I'll make the inference that he has nothing constructive to add to this conversation.
"If you were innocent, you would let us search your home."
There is a very fine line between destroying evidence, and refusing an investigation.
...and, don't get me wrong - I believe it's entirely possible that covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan Lab - but a refusal to be party to a politically charged investigation should not infer guilt.
Your rational is similar to assuming someone is guilty because they refuse to answer police questions.
This is more like if the police come to search your house, and find that you've burned it down, or you've barricaded yourself inside with guns and hostages.
But, let's assume for the sake of argument that your analogy is the correct one. You know where they assume that if you don't let the police search your house, or if you don't answer police questions, you must be guilty? China.
So, we can just as easily judge the Chinese government by another heuristic: The Golden Rule
This has been my guiding heuristic - China has acted unmistakably suspect.
They've got a political and ideological character that requires controlling narratives and erasing any trace of incompetence(this threatens the illusion of supreme power).
If their political and ideological character requires controlling narrative, then surely any single instance means nothing.
If I have an espresso every morning, the fact that I have one tomorrow morning means nothing. If I don't have one tomorrow, if I deviate from my usual behaviour, that might mean something significant. But following one's normal routine is just… normal.
The difference is that the ethical implications of you buying your espresso daily don't make you inherently less trustworthy.
The "routine" of burying evidence, silencing dissidents, and constant propaganda does absolutely reduce China's trustworthiness. To the point where we can and probably should always assume the worst of that regime.
What you said (and which I agree with) is that they always want to control the narrative. Not when they've done anything wrong, but always. I agree with that part — it's aregime that wants to control the narrative always, just so the populace won't get used to the existence of anything beyond control of the regime.
However, since the regime always wants to control the narrative, you cannot assume that wanting to control a particular narrative means anything more than "they're acting as usual". You can assume that the regime is untrustworthy in general, but you cannot assume anything particular about this instance.
Your argument is tantamount to "any control freak can and probably be assumed guilty of everything".
> However, since the regime always wants to control the narrative, you cannot assume that wanting to control a particular narrative means anything more than "they're acting as usual".
When dealing with a compulsive liar, you don't approach any situation with "This time maybe they aren't lying". They make up lies constantly about everything in order to obscure
when they are actually lying.
You're right that you cannot make assumptions about what the truth is in any particular instance, but in every instance it is reasonable to assume they are lying and then go about finding the truth.
And frankly I suspect that China lies all the time not just to obscure their real lies, but because they are actually engaged in shitty behavior all the time. It's not even a secret that they are currently involved in genocide. If that's not out of the question for them then I don't think anything is, including engineering a plague.
> I don't think anything is, including engineering a plague.
People seem to forget that China was claiming for a long while that the virus wasn't transmissible (I'm sure people will equivocate that they really claimed there was no evidence of transmission, but it's tantamount), only shortly after for all the videos to surface with people passing out in the streets and the police welding people in their houses, etc.
I read a timeline once, and from what I remember it was a considerable number of days. But not more days than I would expect from any big organisation. It takes time to push data and wording up and down an orgchart until all the necessary people have signed off.
I've waited longer for routine code reviews in supposedly agile teams.
So, while we may not be able to know for sure how COVID-19 originated, we can certainly draw an adverse inference from the behavior of the Chinese government.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference