Coronavirus: Lab Leak Part 15 - When A Scientist Stands Out, They Get Hammered Down

Here's an interesting look into the politicization (or maybe better to call it school yard antics) of COVID-19 origins by scientists.

 The New York Times via Yahoo (Aug 24):

“By the time the SARS-CoV-2 virus was detected in Wuhan in late 2019, it looked like it had already picked up the mutations it needed to be very good at spreading among humans,” [Alina Chan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts]  said. “It was already good to go.”

The hypothesis, widely disputed by other scientists, was the foundation for an explosive paper posted online in May 2020, in which Chan and her colleagues questioned the prevailing consensus that the lethal virus had naturally spilled over to humans from bats through an intermediary host animal.

Their paper came up with 3 different hypotheses:

1. The virus became well adapted to humans via bats or other animal.

2. The virus had spread undetected in humans for months and had adapted that way.

3. There was a lab leak.

The response was as follows.

. . . Many senior virus experts criticized her work and dismissed it out of hand, saying she did not have the expertise to speak on the subject, that she was maligning their specialty and that her statements would alienate China, hampering any future investigations.

Some called her a conspiracy theorist. Others dismissed her ideas because she is a postdoctoral fellow, a junior scientist. One virus expert, Benjamin Neuman, called her hypothesis “goofy.”

Doesn't the above sound like the popular kids in class making fun of the unpopular kids?  

I do find the idea that the virus was spreading undetected in humans for months interesting.  As we currently understand it, the first COVID-19 death in the United States occurred in early January versus the previously known death of February 6th. Also, The House Foreign Affairs Committee Report Minority Staff addendum believes that the virus started spreading in mid-September via a lab leak. One argument they make is that the Military World games were held in Wuhan in October 2019 and that the first cases of COVID-19 by countries that attended those games was in the November-December timeframe. Instead of an argument for a lab leak, is this instead an argument that the virus was spreading across the globe by October 2019 -- if not sooner?