So the Times I guess doesn't fact-check its opinion pieces anymore?

Alina Chan keeps posting the same wrong and misleading arguments over and over again.

The deep irony of this opinion piece is the very first point in it is literally how SARS emerged via natural origins. SARS originated in bats in Yunnan province. The first outbreak was in Foshan, Guangdong province. It traversed this long distance through an intermediate animal, civets.

So it is quite funny she's using the same logic to argue for a lab leak origin here.

There are many falsehoods and grossly misleading lines in this piece.

Hubei province has bat coronaviruses in the western part of the province.

Infections with bat coronaviruses aren't rare. There are antibody surveys of Chinese villagers indicating many cryptic infections have occurred. These infections just didn't result in pandemics.

The DEFUSE proposal described different work than SARS-COV-2 and was not to be done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but at UNC. In any case, the WIV database mentioned shows no precursor virus for SARS-COV-2.

At the time the closest relative to SARS-COV-2 was too distant to be the precursor virus. We still don't know what the precursor virus was. There's no fingerprint for an engineered virus. The scientist mentioned Baric who was to do the DEFUSE proposal at UNC said as much in his testimony.

The furin cleavage site in the coronavirus can emerge naturally. There are several papers to that effect. Likewise other coronaviruses have furin cleavage sites. Since the pandemic we've found several wild coronaviruses that share similar features to SARS-COV-2 including in regards to the cleavage site.

In general though she's making a major logical error. We've only sampled a fraction of the wild coronaviruses, so we can't say with certainty what features are rare.

It is weird how she talks about the published paper by the Wuhan scientists. They released the sequence of the virus.

She brings up the "scientists getting sick in the fall of 2019" talking point again. But that was long ago debunked by the intelligence community. They weren't confirmed to have COVID. The intelligence community dismissed this line of thinking in its reports. They likely had colds or the flu.

She doesn't mention that the phylogenetic evidence suggests two introductions of the virus. Early on the virus had two distinct lineages A and B. The two lineages suggest multiple introductions and is more consistent with natural origins than a lab leak.

The last part is highly misleading in full context. It took 15 years to find the bat origin of SARS, despite the civet intermediate origin being found relatively early. We actually don't know the origin of MERS still, but we do know camels are an intermediate reservoir for the virus. We don't know the origin of Ebola going on 50 years now.

I don't know how SARS-COV-2 originated, but neither does Chan. And we aren't much closer than we were from a year ago. We may never know. These sorts of pieces don't particularly help.