The lab-leak hypothesis is meta-scientific. When it was first tossed around, the lab leak hypothesis generated two predictions:
1. We would find evidence that someone was doing experiments on furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses.
2. We would find that the furin cleavage site matched a known sequence.
We did not find 2, which should have been easy to find. Eventually, we found 1, since a rejected DARPA grant proposal affiliated with the lab in Wuhan emerged.
Then, we found 2!! with a plausible explanation of why no one had found it earlier -- you had to turn on "patented sequence search" on NCBI blast, which is turned off by default. An easy mistake to make. As a professional biochemist for a decade I had no idea that blast had a patent sequence search, much less that it was turned off by default (which, btw is a sensible setting).
The scientific method says given a model it should make independent predictions (ideally unlikely) which are later verified. The evidence for a lab leak should be considered relatively strong.
1. We would find evidence that someone was doing experiments on furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses.
2. We would find that the furin cleavage site matched a known sequence.
We did not find 2, which should have been easy to find. Eventually, we found 1, since a rejected DARPA grant proposal affiliated with the lab in Wuhan emerged.
Then, we found 2!! with a plausible explanation of why no one had found it earlier -- you had to turn on "patented sequence search" on NCBI blast, which is turned off by default. An easy mistake to make. As a professional biochemist for a decade I had no idea that blast had a patent sequence search, much less that it was turned off by default (which, btw is a sensible setting).
The scientific method says given a model it should make independent predictions (ideally unlikely) which are later verified. The evidence for a lab leak should be considered relatively strong.