Matt Ridley's Believe It Or Not

Lab Origin proponents want everyone to accept observations on faith, yet fail to deliver a robust hypothesis

Matt Ridley, coauthor of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, is increasingly certain about “COVID” having a lab origin.¹ If he had “very little doubt” in September 2024, he now appears to have none.

Ridley posted a helpful summary of his current beliefs on X. He uses colorful language and gripping style and operates within the false binary of lab origin (leak/release) verses natural origin (market).

A virus appeared in Wuhan that was highly infectious from the get-go, superbly adapted to human ACE-2 but bad at infecting bats, and whose closest relatives came from where the WIV had been collecting viruses a thousand miles away from Wuhan, and uniquely equipped with a furin cleavage site never before seen in Sars-like viruses

It turned up in a city where there was a lab with a huge SARS-like virus hunting program that had collected hundreds of related viruses from a long way away and brought them to Wuhan that possessed the 9 closest relatives to SARS2 – that we know of - in its own freezer that had recently got interested in SARS1’s more distant cousins that misled us about when it had sequenced the nearest relative and why it had changed the name, and that would not share its data base

A lab with a SARS-like-virus hunting program that collected things called viruses from bat caves. Not only that, the lab had already made chimera viruses with massively increased infectivity in humanized mice was party to a plan to put a furin cleavage site in such a virus for the first time knowing that this generally makes viruses more infectious, having already done it in a MERS-like virus, and when the outbreak happened they were reluctant to draw attention to the furin cleavage site in sars2

Moreover, that lab had a poor safety record as testified by a US Embassy 2018 report was in the habit of using inappropriate safety levels for its experiment and behaved very oddly when the outbreak happened.

None of this is disputed.

And meanwhile, Wuhan’s seafood market was found to contain: No infected animals. No infected animal traders. No infected wildlife handlers. And no other market was affected.

So Covid turned up in: exactly the right city, at exactly the right time, as they were planning exactly the right experiments, that would put exactly the right insertion - into exactly the right place - in exactly the right gene - of exactly the right kind of virus.

And to do so at exactly the wrong biosafety level. We are supposed to believe that it's a coincidence? Because some unidentified raccoon dogs also happened along at the same time and then vanished without trace?

Quite the pitch for a show, isn’t it?

From a storytelling perspective, Ridley has yet to explain how his main “character” - a virus - left the lab scene and got everywhere else. An English teacher would send him back to the drawing board, pointing out the plot holes: What did the antagonist do, and how did it get from one place to the next?

In scientific terms, Ridley has some observations about the traits of a thing, the place where the thing is supposed to have been adulterated or created, and no hypothesis about how the thing traveled from the place of origin, or why the thing “behaved” in the fashion that testing patterns and differential death curves depict.

Ridley says, “None of this is disputed” without acknowledging that

• Some of what he says or implies has been disputed (example, example, example), and

• Much of what he presents is only loosely connected to the core questions of what actually happened and how it happened.

He’s not alone in sidestepping the transmission question. Simply stating, as some do, that there was a virus or there was a manmade virus offers no more explanatory power than declaring there are no viruses and leaving it at that.

Both lab-origin proponents like Ridley and zoonotic-origin advocates like Sunetra Gupta struggle with timeline, mechanistic plausibility, and reconciling their claims with on-the-ground events and official data.² Neither camp seems able to align biological reality—or the historical record—with their narratives and wishful thinking.

Claims about ‘spread’ cannot be divorced from the fact that patterns in clinical observation did not precede the deployment of testing for a newly-named thing “found” under foggy circumstances and which triggered a sequence of events that strain credulity.

Worse, zero onus is placed on anyone - including authorities - for addressing very basic questions, ‘dissident’ platforms have deemed debate unnecessary, and the Next Pandemic industrial complex marches on. Playing along, remaining silent, pretending significant differences of opinion don’t matter as long as someone opposes the COVID shot—none of these are good options for those who want to prevent a repeat of the Human Rights Heist of 2020.

Matt Ridley - and Elon Musk - would have us simply ‘believe it’.

I choose ‘or not.’

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The Unconvinced Alina Chan

1. COVID-19 is the name the WHO gave to a disease purportedly caused by a viral agent the ICTV-CSG named SARS-CoV-2. (See COVID-19 Did Not Come from a Lab) Why Ridley and others continue to use “the origins of COVID” and say “COVID came from a lab” is perplexing.

2. Critical data could be manipulated - as

Jonathan Engler

and I have asserted about New York City and Bergamo. But data fraud involving all-cause mortality isn’t something that most analysts who debate origins acknowledge as a possibility.