Editor’s note for Friday, June 18, 2021

Thoughts today from Lucas, filling in for Jeremy:

Our word of the day is an act of justice (正义之举 zhèngyì zhī jǔ), a phrase used by Beijing’s liaison office in Hong Kong to describe the police raid on Apple Daily’s newsroom yesterday.

It appears that justice in the enforcement of the national security law is increasingly retroactive, however. Police confirmed that at least some of the offending Apple Daily articles calling for foreign sanctions were “published before the security law was enacted in June last year, although it is not supposed to be retroactive,” AFP reports.

Also seeking to claim some vindication in recent weeks are several former Trump administration figures, including Trump himself, as the “lab leak” hypothesis of the origins of COVID surged in popularity in the American media.

A closer examination of the evidence, however, appears to show that any specific hypothesis of the origins of COVID has generally weak and circumstantial evidence to back it up. Two recent studies, on additional coronaviruses in bats in Yunnan and the activity in wildlife markets in Wuhan, lend support to a “natural” spillover hypothesis, but the likely intermediate species in that scenario might never be identified.

And while the idea of some research gone wrong — even outside of a lab environment, it could have been bat guano smeared on a scientist’s shoe and spread to the wrong place at the wrong time — is practically impossible to rule out, the evidence commonly cited to boost that hypothesis is very thin.

Recommended reading and listening:

• In hunt for COVID’s origin, new studies point away from lab leak theory / Guardian
• The COVID-19 lab leak theory is short on evidence and long on guesswork / Foreign Policy (paywall)
• 5 questions: David Relman on investigating origin of coronavirus / Stanford Medicine
• COVID-19 origins revisited, with Deborah Seligsohn / Sinica Podcast

—Lucas Niewenhuis, Newsletter Editor (lucas@thechinaproject.com)