Instead of "pandemic virus appears down the street from a viral research lab", it might be more accurate to say "pandemic virus has first documented human outbreak in a province whose capital city is a metropolitan area of over 19 million people and also has a viral research lab." Wuhan is bigger than two New York Cities put together -- and it's not at all impossible that the earliest cases actually came from outside the city but were treated in Wuhan. (A report from the South China Morning Post in March, based on unpublished government data, was that "a 55-year-old from Hubei province could have been the first person to contract Covid-19," and the description of him as "from Hubei province" rather than "from Wuhan" is at least suggestive.)
If China's BSL-4 virus laboratory was set off in the countryside in a "little" town of 50,000 and the outbreak started there, the paper's argument would be way more compelling. If we could even reliably trace a "patient zero" to a neighborhood near the WIV, then, again, maybe. But we can't. All we can say for sure is that a dangerous global pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus started in a huge metro area (or its surrounding province) that's also the site of a BSL-4 lab specifically set up to study dangerous global pandemics caused by novel coronaviruses. The paper's conclusion is, well, pretty much the paper equivalent of archly intoning "that would sure be a weird, ironic coincidence" and staring meaningfully into the camera. I mean, yes, it would be, but that's a little short of a slam dunk.
If China's BSL-4 virus laboratory was set off in the countryside in a "little" town of 50,000 and the outbreak started there, the paper's argument would be way more compelling. If we could even reliably trace a "patient zero" to a neighborhood near the WIV, then, again, maybe. But we can't. All we can say for sure is that a dangerous global pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus started in a huge metro area (or its surrounding province) that's also the site of a BSL-4 lab specifically set up to study dangerous global pandemics caused by novel coronaviruses. The paper's conclusion is, well, pretty much the paper equivalent of archly intoning "that would sure be a weird, ironic coincidence" and staring meaningfully into the camera. I mean, yes, it would be, but that's a little short of a slam dunk.