Bad logic and math aside, I’ve noticed that the lab leak hypothesis has definitely—shall we say?—evolved during the last year. Given the utter lack of evidence in the nucleotide sequences of SARS-CoV-2 for an “engineered” origin, the “respectable” people now claiming that the coronavirus came from a lab hasten to deny (usually quite fervently) that they think it was “engineered” or a “bioweapon.” Basically, there are now two primary versions of the “lab leak” hypothesis, although they frequently seem to overlap, as advocates of version #2 can’t seem to resist using some of the downright silly arguments favored by advocates of version #1. Here are the two versions, stated briefly: 1. An engineered SARS coronavirus created at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through “gain of function” experiments somehow escaped and caused the pandemic. 2. A natural SARS coronavirus stored and studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology somehow escaped and caused the pandemic. I can say with a high degree of confidence based on existing evidence that the first version is so implausible as to have been firmly in conspiracy theory territory for well over a year. The second is the version that “reasonable” people consider plausible. Unfortunately, here is no good evidence for either version, and even the second version is fast joining the first version in becoming a conspiracy theory, particularly given the increasing claims that “they” don’t want you to know about it and that there’s been a massive conspiracy to “cover up” the lab leak origin of SARS-CoV-2. In any event, given how much these hypotheses have been discussed in the news as though there were some new evidence that now makes the “lab leak” hypothesis more likely (spoiler alert: there isn’t) and assaulted me on social media, coming from conspiracy theorists and non-conspiracy theorists, I just had to look into this issue again. Let’s look at each version of the hypothesis.