> There is no paper. That's a word that implies a certain level of research, expertise and peer review.

No it doesn't. Lots of junk papers get published by clowns, with or without peer review. They're still referred to as papers. The document I linked to follows the form of a scientific publication, so I'm calling it a paper.

Either way, whatever you call it makes no difference as to the content.

> The document even appears to get some basic facts wrong, like the location of the WHCDC lab and the presence (or rather, non-presence) of bats in the lab.

It doesn't get basic facts wrong. You got the facts wrong. There is a facility at the specified location, there is research on bats at the WHCDC. It's unclear whether such research took place at that particular facility, but you would expect that if there wasn't then it would simply be (truthfully) denied. Even if there wasn't any research there, an employee working on another facility could've visited it.

> It's being dismissed by virologists as a conspiracy theory because it's just that: there's no evidence for it, and if you know anything about zoonosis and actual lab methods in virology, it's a wildly implausible hypothesis. It also requires one to believe that some highly respected scientific figures in virology, like Shi Zhengli, are blatantly lying.

Wildly implausible? Well let me quote Shi Zhengli herself then:

"“I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...

It's correct that Shi Zengli later categorically denied that it came from her lab, the Institute of Virology, but only after looking into the specifics of the virus and those at her lab, not because a lab accident would've been implausible.

As for the "lab methods" at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (from their website, now deleted):

https://i1.wp.com/metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/PRI...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...

I'm not saying she is lying, but she would have good reasons to do so, saving face for herself and the whole country is tremendously important.

> It's not being as widely dismissed in the media as it should be, the reason being that a good part of the political class is intent on pushing it. Trump and Pompeo are promoting this theory in order to deflect criticism and turn anger about the US government's disastrous handling of the virus against a foreign enemy.

That's the crux of it, you can't allow this hypothesis to be plausible because your political enemy espouses it. Honestly, I don't see how it makes a difference. From a foreign perspective, an accident is an accident, whether it occurred in a wet market or laboratory.

> I've started noticing the phrase "CCP" being used more and more among people who are set on demonizing China.

I'm using the term CCP to distinguish between the regime and the country and its people.

> I think it's being used for the shock value, and because it taps into long-standing anti-Red sentiment in the US.

What's the "shock value" behind calling the ruling party of China by its name?

> I'll say this, though: whatever crimes the Chinese government committed, their handling of CoVID-19 turned out to be incomparably better than the US government's handling of the virus.

Did you pay any attention to what happened in China? Without the attempts of the CCP of hiding and downplaying the outbreak, it quite possibly could've been contained at least within China. Then, after it couldn't be contained, they used draconic measures to stop it. They arrested people in the streets for having an elevated temperature and put them into open-floor internment centers where people had no protection.

> Trump has now said that the deaths that will be caused by opening up are worth it. The Chinese government didn't passively watch as 70,000 of its citizens (increasing every day) died.

I'm sorry, but the US is not a dictatorship. The president doesn't get to dictate how the states handle such a situation. All of the hardest-hit places are run by Democrats, who could've acted early, but didn't.

Could the president have handled the situation better? Sure, but if you are waiting for Donald Trump to lead you in the time of a crisis, you are a moron. You don't get to blame your own ineptitude on the president.