A new Senate Republican-led report on the origins of COVID-19 released Wednesday contains new circumstantial evidence, but still no proof, that the virus spread as a result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology rather than the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, CNN reports.

Describing evidence that ChiCom officials knew of some sort of biocontainment failure at the Wuhan lab “approximately during the same period of time in which the available epidemiological evidence indicates that SARS-CoV-2 was introduced to the human population in Wuhan” which “suggests that the most senior leadership of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) likely had at least limited knowledge of this laboratory incident by no later than the middle of November 2019,” the report seems designed to politically vindicate the right wing’s desire to make the catastrophe wholly the responsibility of the ChiCom regime – who absolutely have an interest in making the pandemic appear as if it were an act of God rather than a product of their corruption and/or incompetence.

That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, and no matter how much scientists who are otherwise extremely qualified will publicly credit possibly fabricated evidence that the virus came from a raccoon dog being sold as meat at the market, it’s still pretty fucking hard to get around that COVID just so happened to spread from a city in which there’s a goddamned laboratory that studies viruses.