Theories don’t have be based on data in order to be valid, nor should there be baseless speculation. But yes, absent of true evidence, journals will publish viable theories. It’s literally part of the scientific process.
Really now. Please link to an article in any journal worldwide that has no evidence backing it up whatsoever. I’m not talking about conclusive evidence, I mean anecdotal, observational, anything.
That’s not how science works. People develop theories because of something they believe indicates the theory to be true, and then they attempt to prove it through replication. But you won’t get published for a theory that has absolutely no legs to stand on, and you shouldn’t.
We may just be arguing over semantics.
For COVID, the science behind animal to human transfer leaves very few realistic options for how this transfer occurred. Immediately,, the wet market theory was proposed, but was proven false by February. How long was that theory propagated? Then you have the lab leak theory which has a lot going for it - the proximity to ground zero, extremely unique access to novel viruses, history of previous leaks and breaches of protocol, China’s block of independent investigators, the list goes on and on. This has always been a leading theory that should have been strongly considered and deeply investigated until proven false.
You are forgetting that there have been multiple other similar outbreaks in China over the last couple of decades, not anywhere near Wuhan, also believed to have originated from wet markets. Those almost certainly did not come from a lab. To now pretend like a leak from a lab was always the leading theory is ridiculous. Also, I’m not so sure the wet market theory has been “proven” false, even if most of science has agreed at this point that it’s quite unlikely.
As I’ve stated repeatedly, the theory
has been investigated from the beginning as a possibility, hence the information we are seeing now. It just wasn’t necessarily the best theory all along. Mind you, for all the talk about the media using it against Trump, Trump was equally biased the other way- he ran with the idea because he could use it to deflect blame from himself by pinning it more on China (and the media hated to see him with a winning idea, of course). He was loving it, despite the fact that it could very possibly (and may still) prove wrong.