Everyone with common sense must assume that a lab which does experiments on Corona viruses is the most likely source and not the food market nearby.
It's really that simple...
It's really that simple...
Both SARS and MERS were recent coronavirus outbreaks that have had their origins rigorously pinpointed. Did this happen because governments cooperated and journalists provided important information? Not even close. Governments interfered with research into SARS and MERS origins for political reasons and journalists never really contributed anything of significance. The hard work was done by scientists doing sampling and sequencing of viruses and their results are extremely robust.
The next most recent pandemic is HIV/AIDS. When AIDS first hit everyone absolutely knew for certain that it was caused and spread by rampant gay sex in coastal cities. Then when research pointed to the Caribbean everyone knew that decadent travelers were to blame. It was only after a great deal of scientific work, again focused on sampling and sequencing, that we came to know HIV came from interactions with wild animals in Africa and didn't explode until much, much later. The one thing that can be said for certain about all of the early popular hypotheses is that they were all both completely wrong and thoroughly unhelpful.
The biggest problem with the lab leak theory is that it ignores all of the important information we have learned from past outbreaks and origins investigations and instead asserts that things are different this time and everything is about making narratives that have a coherent feel like a novel or dramatic film. An alternative conclusion that is far more simple is that finding the origins of SARS-CoV2 is going to be similar to the experiences we had with HIV and SARS and MERS. The rest is politics and click bait journalism.
SARS-CoV-1 has never been rigorously pinpointed. Civets clearly got infected with it, but its not clear if they were infected by bats first or were infected by humans (similarly to minks and SARS-CoV-2). It wasn't until 2013 when WIV1 was isolated and is the most likely related virus in bats in Yunnan. WIV1 may be able to infect humans directly, but it is only 95% homologous with SARS-CoV-1.
The WIV1 sample was also found in bats in the same province as the RaTG13 virus which is closest overall so far to SARS-CoV-2, but the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak happened about 700+ miles away in Guangdong. It still isn't clear how that happened, just a lot of handwaving about the movement of animals like civets around China.
“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...
But that is proof that a virus in bats can jump to humans 700+ miles away.
https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...
- Shi Zhengli
The reason the wet market theory came to prominence was because commerce seemed like a reasonable explanation for how a novel coronavirus showed up so far away from its known animal reservoir (bats).
The reason the WIV is in Wuhan is the same as the reason why the CDC is in Atlanta or whatever -- Wuhan is a major city and it has things in it.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2
Coincidentally, my sister lived in Wuhan for 3 years. Prior to 2020, I had to explain its location to people here in the US, but that is no longer the case!