https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Center_For_Disease_Con...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/head-of-who-team-investigating-...
> “They also reported no storage nor laboratory activities on CoVs [coronaviruses] or other bat viruses preceding the outbreak.”
> The lab is classified BSL-2, a safety level at which air ventilation controls aren’t particularly strict, as they are in more secure labs. At that level, lab workers are usually dealing with pathogens that either cause mild disease in humans or which don’t typically spread through small particles that linger in the air. Researchers at that level don’t necessarily wear masks.
> The Wuhan CDC lab tested all of its staff for Covid-19 antibodies, it told the WHO in February. All staff tested negative, except one who tested positive, it said. That person was infected “due to family cluster transmission,” the WHO-led team’s report’s annex says.
> But Dr. Ben Embarek is the first to so explicitly question the team’s conclusion, published in a joint report with Chinese counterparts, that a lab accident was an “extremely unlikely” hypothesis.
> That wording was only reached after a 48 hour period of intense negotiations with Chinese counterparts said Dr. Ben Embarek, who said he would have preferred to designate an accident inside a lab as merely “unlikely.”
> The lab hadn’t published any work with bats since 2013, he said.
> “As far as we understand, they work mostly with parasites, not as much with viruses, so they have worked on parasites from bats.”
Yet, after fighting to label the lab leak theory “unlikely”, he throws a bone to the conspiracy theorists:
> “It’s also possible that someone is trying to hide something,” he added. “Who knows?”
They did do coronavirus experiments in level 2 facility.
[edit] replaced link as FT makes it difficult to refer to them.
Regarding the 2016 work:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
> Since bat viruses like WIV1 haven’t been confirmed to cause disease in human beings, her biosafety committee recommended BSL-2 for engineering them and testing them and BSL-3 for any animal experiments.
> In response to questions about the decision to do the research in BSL-2 conditions, Peter Daszak forwarded a statement from EcoHealth Alliance stating that the organization “must follow the local laws of the countries in which we work” and that the NIH had determined the research was “not gain-of-function.”
> The genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 does not resemble that of any virus the WIV was known to be culturing in its lab, such as WIV1, and Baric says he still believes a natural spillover is the most likely cause.
This theory is more than a few steps away from being a smoking gun.
The idea of COVID leaking from a Level 2 lab 2 blocks from the Wuhan wet market is solely circumstantial.
It is indeed a level 2 facility, and it was being used to perform the bat coronavirus research outsourced to the WIV [1]:
The NIH decided the risk was worth it. In a potentially fateful decision, it funded work similar to Baric’s at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which soon used its own reverse-genetics technology to make numerous coronavirus chimeras.
Unnoticed by most, however, was a key difference that significantly shifted the risk calculation. The Chinese work was carried out at biosafety level 2 (BSL-2), a much lower tier than Baric’s BSL-3+.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
Also from the article:
> The genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 does not resemble that of any virus the WIV was known to be culturing in its lab, such as WIV1, and Baric says he still believes a natural spillover is the most likely cause.
The timelines and genetic profiles don’t match up for a level 2 lab leak 2 blocks from the wet market.
It moved just before the outbreak [1]:
The lab, where Chinese scientists research mild human diseases with bats, was moved near the seafood market where the first COVID-19 cases were found just days before the outbreak, WHO investigators said.
Classified with a “Biosafety Level of 2,” the lab also has ventilation controls that aren’t as strict as other more secure facilities, according to the report.
I find it surprising how little attention this tidbit got; a move of lab equipment and animals probably involved external personnel not used to bio-safety procedures. Perfect opportunity for a virus to escape.
> The genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 does not resemble that of any virus the WIV was known to be culturing in its lab
The key words here being "was known", since the WIV notoriously took its database offline and even requested the deletion of sequences stored on US servers [2][3].
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/08/13/who-scientist-eyes-on-wuhan-la...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-24/u-s-confi...
[3] https://www.science.org/content/article/claim-chinese-team-h...