The theory was not "crackpot", but it was asserted with 0 evidence back then. The evidence is judged, not the theory itself.
The bat theory was asserted with way more force at the time with even less evidence.
We can't truly know just how novel covid-19 is; we don't have sequences from the database of coronaviruses, and even if we did it might have leaked right after it was collected, without having been sequenced yet.
I'm not an expert in the history of viral origin stories, but I'm pretty informed, and I'm not aware of any documented examples of pathogens emerging from public markets.
To be clear, I'm aware of lots of examples associated with pig and chicken farms, and several viruses that are presumed to have emerged from various kinds of "bush meat" (monkeys, guinea pigs, deer), but even these are pretty much correlative lines of evidence. A documented case of a virus emerging from a wet market? No. Moreover, if you've been to one of these things, it's pretty implausible as the source of a respiratory virus. They're usually outdoors, or in vast spaces. At least in farms you've usually got a farmer hanging around in a small building with hundreds or thousands of identical animals on a regular basis.
The evidence for the wet-market theory has always felt like one of those things that "scientists just know"...until it turns out they were repeating apocryphal stories to each other. This happens far more often than scientists care to admit.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/34/Supplement_2/S58/459...
> In summary, the present evidence indicates that the H5N1 strains that caused the Hong Kong 1997 outbreak were reassortants from multiple cocirculating avian influenza virus strains
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3323155/
> On January 2, 2003, two cases of atypical pneumonia in the city of Heyuan, Guangdong Province, were associated with transmission of infection to several healthcare workers at the hospital (5). Investigation by the Guangdong Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention led to the identification of clusters of cases in six other municipalities (Foshan, Jiangmen, Zhongshan, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhaoqing) from November 2002 to mid-January 2003.
I literally took the first two papers I found via googling.
> the wet market theory has a reasonably credible history.
You're free to cite some of this history.
I heard someone once describe that kind of germ warfare as "attempting to use a grenade as a handgun." Yes it hurts your opponent, but...
Someone will bring up the fact that China seems (if you buy their numbers) to have had good success containing COVID, but the thing is: there's no way they could have known this would be the case. What if they released it on purpose and their containment efforts failed? What if it mutated into something 5X as deadly and 100X as contagious? Viruses don't take loyalty oaths.
Also: the global recession it caused probably did not do China any good in terms of net economic growth.
Also also: why would China release it inside their own country? Why not drop it in some random airport somewhere? If they really wanted to target the USA the thing to do would have been to drop it in Bethesda, Maryland and then spread a lot of anti-US conspiracy theories.
Lots of reasons it would have been a stupid idea to release it on purpose. China's leadership might be evil in some ways but they're not stupid or careless.
> The Wuhan Institute of Virology is China's premier virology research lab, its first biosafety level 4 lab, and one of the very few (or only one?) that was doing gain-of-function research. Wuhan has a population of 12M, which is just under 1% of China's population.
> The fact that the virus emerged there, of all places in China, is non-conclusive but highly suggestive circumstantial evidence.
Just for the lolz I would have asked if they are frequent patrons :)
IDK, but I tend to apply Occam's to the theory, and to me, the alternative theory looked a LOT more crackpot-ish...