How would two different non-bat animals shed two different (but closely-related) bat viruses, in a market with no bats, and far away from the bat caves where related viruses are documented? And further, manage this with
no evidence of any other animals infected with related viruses in that region, nor along the trade routes any such animals/viruses must have followed?
Those were the two luckiest bat-viruses ever!
On the other hand, the research lab across town had collected hundreds of such bat viruses from far away - suspiciously never fully catalogued.
EcoHealth belatedly reported in late 2021 to the NIH, its funder that it had already, prior to May 2019:
• created a new, chimeric SHC014-WIV1 virus that was more virulent in human tissue than the (relatively benign) natural WIV1 virus
• took a natural virus that was already highly deadly, MERS, & added new binding sites
You can read an overview from The Intercept at <https://theintercept.com/2021/10/21/virus-mers-wuhan-experim...>, or a (partially-redacted) suspiciously-late EcoHealth report to the NIH at <https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21089573-priority-gr...> which describes these experiments.
Note also that per The Intercept, an EcoHealth spokesman had previously denied any such MERS gain-of-function experimentation had occurred - claiming instead it was only "suggested as an alternative and was not undertaken".
So: EcoHealth lied.
What if someone's secret budget, or pre-grant investigational work, had helped WIV do exactly the FCS addition they'd already asked for funding to do? That'd be a sufficient, and straightforward, way to get a SARS-CoV2-like virus from less-human-adapted viruses in nature.
And while this route isn't proven – perhaps because those involved have been suspiciously uncooperative – this hypothetical origin has more supporting evidence than "luckiest bat viruses ever snuck to Wuhan from a thousand miles away, zoonosed in Wuhan twice in rapid succession, leaving no sick animals or people anywhere else, despite a giant search".