The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic

positive environmental samples near animal stalls in the market, of which they found two strains. Neither of which is dispositive of anything, and more an indictment of the motivated reasoning of the academic literature at the time than anything else. If you bother to read any of the subsequent analyses, you'll find that there are a bunch of different lines of evidence (genetic and case reports, at the least), pushing the date of the first infections well before December. In short, the first/WHO case reports were probably wrong, the virus likely broke out earlier and was circulating in Wuhan before these samples were taken. If that's true, it wouldn't be surprising, at all, to find positive environmental samples in a food market, and the tortured logic of this paper would fall apart. [1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715 [2] Seriously. Not joking. Here's the "methods" they used for this oh-so-rigorous analysis: > The 2021 WHO mission report identified 174 COVID-19 cases in Hubei Province in December 2019 after careful examination of reported case histories (7). Although geographical coordinates of the residential locations of the 164 cases who lived within Wuhan were unavailable, we were able to reliably extract the latitude and longitude coordinates of 155 cases from maps in the report They then take this data and blend it through a kernel analysis, wave their hands, and voilá! This this The Science (tm) upon which your confidence is based. ...oh, and by the way: the market in question just happens to be right next to the Wuhan CDC, and a major city hospital [3]. Weird, right? I'm sure it's just a coincidence. Certainly nothing worth including in a putative "probability analysis" of geographic distribution. [3] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-Huanan-Seafood-Ma...

away from where the bats that carry SARS live), the Wuhan Seafood Market spillover looks nearly identical - just 17 years later. Meanwhile, no evidence at all has emerged that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had anything to do with the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. Scientists at the WIV were regularly publishing and giving talks about exactly what they were working on, and they never mentioned anything closely related to SARS-CoV-2. They were working with viruses much closer to the original SARS, which is what most people back then were interested in. After SARS-CoV-2 emerged, you could actually go back and look into the WIV's publications to find the most closely related virus. It's called RaTG13, and it was published by scientists at the WIV all the way back in 2014. However, it's way too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to be the progenitor virus, and in fact, more closely related viruses have since been found by a French team in Laos. Basically, all the evidence about who knew what when, the genetics of more closely related viruses that have been discovered since the pandemic began argue positively that the WIV had nothing to do with the origins of the pandemic. This is in addition to the strong evidence that the initial outbreak was not at WIV, but rather at a wild animal market (which is exactly what you'd expect for a natural spillover). None of this has made its way into the American public's consciousness, though. 0. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abp8715 1. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abp8337

market (38). We estimated the first COVID-19 case to have occurred in November 2019, with few human cases and hospitalizations occurring through mid-December. [...] the evidence presented here that lineage A, like lineage B, may have originated at the Huanan market and then spread from this epicenter into the neighborhoods surrounding the market and beyond.

Several lines of evidence support the hypothesis that the Huanan market was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic and that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from activities associated with the live wildlife trade there." https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715 . The general response to the lab leak hypothesis is "where's the evidence"? Not "you're racist". > This was culturally marked in the show Halt and Catch Fire. A show made, what, 25 years after the era it describes? Do you know about "Kirk Drift"? The Kirk of the original series is not the womanizer people remember him to be. http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/freshly-remem... Why do you think Halt and Catch Fire accurately describes things, rather than being subject to its own sense of drift? While my own pop culture example comes from the era you describe. Here's another 1991 quote, from Lippman's C++ Primer: """Object-oriented programming is an evolutionary advance in the design and management of large software systems. It is not, however, the deus ex machina come forth to resolve the many ills of the software industry.""" - https://archive.org/details/cprimer0000lipp/page/530/mode/2u... That's in the section titled "Living in a Multi-Paradigm Universe".

sampled either." https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715 > … how to prove they haven't tampered… So even "a proper investigation" will be insufficient. > … every day the natural source isn't found should increase the odds… Hardly. Let's make a wild ass guess that vastly more resources are being focused on the next Tampa Bay Buccaneers NFL game, than on finding "the natural source". What if "the natural source" was destroyed as part of the tear-down of that particular live animal trade?

genetic evidence for an animal-human-animal-human transfer in Nov. 2019 at the wet market and swab samples of cages tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Here's a sample: [1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715 [2] https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/covid-19-originated-at-... [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62307383 [4] https://www.newsweek.com/wuhan-lab-leak-theory-undermined-ne... (For me, there are political motives too strong behind the lab leak theory, to accept a mere conjecture that fails to connect the dots. Grave accusations require proof. Especially, if you haven't ruled out contradicting candidates.)

transmitted the virus to others. This is a plausible option, and it is being researched. However it is less plausible than wild transmission based on a simple numbers game. What is more likely, a breakout infection cause by a dozen scientists specifically trained and equipped against this possibility, or a transmission to one of the millions of other people who routinely interact with these bat populations? Both are possible, but one is much more likely. Before covid19, WIV had published research indicating that novel coronaviruses routinely jump from bats to humans in that part of the world. Most of these viruses aren't don't last in human hosts, but it's clear that it was only a matter time before something nasty got through. After all, it's already happened once before. The real nail in the coffin is that research[0] has shown that there were at least two, independent transmissions of sars-cov2 to humans. For this to happen as part of a lab leak it would require WIV to have found and cultivated 2 different strains of sars-cov2, and then each of those strains would have to escape the lab. [0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715

RaTG13 and SARSCoV2 diverged almost 50 years ago. The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early cases clustered around the market not the lab [0]. Furthermore, several different isolates were found in the market, indicating that SARSCoV2 had been circulating before the epidemic took off. [0] The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715

the COVID-19 pandemic" at a Wuhan market. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715 There's "Multiple positive samples … from one stall known to have sold live mammals, and the water drain proximal to this stall, as well as other sewerages and a nearby wildlife stall on the southwest side of the market, tested positive for SARS-CoV-2." https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715 Please be more specific.

Wuhan. There would have been no reason at all for them to hide SARS-CoV-2 prior to the pandemic, and there is simply no shred of evidence that they had SARS-CoV-2. Finally, I would just encourage anyone who's wondering how much stock to put in Ebright's claims to scroll through his Twitter account. The online persona he cultivates is, to put it very politely, that of a troll. 0. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abp8715