Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor

infecting significant number of people in Yunnan. On top of that that supposed natural COVID-19 virus supposedly did such a first jump on human in Wuhan market at exactly the same time when the Wuhan lab produced in BSL2 environment (hardly can be called "biosafety" at all, especially for an airborne virus) a chimeric virus by all accounts indistinguishable from COVID-19. It isn't a conspiracy theory. It is probability theory. If we imagine that an event of such vanishingly small probability did happen, then it would be a crown achievement of human science worth 10 Nobels - just think about it - creating the same virus at the same place at the same time as the supposedly "natural" beginning of the pandemic. EcoHealth and WIV would be doing non-stops victory laps, and we would be putting bronze statues of Daszak on every corner of every public street. Instead all the participants - the WIV, EcoHealth, NIH and China government went total denial and "5th amendment" and started that huge PR campaign to spread that nonsense that thinking that an airborne virus can escape BSL2 makes you a racists conspiracy theorist.

tested for these studies, they were not aware that they had ever been infected. > is unlikely because we would have found the intermediate animal by now There's no reason to expect we'd have found the intermediate species by now. Finding intermediate hosts can be very difficult. For example, it took four decades to identify the likely host species of Ebola, and even so, there's still a huge amount of uncertainty about whether there are multiple host species, and how spillover occurs.[4] > (3) is unlikely because the first case found was in China The frozen food hypothesis that the WHO is looking at is that animals that were raised or caught in Yunnan province, slaughtered and frozen, and sent to Wuhan might have been carrying the virus. Option 4 is unlikely because nobody knew about this virus before it appeared in December 2019. The researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology work closely with international scientists (including in the US, Australia, France and Singapore). They regularly publish identifying RNA fragments of the viruses they discover. The viruses that they have isolated and cultured in the lab are well known, because they've published on them extensively, and because they collaborate with international researchers. They have only isolated three SARS-related coronaviruses (the vast majority of the viruses they discover are only detected as RNA fragments, not "live" virus particles), and those viruses are all much more closely related to the original SARS than they are to SARS-CoV-2. The reason for this is that before this pandemic, researchers focused their attention on viruses that were close to the original SARS (such as WIV-1[5,6]). SARS-CoV-2 and its closely related viruses would have been far less interesting to them. The lab leak theory really is a conspiracy theory, because it requires the scientists at WIV to have discovered a virus that they didn't tell anyone about, including their close collaborators abroad, for them to have secretly isolated it, for it to have escaped from a highly secure laboratory, and then for them to have covered it up. You can assert that all these things happened, but there's precisely zero evidence for it. The alternative is that one of the millions of people who regularly interact with animals that harbor SARS-related coronaviruses got infected, and that as is usually the case, it takes time and painstaking work to determine how, when and where that happened. 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2951-z 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/ 3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259005361... 4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4014719/ 5. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711 6. https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048

here: https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985 The US government pulled funding for all programs like this, but this one was allowed to continue because they had secured funding before the ban. Discussion here: https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/lab-made-coronavi... Whether they accurately predicted the future, or made a huge lab error is up for debate in my book, and is something that should at least be investigated. Lab mistakes happen all of the time, and we're talking about something that has a subsantial ability to spread itself. Here is an expert's unbiased analysis of whether this could be man made: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1221990534643929089.html Given all of this, I don't think it's wholly unreasonable to consider whether or not human error played a role in all of this.