[kaitaincps]

If I could Snopes-whack just one persistent myth in this debate, it would be that one. It’s completely untrue. And the WIV used the human population of Wuhan as a control in their experiments because there was so little exposure to zoonotic viruses within that population.

I’m not entirely sure where this pernicious myth started. I do remember Maggie Koerth pushing that line on Twitter with some kind of smug joke at some point, and it getting lots of enthusiastic upvotes. When it was later pointed out that Koerth had got it wrong, she pretended that by claiming the WIV had been built in the area to study bat coronaviruses, the area she had in mind was “China”. This is like arguing that it makes perfect sense to set up a lab in New York to study rattlesnakes. (Of COURSE you would; the USA is where the rattlesnakes are!)

So Shi Zhengli’s comment makes perfect sense, and was not taken out of context. The WIV was not studying bat-borne sarbecoviruses in Hubei, and had not been set up there to do so. All the interesting viruses were down in Yunnan, a thousand miles away. She meant exactly what she said.