[tripletao]

It's amazing that people are still repeating this line. Dr. Shi's sampling trips were to Yunnan and surroundings, ~900 miles away. Expected prevalence of SARS-like coronaviruses in the Wuhan population was low enough that they used blood samples from Wuhan as negative controls in antibody studies. (Of course that expectation could have been incorrect; but the idea that her research group was deliberately based in a region of expected natural spillover is unquestionably wrong.)

Also, the WIV was more than 2 km from the market; the grandparent is probably thinking of a different, closer lab. The market was definitely the first big super-spreader event, but not necessarily the site of introduction into humans; the earliest cases show much less clear geographic distribution.

There's no conclusive evidence for any origin of SARS-CoV-2 yet. The ODNI report clearly leans against a research-related origin, but no one except the LA Times's "business columnist" is claiming that they "debunked" anything.

[K0balt]

The us government is motivated to attribute the outbreak to natural causes, because if the leak came from the wuhan lab, us policy and action is partially responsible. No one in power benefits from covid being the result of careless isolation protocols in GOF experimentation.

YMMV but to me the spike protein encoding on the original covid strains was just a little too close for comfort to fall into the random mutation category for my armchair opinion. I would have expected to see a non-human variant of the spike protein if it was a natural occurrence.

Either way, it is doubtful to me that we will ever know for sure.