[tripletao]

I agree with that statement. Even with prior warning, and knowing the virus could be introduced only at an airport or seaport, Western public health authorities managed to trace approximately zero cases to their introduction. So it's hard to believe the same tools would succeed at the much more difficult task of tracing the very first cases in China.

That makes it odd that you're promoting an author who has claimed such evidence shows conclusively that spillover into humans--and not just a super-spreader event--occurred in the Huanan Seafood Market. I suspect that if you looked personally at the methodology behind the conflicted (Rasmussen's doctorate was under Vincent Racaniello, a longtime proponent of high-risk virological research) authors' claims, then you'd find them much less worthy of repetition.

[Fomite]

I think her arguments are solid, I'm just not certain they're definitive. But I do find her presentation of those arguments to be both detailed and accessible.

[tripletao]

You might not be certain they're definitive, but she is:

> There’s really no explanation other than that the virus started spreading in the human population at that market

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/13/angela-rasmuss...

The claim that the location of spillover can be definitively localized within hundreds of meters from epidemiological data is core to the predominant theory of natural zoonotic origin, from an overlapping set of authors including Rasmussen.

Theories of a research accident almost never assume such localization is possible, not least because the earliest known cases weren't particularly close to the WIV. (If anyone's claiming otherwise, they've probably confused the WIV and Wuhan CDC.) So it's odd that you'd correctly note the near-impossibility of that localization, but then cite that as evidence against unnatural origin.

This makes me think you haven't looked much in the details yourself, and two of your four points above are explicitly arguments from authority. If you did look yourself, then I think your assessment might change.