The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan

One problem for the wet market theory is that neither bats nor pangolins were sold at that wet market:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2

"Here we document 47,381 individuals from 38 species, including 31 protected species sold between May 2017 and November 2019 in Wuhan’s markets. We note that no pangolins (or bats) were traded, supporting reformed opinion that pangolins were not likely the spillover host at the source of the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic."

That doesn't mean there couldn't be a zoonotic explanation, of course, but it does significantly complicate the main alternative to the theory that WIV was doing coronavirus research in humanized mice and that escaped from the lab.

It's easy enough to apply outside audits to something like Space Shuttle development, where the goals are not secret and it's pretty well understood what you are trying to accomplish and what your capabilities are. It's a very different situation when it comes to bioweapons research -- how do you let outside auditors into Fort Detrick without running the risk of giving some game away?

The problem with this whole article is that we know of no suitable backbone virus to use, and we know of no suitable spike-protein sequence to form a chimera which results in SARS-CoV-2.

The experiments done on the SARS-CoV-1 or WIV1 backbone don't remotely get you close to SARS-CoV-2 and you're dealing with centuries of evolutionary difference there.

The RaTG13 virus backbone is also several decades of evolution away from SARS-CoV-2.

Learning how to replicate a virus in the lab is also not simple so they're not going to be doing this with every virus they find. We know they managed to do it with SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1, but they'd need a reason to undertake it with any other virus.

So you have to assume that WIV has a virus which they found which is similar to RaTG13 which they have never published, and for some reason they jumped straight to making that virus replicate in the lab and creating chimeras, and they also had a previously and still unpublished spike protein which was similar to the Pangolin spike which they used. Then for some reason they didn't do this in petri dishes, but used animals and/or somehow managed to aerosolize enough of it that researchers at WIV got sick from it. This is with a virus that we now know doesn't stick to surfaces very well at all, so the actual accident remains unexplained (they had a party and someone chopped up some chimera and railed it like a line of coke? that'd do it).

While you're pondering all that keep in mind that the person who "broke" the story in the WSJ about the sick workers at the Wuhan lab was Michael R. Gordon. He's also notable for having co-authored with Judith Miller in 2002 the NYT story on Hussein's nuclear program and WMDs that arguably helped propel us into the Iraq War.

It is also worthwhile to read Shi Zhengli's rebuttal to the lab leak theory:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/world/asia/china-covid-wu...

If you'd like some actual science on the zoontic investigation:

"Evidence for SARS-CoV-2 related coronaviruses circulating in bats and pangolins in Southeast Asia"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21240-1

"Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus"

https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...

"Identification of novel bat coronaviruses sheds light on the evolutionary origins of SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses"

https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00709-1.pdf

> One problem for the wet market theory is that neither bats nor pangolins were sold at that wet market

That's not a problem for the theory. SARS did not come directly from bats (or pangolins). It went through civets first, which were sold at markets. That's why SARS first showed up in Foshan, 1000 km away from where the bats that harbor the ancestral virus to SARS live.

The Nature paper you linked shows that live animals that are known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 were sold at the Huanan Seafood market. Because of that, the paper has been generally received as strongly supporting the idea that the outbreak began at the Huanan market.

I read that and her volunteered info was all over news sites last week. However, this is not what we need. What we need is an independent body that goes into the Wuhan lab.

Let us inspect the bats. The cages, the equipment, the staff.