Theory 2 - Lab Origin (General)
Lab Origin:
Someone working for an Wuhan lab became infected with a version of RaTG13 then spread it into the community.
Evidence so far:
- An unprecedentedly super-contagious coronavirus breaks out in Wuhan - right next door to a lab that was engineering super-contagious coronnaviruses.
- Exhibition of weird name-calling behaviour from the world’s top experts when questioned as to whether it may have escaped from a lab.
- RaTG13 (aka BtCoV/4991), collected from the Mojiang mine, was held at WIV, as were samples from the infected lungs of miners from the 2012 Mojiang incident.
- As were another 15 000 samples of bat viruses* - and a veritable zoo of caged passaging animals and/or virus samples from bats to macaques to mice to snakes to pangolin. (* Edit: In late 2021 a Laos bat became new closest match at 96.7% - WIV/EcoHealth - through PREDICT - collected samples from Laos over several years)
- WIV/EcoHealth scientists declared that some of the viruses collected were infectious to humans.
- WIV/EcoHealth ‘passaged’ candidate viruses through animals and engineered/recombined viruses through Gain-of-Function experiments to make them more contagious.
- WIV/EcoAlliance’s handling of bats without PPE, according to photos below (courtesy https://twitter.com/BillyBostickson), looks bloody dangerous.
- Lab accidents happen - a lot. SARS-1 has escaped six times. Covid wouldn't even be the first pandemic caused by scientists. This 2010 paper concludes that the origin of the H1N1 pandemic was a lab in China due to an "accidental release of a frozen laboratory strain into the general population" in 1971.
- Bio-security at the BSL-4 WIV was lax - it was worse at BSL-2 labs. Even the Global Times reported the “discharge of laboratory materials into the sewer after experiments without a specific biological disposal mechanism” and “chronic loopholes at laboratories”.
- US intelligence reports saying, "researchers at the lab fell ill in the fall of 2019 with symptoms consistent with COVID-19".