Dutch virologist

"WHO team members have said in recent days that their main goal wasn’t to investigate the institute itself but to meet fellow scientists who have worked for years on bat coronaviruses for an open-ended conversation about the origins of Covid-19." (paywall)

Marion Koopmans' Comments:

Dr Shi is “one of the people that did incredibly important work, so that would certainly be a starting point,” Dr Koopmans said. But, she added, “It sounds like you are getting into the lab theory, which I’m just not going there.”

Why not? What's the point of doing an investigation if you're not going to investigate one of the main scenarios?

“So we have visited the three laboratories that have been actively working, including the laboratory sitting close to the market, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We have discussed their research programs, their routine testing programs, the way they work, what they had done in terms of health monitoring and testing of staff, and based on that, we concluded that it’s extremely unlikely that there was a lab incident.”

Meanwhile, leading transparency advocate, Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University said:

“The possibility that SARS-CoV-2 entered human populations through a laboratory accident cannot, and should not, be dismissed."

He pointed out the bleeding obvious that a credible investigation would require unrestricted access to records, samples, personnel and facilities at the institute and two other institutions in Wuhan.