Richard D. Fisher, Jr., Jamestown Foundation (Apr 2003): The vast weight of reporting thus far on the origins of SARS .. holds that the virus most likely jumped from animals to humans somewhere in China’s Guangdong Province.

19 years later it's an even vaster weight of reporting - but there’s still no definitive science re the mechanics of how that might have happened.

Richard Fisher: But there are compelling reasons, however unsettling, to at least ask whether there might be any linkage between SARS and China’s biological warfare efforts.

Ok, that sounds familiar. Looks like Mr. Fisher was a conspiracy theorist ahead of his time!

Dr. Julie Gerberding, Director U.S. CDC (Apr 17, 2004): (The SARS virus) didn’t look like much of any of the viruses we already had in our reference strain collection.

Sergei Kolesnikov, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences: The propagation of .. SARS may well be caused by a leak (from).. a bacteriological weapons labs. .. We can only get that in a laboratory.

Hmm, so there were suspicions even at the time. The difference from SARS-2 is that SARS-1 fizzled out relatively quickly. Apart from a bunch of lab-leaks in 2004 - it was all over in a few months. That would have also taken the steam out of the conspiracy theories as well. Doesn't make them right. Doesn't make them wrong either.

We don’t know what happened - that's a fact - the state cover-up operation took care of that - then it faded from public interest. But it’s worth scrounging around to see what fragments there are left lying around that can still be pieced together.

And what role did some of our SARS heroes play in the above? Lipkin and Dwyer were there almost from the beginning - Daszak came along shortly after.

Here’s some pure speculation: if they did know something funny had happened but were persuaded to keep it hush-hush for the ‘common-good’ - that would be a powerful incentive to cover up the origin of SARS-2.