I think the "escaped from a lab" hypothesis is unlikely but there's little proof of anything related to its origins at this point, other than a general geographic area where it first entered the human population.
It doesn't even pass the sniff test. Why assume that a virus originating in wild animals which interact with humans reached humans by escaping BSL-3 containment, rather than by wild animals interacting with humans?
Especially given the prior form of this conspiracy theory having held that the virus didn't merely escape from a lab but was created in one, I'm suspicious that what we're seeing here is an attempt to sneak that original, stronger claim
in on the back of this weaker version.
SARS had escaped no less than 4 times from Chinese labs[1]. It’s not implausible at all that coronaviruses have a history of escaping Chinese labs.
Meanwhile, this[2] is a terrible source but some of the info can easily be verified. We know that China was researching exactly this type of virus and gain of function in Wuhan after the U.S. stopped due to “biosafety and biosecurity risks” exceeding benefits. [3]. The US explicitly ended that line of research due to the risks; China continued it.
That's too much stew from one oyster, and the oyster turns out in any case to be a clam.
The claim is that research involving gain-of-function techniques was stopped in the US - which is true - but continued in China without the involvement of US researchers - which is not substantiated by the sources at hand - and that the late 2019 papers and job postings were related to the same research - which is false. That work was a study of how native coronaviruses spread in wild bat populations, and involved US researchers including Dr. Jonna Mazet, who actually touched on the same project in the interview I linked elsewhere in this thread (0). Her description of that project seems fairly authoritative, given that, until her team was defunded last September, she was one of the people running it.
Speaking of GoF work - one would expect an honest reporter to note that the funding pause which makes up such an important part of this conspiracy theory was lifted in December 2017. (1) NIH belongs to the executive branch - if that kind of work is really as dangerous as is claimed in the Gateway Pundit article, how come the Trump administration's been funding it again for over two years?
