Lab, Not Markets, the Origin of Covid-19 By Brian Simpson
We have covered the debate about the lab origin versus the market bat soup position of SARS-CoV-2, in numerous articles at this blog. Earlier, scientists proclaimed the market bat soup view, mainly because Trump was championing the Wuhan CCP lab hypothesis. Recently it has been revealed that some of the original team had undeclared conflicts of interest. As well, other media items have stated that many scientists thought that the lab hypothesis was true, but still publicly advocated for the market bat soup view. Molecular biological evidence accumulated against the market bat soup view, including the extreme improbability that the furin site which made the virus so contagious, arose by chance. It had all the markings of being produced by gain-of -function research, which was done with coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab, with US-grant funding. There are now mainstream books about this.
But in science there are few absolutes (excluding absolute zero temperature), at least in epidemiology. A recently released paper has claimed though that the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was the epicentre of the outbreak, not the amplifier:
https://zenodo.org/record/5075888#.YigwohBBwQL
The hypothesis is that the species jump occurred in the market, not from the lab, located only 30 kilometres away, certainly in walking or bike riding distance. The paper claims that the pattern of spread is not consistent with a release from the lab. There was apparently a concentration of cases around the market in December 2020, and this was where the first reported cases came from. Hence the market is the epicentre.
The problem with this hypothesis, based upon statistical analysis, is that apart from not explaining the molecular biological evidence, such as the recent fact that one Big Pharma company had previously patented part of the sequence of SARS-CoV-2, all it really shows is that the virus spread from the market rather than from the lab. This is consistent with the virus being spread directly from the lab to the market. If this was done accidently, someone infected from the lab, or with an infected animal, simply went to the market, and the spread occurred then. If the virus was deliberately released by the CCP, then the scenario is that an infected organism was taken to the market. Clearly the market is the right place to quickly spread such a virus, and a good cover story as well. So, I am not convinced by the new papers, which cannot exclude these scenarios. The spread pattern is consistent with either lab leak hypothesis.
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