Neuere pandemische Viren sind ohne vorherige Anpassung auf den Menschen übergesprungen. Keine Hinweise darauf, dass SARS-CoV-2 durch Selektion in einem Labor geformt wurde: UCSD-Studie.

I find it baffling that there is no consensus on this subject after all this time.

[deleted]

The 2021 [Xiao Xiao report](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2) proved that raccoon dogs, civets, and bamboo rats were sold at the Huanan market until November 2019. This directly contradicted early official denials that live wildlife was traded there.

The closest bat relatives to SARS-CoV-2, such as those found in Laos and Yunnan, are located roughly 1,000 miles from Wuhan. Horseshoe bats have a very limited range and move across the landscape at a rate of only a few kilometres per night.

Swabs from the Huanan market contained SARS-CoV-2 and raccoon dog DNA in the exact same spots. Crucially, the raccoon dog DNA matched wild populations from Southern and Central China, not the industrial fur farms of the north. This places these specific animals in the same regions where the ancestral bat viruses live.

Researchers identified two distinct lineages of the virus (Lineage A and B) circulating at the market. This suggests at least two separate spillover events from animals to humans, a pattern typical of market-based outbreaks rather than a single point-source laboratory accident.

Early cases in December 2019 clustered tightly around the Huanan market. Even cases with no direct link to the market lived significantly closer to it than would be expected by chance, suggesting the market was the primary engine of the initial spread.

Very odd that the place Covid originated from, in China was coincidentally next to the Wuhan institute of virology where they were doing gain-of-function research on SARS (Covid) which was partially funded by US dollars. I’m going with the lab leak theory on this one.

Why are so many stupid people in the comments?

I think when people talk about „origin“ and „lab leak“ there are different ways of interpreting these words, which results in people talking past each other. Was the virus engineered in a lab? Very probably not. But was the origin of the pandemic really the virus in the animals in the wet market jumping to humans? This we dont know for sure. If the virus was jumping from humans from whatever particular animal taken to market, we would expect to see the earliest cases of infection up the supply chain of that animal. We dont have any evidence of this. Further, if the origin of the pandemic was really the wet market, given how infectious the virus was, we would have expected to see nearly everyone at the market in the earliest cohort of infections. This didnt happen. This seems to indicate to me that either the virus or hosts were not in a state apt for pass infection (in other words they were dead or virus at the point wasn’t airborne).

The only reason we even suspected the wet market is because a *plurality*, not a majority, of the first reported cases had a weak commonality in the wet market. If I remember correctly, it was something like 8 people said they had gone to market that day, out of 50. That means 42 people didnt have any link at all to the market. Not even all the people who worked at the market, who would have had prolonged exposure, were among the first reported cases.

Its more than plausible that the virus was being tracked by researchers, sampled, and mishandled at the lab, where it infected a researcher who then unwittingly went out into the world and infected others. It wasnt manipulated, it was simply exposed. Happens alot more than people realize. I like to point to [this article from Feb 2018](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/09/safety-blunders-expose-uk-lab-staff-to-potentially-lethal-diseases), well before covid, about the UK:

>The HSE held formal investigations into more than 40 mishaps at specialist laboratories between June 2015 and July 2017, amounting to one every two to three weeks. Beyond the breaches that spread infections were blunders that led to dengue virus – which kills 20,000 people worldwide each year – being posted by mistake; staff handling potentially lethal bacteria and fungi with inadequate protection; and one occasion where students at the University of the West of England unwittingly studied live meningitis-causing germs which they thought had been killed by heat treatment.