In that case, the first group to be infected would have been lab workers and their families, not the people in the market.
Make no mistake, that lab was an outbreak waiting to happen, but then again, so was the wet market. Had we not had the pandemic, we may have seen something happening in the lab.
However, the issue I have is that the arguments for a lab leak are all full of unsupported logical leaps, logical fallacies. They also are making claims that they know are false.
This is a conspiracy theory, because the “conclusion” was determined before any “evidence” was collected. Wade started with the belief that the virus was engineered in the Wuhan lab, and he then proceeded to build his argument backwards to create a reasonable just-so story that supported his claim.
There are two separate and very different claims that Wade is making.
First: the virus was engineered
Second: it escaped from the lab.
The first has been repeatedly debunked, from its very first iteration, and yet Wade once again resurrects it. That fact that he, and other conspiracy theorists keep on changing what they consider to be “the smoking gun” is pretty clear proof that they have absolutely no intention of finding out what happened. They have already decided that the virus was engineered, and therefore nothing else will be considered. If their claims of AIDS virus pieces on the spike have been disproven, they’ll claim that the furin cleavage is not found elsewhere. Now that it has been found elsewhere, they will try to “find” other “proof”.
Again, the fact that the “proof” keeps on changing, but the claim doesn’t, tells me that they’re not engaged in science, but in conspiracy theory.
The second is not an entirely wild assumption, since there very well could have been a sample of SARS-CoV-2 taken from somewhere else and lack of safety protocols resulted in a worker being exposed.
However, that would require that the first outbreak start with the lab. A person who is infected first transmits it to their family, friends, and coworkers, and the outbreak didn’t start with people around the lab. Even if that person also spread it in the market, the first people infected would have been connected to the lab. It didn’t have to actually start in the wet market. The first person who transmitted to another person could have been one of the people who supplied the wet market who raised or trapped animals or even just transported them. It could even have been a customer who was infected by one of the animals they bought. The pattern of spread indicates that the first patient or patients were connected to the wet market, which indicates transmission from animals.
One thing, though, that we can agree on is that the Chinese governments messed up in their responses and they have been doing their best to make it impossible to determine the origin of the pandemic. They got rid of the wet market and are denying facts, such as the presence of racoon dogs (photographed in 2015).
They also have successfully deflected attention from their mishandeling of the pandemic to the source of the virus, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were engaged in keeping the “engineered virus” conspiracy theory alive. That way everybody is wasting their time on that, rather than on errors, mishandling, and bad decisions that people actually made.
As an aside - there are an estimated 320,000 varieties of viruses that infect mammals, and we barely know one percent of them. So when Wade goes blathering on about how SARS-CoV-2 must be engineered because it doesn’t look, to him, like any virus that are known, that is sort of meaningless, since we only know a tiny fraction of all the viruses that are out there.
It’s as though he were claiming that the Earth must have been engineered, because it is unlike any of the other planets and exoplanets that we have found.
