In 1999 Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik won a Pulitzer Prize. Now a business columnist for the Times, he writes that “new evidence undermines the COVID lab-leak theory — but the press keeps pushing it.”
A paper posted online [in September] chiefly by researchers at France’s Institut Pasteur and under consideration for publication in a Nature journal…reports that three viruses were found in bats living in caves in northern Laos with features very similar to SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19. As Nature reported, those viruses are “more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than any known viruses.”
Another paper, posted in late August by researchers from the Wuhan lab, reports on viruses found in rats also with features similar to those that make SARS-CoV-2 infectious in humans.
Two other papers published on the discussion forum virological.org present evidence that the virus jumped from animals to humans at more than one animal market in Wuhan, not just the Huanan seafood market. Given that these so-called wet markets have long been suspected as transmission points of viruses from animals to humans because they sell potentially infected animals, that makes the laboratory origin vastly less likely, according to a co-author of one of the papers. “That a laboratory leak would find its way to the very place where you would expect to find a zoonotic transmission is quite unlikely,” Joel Wertheim, an associate professor at UC San Diego’s medical school, told me. “To have it find its way to multiple markets, the exact place where you would expect to see the introduction, is unbelievably unlikely.”
As virologist Robert F. Garry of Tulane, one of Wertheim’s co-authors, told Nature, the finding is “a dagger into the heart” of the lab-leak hypothesis.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.