And the Germ Warfare lab was "invented" by Senator Cotton.
Warfare seems to have been invented, but as stated earlier in the thread, they were working on SARS vaccines in Wuhan at least back in 2013, as stated on the Wuhan insitute of virology homepage.
Wuhan Institute of Virology mission targeting for population health, agriculture and sustainable development strategies and public safety needs of the country, relying on high-level biosafety laboratory cluster platform, focusing on virology, Agricultural and Environmental Microbiology and...
english.whiov.cas.cn
My problem with BOTH the
1) The wet market natural evolution theory
2) Wuhan institute of virology source theory
is that they are both persuasive explanations of the origin of the virus, but they should not be geographically connected.
1) Almost all of the first cases were found in the Wuhan wet market, where pangolins and snakes could have been infected with bat poop (as per Contagion) or otherwise infected with a Bat virus (as this virus is). This is quite conceivable. But of all the wet markets in Asia, for this to be just down the road from the Wuhan Institute of Virology that was working on mutations of the SARS (very similar bat originated) virus seems too much of a coincidence.
2) For this virus to have originated in the Wuhan institute of virology one would have to explain how it got to the Wet market, and why?
2.1) A lab technician happened to be infected, or have some virus on their boots, and went home via the wet market. But of all the places in Wuhan, how likely is it that the place they deposited their viral spill be the same place that a virus could also have mutated and evolved naturally? As in (1) above, this coincidence too seems unlikely.
This leaves some sort of human intent....
2.2) A lab technician got infected, and or infected someone else, and then deliberately spread the virus in just the place where it could have mutated naturally as a cover up. Would someone start a global pandemic for this reason? I don't think so myself.
2.3) A lab technician sold a lab animal to the market? It seems to me that selling an animal that has been used in SARS research to a market for food is not something that a lab technician would do. Additionally, there is a big gap between rich and poor in China. So, in addition to being aware of the dangers, the lab technician is imho very unlikely to want the sort of tiny financial reward that a wet market can offer. Would a lab technician start a global pandemic for pennies? I don't think so myself.
[I'd be willing to bet that lab workers generally have zero contact with the wet market, purchasing their dinners from supermarkets much like those in the West. It is difficult to be aware of this without having been to China. China is like the West today and 19th century Asia in one place, but the people who hang out in laboratories do not visit the "19th century Asia" of the wet market. I went to Dairen Language University recently. It is not a very high technology place but still the people commuting to the air-conditioned university, wearing suits, driving foreign cars, were very different from those using the fish markets and fisherman's cafe only 1km away. Even here in Japan, my wife, my colleagues, do not go to the live fishmarket in the fishing village. They are all modernised purchasing fillets of fish in packs from the supermarkets. The cultural behavioural differences are not geographic nor measured in distance, but in the modern/university/laboratory types vs others. In China these different types of people live in close proximity, but they are still imho, very different.]
2.4) (I thought of another one.) A lab technician who usually has little contact with wet markets got sick, and decided to go to the Wet Market to purchase some sort of traditional cure. But, if so again, I would have expected people in the local pharmacy, and Chinese medicine dispensary to also have been infected instead of infections being localized in, and almost entirely limited to, the one place the virus could have evolved naturally. (Though there is suggestion that there
were others, including patient Zero)
So how could the Wuhan lab / Wuhan market coincidence arise? As noted above, for me a natural coincidence is too great, so this question becomes, why would someone deliberately spread the same sort of virus that exists in the Wuhan lab, in the Wuhan market?