Might have come out of a lab, but the facts are many past viruses have come out of the "wet" markets.
Limbaugh was chortling yesterday about the people, like me, who believed it came out of the "wet" markets. He focused on the bats and their supposed lack of involvement in this virus crisis.
But actually there are a numerous animals that could have caused an outbreak. Like pangolins and other weird critters. The SARs virus was traced to a "wet" market.
We still don't know for sure that it came from a lab, but I'm willing to accept that theory.
Nevertheless, whether it came from a lab or a "wet" market, the Chinese government is responsible for the spread. However the virus spread, I want severe sanctions imposed on the ChiComs.
p.s .Limbaugh contradicted himself on his show yesterday. First he said he wasn't ready to believe the ChiComs deliberately spread the virus, and then he said it sure looks like they deliberately spread the virus.
The first question that raises a flag with the wet market story is that it is a seafood market. Bats aren't sold there. Second, the problem is that there were roughly 1/3 of early cases not associated with the seafood market in any way, and until the Chinese changed the parameters for considering an illness to be caused by SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) to ONLY include those associated with the seafood market, they were included in the rapidly expanding database.
By redefining the disease, regardless of pathogen, the true origins of the disease have been obscured, as was the beginning of the outbreak. Patient zero likely had nothing to do with the market. By the time the outbreak had expanded into the market, it is likely there were multiple carriers and that is why the explosion in the number of cases.
There is a trail of research papers, in which the creation of viruses which have the gross characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 is documented, The earliest I found is in Nature,
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985 but even that research was based on other and earlier research. This particular paper, to me is a smoking gun. That two of the researchers were from (and returned to) the Wuhan Institute of Virology is just too much coincidence to not see a connection.
There are lots of things we might not want to believe, but are still true. (normalcy bias)
When I first heard that a plane had hit the WTC tower, I thought of the accident in 1947 where a B-25 hit the Empire State Building, surprised that such an accident could occur in the US in 2001.
When I heard the second plane hit the other tower, it dawned on me it was an attack.