One of the things I did not like about Trump was his willingness to run with a conspiracy theory...POTUS should NEVER be apart of such things. With that in mind I always looked at some of the "theories" about the true origin of COVID-19 with a jaundiced eye. This past summer there were several "definitive" stories saying researchers looked at the genetic sequence of COVID-19 and determined it was not a manufactured virus. With high confidence they stated it like came from humans interacting and eating bats and it finally made the big jump "naturally" in the Wuhan market. I don't recall which publication it was but it was peer reviewed and shared by multiple experts...and I believed what they said.
Over the past few months more and more information has come out that puts the focus on the Wuhan Institute of Virology which just so happens to be located near the food market. These are not conspiracy nutbags pushing an agenda...shockingly there is some real reporting go on as folks try to get through the wall of Chinese silence and censorship.
Politco just published an EXCELLENT article (link below) with some very disturbing and damning facts. The facts came from U.S. State Department personnel that saw things in 2017.
In 2018, Diplomats Warned of Risky Coronavirus Experiments in a Wuhan Lab. No One Listened.
I highly encourage you to read then come to your own conclusion. For those with ADHD I am posting an excerpt with some of the most eye opening information.
"In late 2017, top health and science officials at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing attended a conference in the Chinese capital. There, they saw a presentation on a new study put out by a group of Chinese scientists, including several from the Wuhan lab, in conjunction with the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Since the 2002 outbreak of SARS—the deadly disease caused by a coronavirus transmitted by bats in China—scientists around the world had been looking for ways to predict and limit future outbreaks of similar diseases. To aid the effort, the NIH had funded a number of projects that involved the WIV scientists, including much of the Wuhan lab’s work with bat coronaviruses. The new study was entitled “Discovery of a Rich Gene Pool of Bat SARS-Related Coronaviruses Provides New Insights into the Origin of SARS Coronavirus.”
These researchers, the American officials learned, had found a population of bats from caves in Yunnan province that gave them insight into how SARS coronaviruses originated and spread. The researchers boasted that they may have found the cave where the original SARS coronavirus originated. But all the U.S. diplomats cared about was that these scientists had discovered three new viruses that had a unique characteristic: they contained a "spike protein” that was particularly good at grabbing on to a specific receptor in human lung cells known as an ACE2 receptor. That means the viruses were potentially very dangerous for humans—and that these viruses were now in a lab with which they, the U.S. diplomats, were largely unfamiliar.
Knowing the significance of the Wuhan virologists’ discovery, and knowing that the WIV’s top-level biosafety laboratory (BSL-4) was relatively new, the U.S. Embassy health and science officials in Beijing decided to go to Wuhan and check it out. In total, the embassy sent three teams of experts in late 2017 and early 2018 to meet with the WIV scientists, among them Shi Zhengli, often referred to as the “bat woman” because of her extensive experience studying coronaviruses found in bats.
When they sat down with the scientists at the WIV, the American diplomats were shocked by what they heard. The Chinese researchers told them they didn’t have enough properly trained technicians to safely operate their BSL-4 lab. The Wuhan scientists were asking for more support to get the lab up to top standards.
The diplomats wrote two cables to Washington reporting on their visits to the Wuhan lab. More should be done to help the lab meet top safety standards, they said, and they urged Washington to get on it. They also warned that the WIV researchers had found new bat coronaviruses could easily infect human cells, and which used the same cellular route that had been used by the original SARS coronavirus."