> According to municipal reports and the testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors, the bat was never a food source in the city, and no bat was traded in the market.
I've worked in a lab and Occam's razor for me says the lab that is 280 meters away and studied bat viruses is a lot more plausible than it originating in a wet market. People make stupid mistakes handling waste all the time. There was no need for the Chinese government to throw the wet market under the bus or for people to imply Chinese people ate bats or some other racially motivated theory and there was no need to believe the chinese government created a bioweapon. Most likely is that it was just a horrible mistake and careless handling of biohazardous waste/animals.
Yeeaah, about that... I looked more myself last time when I mentioned this and couldn't find the reference I originally saw (it was more than a month before my comment a month ago), instead found this:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/%E6%96%B0%E4%B8%96%E7%BA%A...
https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto...
According to Google Maps and Translate, the pin in the image in that PDF that says "Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention" is actually on a building labeled "New Century Home Appliances Collection and Disposal Station".
14-15km appears to be the actual distance from the market to the lab: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Wuhan+South+China+Seafood+Wh...
There is one building 4km away called the Wuhan CDC&P, but looking at the surrounding buildings that appears to be an office, not a lab: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Wuhan+South+China+Seafood+Wh...
IMO despite the faked image, the same city is still suspicious, especially with stories like this coming out now: https://news.yahoo.com/suspected-sars-virus-and-flu-found-in...
https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/01/covid-19-bioweapon/
Snopes reports that it contained numerous errors, and the authors themselves have said they had no direct evidence for their claims. (Note that it was never peer-reviewed or even accepted for publication anywhere. They just pasted it up on a social media site.)
It definitely seems feasible to me that it could have "come out of a lab" while still being entirely natural in origin and without any ill intent on the Chinese part.
I'm not endorsing this as true, I don't know if it's true or not, but I did find it interesting and worthy of additional research.