"New studies say Wuhan market is the only ‘plausible’ source of COVID-19 pandemic"
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2022-07-26/new-studies...
“I was quite convinced of the lab leak myself until we dove into this very carefully and looked at it much closer,” Andersen said. “Actually, the data points to this particular market.”
The rest of the article says that the reports were deemed by the WHO to be "inconclusive". And what else do you expect? Conclusive evidence for the lab-leak hypothesis should be hyper-ultra-uber strong, because its consequences could potentially be requests for trillions of dollars of reparations. Evidence for the market hypothesis doesn't need to be as strong, this alternative would make quite a lot of people quite happy, but for some reason no clear evidence was found.
In the article they claim the possibility for contagion via frozen food was deemed "possible". This is total BS. Covid is an airborne disease. We've all lived for more than 2 years with it, and most HN readers probably read for thousands of hours about Covid. The claim that you can get Covid from food is preposterous. Of course, if you intentionally want to get it, you can get it, so one cannot rule it out, but deeming this "possible" is clearly just based on politics. It should be deemed "possible, but highly improbable".
So, no, I don't see a plausible scenario where the wildlife is the source of the disease. I can see a lab worker contracting the virus in the lab, and then going to lunch to the market, and then the disease spreading from there. But not from wildlife, because there were no documented cases of live bats or live pangolins being sold in that market.
"The USDA and the FDA … the risk is exceedingly low for transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to humans via food and food packaging."
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/covid-19....
Was selling live bats or live pangolins legal?
[1] https://noagenda.fandom.com/wiki/I%27m_shocked,_shocked_to_f...!
"The Contested Origin of SARS-CoV-2" 26 Nov 2021
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2021.2...
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
I guess "The animals on these farms (nearly 1 million) were rapidly released, sold, or killed in early 2020…" because those involved in the illegal trade did not wish to be held responsible for a repeat of SARS-CoV-1.
Viruses, as opposed to farts, don't smell, but otherwise they are similar. If someone coughs outdoors, the aerosols containing the viral particles just spread around and soon their concentration becomes negligible. If someone coughs, or just breathes indoors, the aerosols spread, but if the space is not very large, their concentration will stay elevated, enough to infect other people.
With this preamble out of the way, what is the hypothetical scenario where the pandemic starts in the market? Covid does not spread from dead meat, it's an airborne disease. Was there some live bat (or pangolin) that was sneezing in some enclosed space, and some people acquired the virus there? A google search shows links with evidence to the contrary ([1], [2]).
Here's and NY Times article [3] that's arguing for the non-lab-leak origin, but you'll notice they are using misdirection (e.g. "dozens of species that can carry pathogens that infect humans" -> ok, this says nothing specific about Covid, but is written to prime the reader to think Covid was among those pathogens).
Overall, the simplest explanation is that one lab worker acquired the disease from aerosols in the lab produced by the lab mice infected with the virus. The worker then left the lab and stopped here and there (home too) and left aerosols that some other people inhaled. Whenever it was outdoors, the aerosols did not cause infections, but sometimes when it was indoors, they did. Is it possible that that person went to the market nearby to have lunch or dinner and coughed or sneezed while indoors, and some of the market workers, or co-diners got infected? It does not sound outrageous.
You can envision tons of plausible scenarios with an initial lab worker getting infected, but you need to get into contorted scenarios to cook up a theory where some bats from a few thousand kilometers away get transported to Wuhan and fail to infect anyone on their way, then the disease explodes like a bomb in Wohan, and then nobody is able to find evidence of those live bats being sold in that market.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2
[2] https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/science-blog/wet-market-sources-co...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/world/wuhan-animal-market...
[4]