" to the lab-leak theory — that the virus somehow escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which does research on coronaviruses. In reaction to the papers, they say the newly published data is tipping the scales toward wildlife sold at the market., who's at Louisiana State University Health Shreveport and was not involved in this research."But they absolutely are pushing it toward an animal origin.
Staff members of the Wuhan Hygiene Emergency Response Team investigate the shuttered Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market on Jan. 11, 2020, after it was linked to cases of COVID-19. An anonymous user on the Chinese social media platform Weibo posted pictures of live animals for sale in the southwest corner of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan in 2019.
We found out that one stall actually had five positive samples — five surfaces in that stall had virus on them. And even better, in that particular stall, the samples were very animal-y. For example, scientists found virus on a feather/hair remover, a cart of the sort that we see in photographs that are used for transporting cages and, best of all, a metal cage in a back room.
With a virus, such as SARS-CoV-2, that causes no symptoms or mild symptoms in most people, you don't have any chance of linking all the early cases to the site where the outbreak started. Because the virus is going to quickly spread to people outside of wherever it started. So if the pandemic didn't start at the market, one of the first five or 10 people infected in the world was at the market. And how do you explain that?