I think it's unfair to call the theory that a coronavirus popping up next to the world's most active lab experimenting them may have come from the lab a conspiracy theory. I mean did we call people saying radiation from the Chernobyl reactor might have come from an accident conspiracy theorists?
The "conspiracy theorists" include the director of the CDC at the time who was actually in contact with the Chinese CDC and also a virologist, and also the chair of the one official investigation which visited Wuhan in the early days.
The WIV is more than 30km away. The quote below is from the above link, which is a relatively recent review of the "scientific evidence" from a virologist who (from the disclosure statement) "between 2019 and 2021, he was an unpaid Honorary Visiting Professor at Fudan University, Shanghai, China, and between 2014 and 2020, he was an unpaid Guest Professor at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing, China." You should read the link I sent, at least
>Obvious evidence against the laboratory leak allegation is that the first documented cases of COVID-19 were not linked to the WIV nor in the same geographical region of Wuhan (44). The WIV laboratory of Prof. Zhengli Shi, who has been the subject of abundant accusations because of her work on bat coronaviruses (10, 11, 13), is located more than 30 km from the Huanan market epicenter. Clearly, if the virus first emerged at the WIV, then that location should be the site of at least some of the earliest cases or linked to those cases. It is not.
Holmes also collaborated with Shi in 2018 so is maybe not unbiased. The paper only has the WHO location data which was provided by Chinese government sources who seemed pretty determined to make out it came from the market. There is an earlier data set from a radio phone in, clustered on the other side of the river.
Market believers tend to say he's a Republican he must be an anti science crank but what motivation would he have to lie about such stuff which caused a lot of criticism or him?
Could you post some links to papers comparing the clustering of this "earlier data set from a radio phone in" to the "WHO location data" I couldn't find anything about it with Google Scholar.
I'm skeptical, because Holmes points out that the Huanan market origin is supported by molecular evidence:
>Phylogenetic analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences also points to the Huanan market being the epicenter of the pandemic, with the Huanan market sequences falling at the root of the SARS-CoV-2 tree. The earliest split in the SARS-CoV-2 phylogeny, which seemingly occurred in Wuhan, is between the A and B lineages that differ by two nucleotide substitutions (45) yet gave rise to many descendent lineages. Remarkably, despite its relatively low number of visitors, both these lineages were present at the Huanan market (44, 46, 47). The odds of this co-occurrence without the market being the global epicenter are extremely low. Molecular clock studies of SARS-CoV-2 evolution also point to a market origin. Estimates of the time to the most recent common ancestor (tMRCA) for the epidemic as a whole, of the specific outbreak in Wuhan, and of the sequences from the Huanan market overlap with a time span encompassing November and December 2019, again suggestive of an outbreak that started at the Huanan market (47). This timescale also means that the virus was circulating for only a short interval before it was first detected by physicians in Wuhan. Additionally, these observations fit the available epidemiological and serological data from Wuhan, which provide no evidence for SARS-CoV-2 in that city prior to December 2019 (44, 48).
The "conspiracy theorists" include the director of the CDC at the time who was actually in contact with the Chinese CDC and also a virologist, and also the chair of the one official investigation which visited Wuhan in the early days.