It's funny how everyone's opinions have changed now Trump is in power. It just shows how much of what people say is to advance their own interests rather than to say the truth.
Personally I'd guess it was almost certainly a lab leak doing research similar proposed by Ralph Baric (the world's leading researcher on this stuff) as described in his testimony to a congressional committee. His work was proposed for US funding and didn't get it but probably the Chinese conducted much the same research themselves and the research pretty much is to make covid for research purposes. One of the viruses he mentions interest in has an insert amino acid identical to covid.
Re. what the sensible authorities at the time have to say I give you the head of the CDC at the time and the chair of the Lancet covid enquiry:
CDC Redfield: "[The US] contributed to the research that led to it and that's to say is that the US government was very involved in funding the Chinese lab that did this research..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMlhvnMpRU0&t=119s
Lancet, Sachs: "Where do you think Covid came from".. "Covid
um the question is which lab and in which way. It almost surely did not
come out of nature uh it almost surely came out of uh a
deliberate research project ..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS-3QssVPeg&t=6493s
Also amusingly on of the scientists most active in implying anyone suggesting a lab leak was a crank or conspiracy theorist at the time of the outbreak was Kristin Anderson. Later his slack chats were subpoenaed and he was saying in them “The main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” He then got a $7m grant from Fauci totally unrelated to saying the research Fauci funded couldn't have been the problem.
Personally I'd guess it was almost certainly a lab leak doing research similar proposed by Ralph Baric (the world's leading researcher on this stuff) as described in his testimony to a congressional committee. His work was proposed for US funding and didn't get it but probably the Chinese conducted much the same research themselves and the research pretty much is to make covid for research purposes. One of the viruses he mentions interest in has an insert amino acid identical to covid.
Re. what the sensible authorities at the time have to say I give you the head of the CDC at the time and the chair of the Lancet covid enquiry:
CDC Redfield: "[The US] contributed to the research that led to it and that's to say is that the US government was very involved in funding the Chinese lab that did this research..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMlhvnMpRU0&t=119s
Lancet, Sachs: "Where do you think Covid came from".. "Covid um the question is which lab and in which way. It almost surely did not come out of nature uh it almost surely came out of uh a deliberate research project ..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS-3QssVPeg&t=6493s
Also amusingly on of the scientists most active in implying anyone suggesting a lab leak was a crank or conspiracy theorist at the time of the outbreak was Kristin Anderson. Later his slack chats were subpoenaed and he was saying in them “The main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” He then got a $7m grant from Fauci totally unrelated to saying the research Fauci funded couldn't have been the problem.