The "natural wet-market hypothesis" is a golden oldie.In 1986, Professor Matthew Meselson of Harvard University was granted approval by Soviet authorities for a four-day trip to Moscow where he interviewed several senior Soviet health officials about the outbreak. He later issued a report which agreed with the Soviet assessment that the outbreak was caused by a contaminated meat processing plant concluding the Soviets' official explanation was completely "plausible and consistent with what is known from medical literature and recorded human experiences with anthrax".
But two of the six factors in that article are hard to explain away, if you want it to be an accidental release from the Wuhan lab: 1. They didn't have any bats, 2. SARS-COV-2 is not a mutagen of RaTG13, because RaTG13 hasn't had long enough (20-50 years) for the necessary mutations to occur. (I see it like making the strong case for the non-existence of Bigfoot, because there is no "hole" in the animal population that would explain where a breeding number of Bigfootses would get the necessary calories to stay alive.)
Dude. Ken Alibek led a NATO procession of 200 scientists through an active biowar factory in 1989. They'd produced 20,000 tons of weapons-grade anthrax in the six months prior and produced another 80,000 tons of weapons-grade anthrax in the twelve subsequent months. That doesn't include tularemia, rabies, glanders, and all the other shit what bumps in the night. 30,000 empoyees that we never knew about. We were in this goddamn complex, looking for shit, expecting to find shit, and saw none. Matthew Meselson? MacArthur Genius Award. One of Linus Pauling's TAs. Teaches at Harvard. "plausable and consistent with what is known from medical literature." "They didn't have any bats?" They didn't have any fuckin' cows in Sverdlovsk, either, but they killed maybe a thousand people and blamed it on the butcher shop. "SARS-COV-2 is not a mutagen of RaTG13?" You say that as if you think it means something. There's a bunch of hinky shit around Coronavirus. My personal opinion is we'll never know what the fuck happened until if and when someone who has a clue decides to come clean and that could be decades. I have no skin in this game. Ebola sure looks like it jumped from animals but fuckin' hell there's been a lot of effort put into making it nastier. COVID-19? I'm no virologist. Not going to pretend to be. But I'm also not going to pretend that a bunch of self-serving self-referential platitudes in a fucking Vox article of all places have anything whatsoever to do with reality. And you shouldn't either.