It came from the wild. They, along with Germany and other labs, were researching Sars related wild vectors and the possibility of natural selection causing a new outbreak.
I find it reasonable to believe a biosafety incident at the Wuhan lab infected several of the lab researchers and that led to the pandemic.
But that’s the extent of where things go. Conspiracies about bioweapons are idiotic.
I thought this as well (massive safety events being a pretty normal thing, after all) until last year when the wet market swab data was finally analyzed. (After apparently being leaked? Accidentally? Accidentally on purpose?)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
“Both early lineages of SARS-CoV-2 were geographically associated with the market”
I remembered reading early on that someone sold a carcass from the lab to a wet market. I think that’s probably Western propaganda and I have no idea whether that’s true.
However, in China there were posters in every restaurant saying to avoid eating such meats. They started to appear in the first half of 2020. I saw them in Shanghai, Ningbo, and Hangzhou.
Maybe the government just saw it as a useful opportunity to steer the public toward factory-produced meats that fall under the “safe umbrella” of capitalism. Either one is interesting to think about
