Senator Tom Cotton was roundly ridiculed and branded a conspiracy theorist for saying that the Wuhan coronavirus may have come from a lab. There was an immediate false equivalence that he was accusing China of releasing an engineered bioweapon. That was never what he said, so we lived through weeks of China’s preferred “bat soup” story that insisted the virus came from a wet market. Then last week, something strange happened. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on China to outlaw wet markets to protect global health. These types of markets where wild animals are kept in close proximity to one another and are slaughtered have been criticized since the slaughter of civets was blamed for the SARS outbreak in 2002.
Following Pompeo’s statement, there was a response in official Chinese media. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said there is no such market in China. While he said there were farmers markets in China where fresh vegetables, seafood, farm-raised meat, and live poultry were available, he insisted it was illegal to sell wild animals.
Yet the “official” story for both the SARS outbreak and the COVID-19 pandemic blames wild animals, specifically bats and civets, sold in open markets. In fact, the Chinese government sampled and shut down the Wuhan wet market a few hundred yards from one of the suspect laboratories on January 1, 2020.
Now, plenty of information has caused speculation that the novel coronavirus may have come from one of the government labs in Wuhan. A virologist known as the “Bat Lady” Shi Zhengli identified dozens of deadly SARS-like viruses in bat caves and also created chimeric viruses in the course of her research. Chimeric viruses are man-made, combining portions of different viruses together. To this point, scientists are saying COVID-19 virus is a naturally occurring virus.
