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There is a virus lab in Wuhan because a lot of coronaviruses originate in that region. Its existence/location is not evidence of a lab leak.

If anything, the lab leak “theory” has received too much media attention when the primary evidence (location of a lab) is easily explained by other factors.

Imagine a virus was spread from penguins to humans. It would not be surprising if research on the virus were conducted in Antarctica!

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TeaBrain 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

The idea that the lab was in Wuhan due to the prevalence of bat coronaviruses in the region was one of the most frequent, yet almost universally unreferenced claims, that was made to explain away why the virus coincidentally showed up first in the same city as the lab. Hubei, where Wuhan is located, is not a central hot spot of bat coronaviruses in China. The available information points toward bat coronaviruses being much more common in the Southern provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou and in particular Guangdong. This can be seen in Figure 1 ("Geographical distribution of bat coronaviruses") in the below referenced Chinese study on bat coronaviruses from 2019, published by members of the Wuhan Institute of Virology less than a year before the sars-cov-2 outbreak.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6466186/

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tripletao 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do you know where you got this idea? It's completely wrong and incredibly prevalent; so I'm wondering if particular sources are misleading people, or if it just "feels right" and people come to it independently unprompted.

Beyond the general background already linked, Dr. Shi specifically did not expect that natural spillover of SARS-CoV-2 occurred near Wuhan:

> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210727042832/https://www.scien...

She could be wrong, but the idea that she chose her work location based on the natural abundance of sarbecoviruses is unequivocally false.

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jkhdigital 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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	▲	jounker 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Coronaviruses are a big family of viruses. The particular viruses they were working with were only distantly related to covid. Related in the same way that house cats are related to tigers. In addition they were not doing “gain of function research”, unless you want to say that they were also doing “loss of function research”. What they were doing was seeing how point mutation affected infectivity both positively and negatively. We know what they were working with, and it wasn’t the virus that gave rise to covid. There are much closer matches than in other species.