By and large, the mainstream media are still protecting the narrative that SARS-CoV-2 is a zoonotically transmitted virus originating in bats. Much of the evidence for this comes from Shi Zhengli, a researcher at the biosafety 4 laboratory in Wuhan, China.

As the leading Chinese bat coronavirus researcher, her career has been focused on studying bat coronaviruses for over a decade. In a recent article,1 Latham and Allison Wilson, Ph.D., dissect research showing this theory simply doesn't hold water.

"Our article doesn't dispute that it came from a bat at some point, I think that is the strongest data, but what we do dispute is the mechanism by which it came from the bat," Latham says.

Lab Origin Theory No. 1

Latham's article lays out several different lab origin hypotheses. The simplest one is that researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or another virology BSL-2 lab that's even closer to the wet market speculated to be the origin of SARS-CoV-2. In that process, one of them got infected and then passed it on to coworkers or family, either because they didn't properly quarantine or didn't realize they were infected.

This is not the most likely of hypotheses for the simple reason that few naturally occurring bat coronaviruses identified have the ability to bind to human ACE2 receptors, which is what allows them to infect human cells in the first place. In order for this theory to work, the virus would have to circulate among many people, evolving slightly with each pass.