World Health Organization expert advisor Jaime Metzl: "The most likely starting point of the coronavirus crisis is an accidental leak from the Chinese virology institute in Wuhan.” He believes researchers were studying the viruses out of good intentions. https://jamiemetzl.com/origins-of-sars-cov-2/

He lists preliminary evidence; "the case remains speculative by necessity," because China "is still restricting access to the relevant data and people... Those restrictions themselves should concern us all."

Beginning on December 10, 2019, increasing numbers of people, many of who had visited the Hunan Seafood Market in Wuhan, fell ill due to a new disease.

There is strong evidence that the novel coronavirus outbreak did not originate in the seafood market (Lancet)

"The Huanan Seafood Market didn’t have bats for sale, & most bat species in Wuhan would be hibernating at time of outbreak. It was reported that 34% of cases had no contact with the marke & ’No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases.’ (Lancet)"

"This market is less than 9 miles away from The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), Chinese Academy of Sciences, which:
Developed chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses
Conducted ’dangerous’ gain-of-function research on the SARS-CoV-1 virus
Established a 96.2% match with SARS-CoV-2..."

a virus they sampled from a cave over 1,000 miles away from Wuhan

Injected live piglets with bat coronaviruses as recently as July 2019

Published a paper on a close descendant of SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV, in November 2019..."

Was hiring researchers to work on bat coronaviruses as recently as November 2019."

"United States embassy and consular officials who visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology in January 2018 were deeply concerned. Their cable sent to the State Department noted (Washington Post):

“the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory”

“the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified...

for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases.

From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.”

Thread of this article by Jaime Metzl is continued here: https://twitter.com/HillelNeuer/status/1254704432132034562