Assertion

SARS-CoV-2 came from a bat in a wet market in Wuhan, China.

Response

SARS-CoV-2 did not migrate naturally from a bat  or scaly anteater being sold in a “wet market” (one that sells perishable goods) in China. There were no bats or pangolins being sold in the wet markets in Wuhan, China during the time in question. Oxford University published a study on June 7, 2021, stating that from May 2017 through November 2019, there were no bats or pangolins sold in the 17 wet markets in Wuhan, China. These markets were under close scrutiny throughout that time for any illegalities, so the relevant information had been tracked.

In fact, there were already many patents filed for commercial exploitation between 2008 and 2019 related to elements unique to SARS-CoV-2. Dr. Peter Daszak, who headed the ironically named EcoHealth Alliance, an organization with the express purpose of preventing pandemics, was the conduit for NIH grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to research how to add gain-of-function components to bat coronaviruses.

The virus likely leaked from the Wuhan lab in 2019, but it had been in development for some years before that. Gain-of-function, per the NIH website up to October 2021, was defined as any research “that modifies a biological agent so that it confers new or enhanced activity to that agent.” That definition has now been sanitized and replaced with a less transparent reference to research that involves “enhanced potential pandemic pathogens.”

On February 26, 2022, the UK Daily Mail reported on a discovery that the novel coronavirus contains a tiny chunk of DNA that matches a sequence patented by Moderna three years before the “pandemic” began. According to the study, the chances are one in three trillion that Moderna’s sequence randomly appeared through natural evolution. Critics rushed to deny it.