# COVID Lab Leak Hypothesis ### Evidence summarized by Matt Ridley - [Tweet](https://twitter.com/i/status/1452629561334763530) by [@mattwridley](https://twitter.com/mattwridley) on [[October 25th, 2021]]: - Haiku thread follows. - If a pandemic caused by a new bat-derived sars-like virus breaks out in a city and - The city has no similar viruses in its local bats and - Has no sars-like antibodies in its people and - Has no infected animals in its markets and... - 1/10 - Sars like viruses have leaked at least four times from laboratories and - The city has a laboratory studying bat-borne sars-like viruses and - That laboratory has published more papers on sars-like viruses than any other and... - 2/10 - Has the world’s largest collection of bat-borne coronaviruses and - Took its database offline and - This included a sars-like coronavirus very closely related to the pandemic virus and - That virus was collected on one of at least 7 visits to a mine 1885km away by road and... - 3/10 - That mine is now off limits to outsiders and heavily guarded and - 3 men died after becoming infected at that site from a suspected sars-like infection and - The laboratory has omitted the connection to that outbreak in publications and... - 4/10 - It has changed the name of a bat borne virus it collected there and - Has misled the world about when it sequenced the genome of that virus and - Did not publish details of eight other viruses from the same site for 11 months and... - 5/10 - Has done experiments to make chimeric sars-like viruses and - Those experiments leave no trace of genetic engineering and - It has tested those chimeric viruses in human airway epithelial cells and - Has tested those chimeric viruses in humanised mice and... - 6/10 - It has done these experiments at lower biosafety levels (BSL-2 and BSL-3) and - Has been criticised for poor laboratory safety standards and - Has patented devices for keeping bats in the lab and - Has patented devices for treating bat-bite injuries and... - 7/10 - Has previously worked on the insertion of furin cleavage sites into MERS-like coronaviruses and - No other sars-like virus has been found with a S1/S2 furin cleavage site and - The lab has recently applied for grants to insert furin cleavage sites into sars-like viruses and - 8/10 - The government of that country has strongly resisted a full investigation and - Has championed an implausible explanation based on imported frozen food and - Has frustrated the attempts of outsiders to seek relevant information... - 9/10 - Then - It is plausible that pandemic may have begun with a lab leak or research-related accident. - 10/10