The original SARS in 2002 outbreak looked exactly like the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak.
SARS also began at a market that sold the same types of animals, in a city far away from Yunnan province.
SARS-CoV-2 comes from Yunnan or Southeast Asia (its closest known relative comes from Laos), but once it gets into farmed wild animals, it doesn't necessarily stay there. These animals are traded over long distances. Heck, Hong Kong had a population of hamsters with Delta a few months ago. The hamsters caught it in Europe, made it all the way to Hong Kong, and then infected a human (this is established based on the viral genetic sequences in the hamsters and the human).
> we wouldn't necessarily know about them until there were publishable results maybe years down the line
We knew plenty about the viruses the WIV had found before the pandemic. RaTG13 (until recently, the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, and the center of a lot of conspiracy theorizing which we can now say with 100% certainty is wrong) was uploaded to an NIH database years before the pandemic. The conspiracy theorists made a lot of stink about 8 viruses that Dr. Shi Zhengli had mentioned in public talks. Those viruses turned out to be too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to be of much interest.
Most of these viruses don't actually exist in live form at the WIV. The WIV only has three live SARS-related viruses, and each one of them is very well known to the outside scientific community. It takes a lot of effort to isolate live virus from bat fecal samples, and it's something the WIV heavily publicizes when it succeeds.
> we do have evidence that the genomes of some viruses that they were working on were scrubbed from the records.
I've followed this story and haven't seen any evidence of that whatsoever.
SARS also began at a market that sold the same types of animals, in a city far away from Yunnan province.
SARS-CoV-2 comes from Yunnan or Southeast Asia (its closest known relative comes from Laos), but once it gets into farmed wild animals, it doesn't necessarily stay there. These animals are traded over long distances. Heck, Hong Kong had a population of hamsters with Delta a few months ago. The hamsters caught it in Europe, made it all the way to Hong Kong, and then infected a human (this is established based on the viral genetic sequences in the hamsters and the human).
> we wouldn't necessarily know about them until there were publishable results maybe years down the line
We knew plenty about the viruses the WIV had found before the pandemic. RaTG13 (until recently, the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, and the center of a lot of conspiracy theorizing which we can now say with 100% certainty is wrong) was uploaded to an NIH database years before the pandemic. The conspiracy theorists made a lot of stink about 8 viruses that Dr. Shi Zhengli had mentioned in public talks. Those viruses turned out to be too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to be of much interest.
Most of these viruses don't actually exist in live form at the WIV. The WIV only has three live SARS-related viruses, and each one of them is very well known to the outside scientific community. It takes a lot of effort to isolate live virus from bat fecal samples, and it's something the WIV heavily publicizes when it succeeds.
> we do have evidence that the genomes of some viruses that they were working on were scrubbed from the records.
I've followed this story and haven't seen any evidence of that whatsoever.