https://jabberwocking.com/heres-why-a-lab-leak-of-covid-seemed-unlikely-even-in-2020/However, in late February 2020 they discovered a bat virus that had an insertion in the genome at exactly the point of the furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2. This strongly suggested that the furin cleavage site could indeed be created naturally by evolution, which in turn meant it was no longer necessary to think the virus could only have been created artificially.
But the PO paper didn't say exactly that. It said an artificial origin wasn't plausible. But why say that unless there was explicit evidence that the lab leak theory wasn't just unnecessary, but positively unlikely?
Well, there was. I didn't include this in my timeline of the internal Slack messages exchanged by the authors while they were writing PO, but one of the messages outlines exactly the evidence against a lab leak. It's from Eddie Holmes, and was written after publication of PO when Kristian Andersen was having second thoughts:
To me there is too long a series of implausible events to suggest inadvertent escape via lab passage.
(i) The Shi group sequence and publish their bat viruses all the time, but none of these are the obvious progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. It seems improbable to me that the one that escaped was not one that they had sequenced already. And why do lab passage on a virus that you have not sequenced?
(ii) If there had been a lab escape then we would expect an initial outbreak at the [Wuhan lab]. Where's the evidence of the outbreak? How could this be hidden? That group were also well enough to sequence an early genome of SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13.
(iii) What are the odds that the virus then first appears in the very place — a wildlife market — where we exactly expect a natural species jump to occur? Why not in a far more crowded place in Wuhan of which there are many.
(iv) Why would the Shi group then publish RaTG13 that would only help point the finger at them? Makes no sense.
That was in April 2020. By now, of course, there's far more evidence both in favor of a natural origin of the virus and against a lab leak. But even at the very start, the evidence against a lab leak was pretty strong.
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