> But the bats in Yunnan are 1,000 miles from her laboratory, and one of the most extraordinary coincidences of the Covid-19 pandemic is that ground zero happen

> But the bats in Yunnan are 1,000 miles from her laboratory, and one of the most extraordinary coincidences of the Covid-19 pandemic is that ground zero happened to be in Wuhan... Yunnan is also about 1,000 miles from southern Guangdong where SARS-1 broke out. The source in both cases is horseshoe bats that live in the Lancang/Mekong River basin. The intermediate hosts are humans that enter the bat roosting caves and the nocturnal arboreal mammals that live where bats perch feed (pangolins, civets, and raccoon dogs). > Shi and her team had already collected hundreds of samples of the coronavirus — including RaBtCov/4991 — from their work on bats across Yunnan province, and they were running controversial experiments... This is sloppy. It conflates collecting RNA samples with virus isolates. There is no evidence that gain-of-function experiments were being performed on a variation of a SARS-CoV-2 isolate. It is plausible but very unlikely.