There's no new evidence presented here. A paper found a SARS-COV-2-like virus in bats, but if you read the paper, it admits that the virus is less similar than

There's no new evidence presented here. A paper found a SARS-COV-2-like virus in bats, but if you read the paper, it admits that the virus is less similar than RaTG13, which was already known well before the lab leak hypothesis became prominent (and samples of which existed in WIV). It states that transmission at a wet market is coincidence enough to prove that it came from animals, ignoring the consensus view that the Huanan wet market was simply a superspreader event and that the origin likely occurred elsewhere in Wuhan — which even the WHO supports [1], and at the same time downplaying the coincidence of the close proximity to a lab researching coronaviruses in bats (and tries to over-generalize that WIV was studying "bat viruses" — technically true, but certainly less damning than the fact that they were studying bat coronaviruses and intentionally modifying them to be similar to SARS, to study human transmission of SARS-like coronaviruses). One of the other two "new" papers is just an analysis (from May) of the WHO findings. The only new information is contained in the third paper — which if you read it, doesn't downplay the lab leak hypothesis, and partially refutes the idea of multiple origins by claiming that it is likely that two of the four supposed early strains in fact never circulated and were simply mistakes in sequencing or bioinformatics. It honestly seems like the journalist didn't bother reading the papers and just parroted quotes about what was supposedly in them, which is becoming less and less surprising to me with science journalism these days. 1: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/04/02/983773881/surprising-nuggets-from-the-who-report-our-science-correspondent-digs-in https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/04/02/9837738...