No one is asserting that SARS-CoV-2 initially spilled from human to animal to human. You're perhaps misunderstanding the assertion from Pekar et al. that it spi

No one is asserting that SARS-CoV-2 initially spilled from human to animal to human. You're perhaps misunderstanding the assertion from Pekar et al. that it spilled from animal to human twice (i.e., from Animal A to Human A forming Lineage A, and from Animal B to Human B forming Lineage B), in "The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2". I think their argument is weak, and mostly agree with the criticisms in https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1 I can at least repeat their argument correctly, though. You've also grossly mischaracterized the evidence for a research-related origin. For example, it's not that "labs around the world work on SARS viruses"--the WIV was one of only two labs in the world (with UNC) genetically manipulating coronaviruses in ways consistent with SARS-CoV-2, and has the largest collection of novel sarbecoviruses anywhere. David Relman (of Stanford) published a note in 2020, which I believe has aged quite well: https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2021133117 https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2021133117 Many other impeccably-credentialed academics consider this origin to be an open question. Bluntly, I don't think you're well-informed here. (Did you know that the 1977 flu killed ~700k people, and is uncontroversially accepted to have arisen from a research accident? If not, does that shift your priors on research-origin pandemics?) I would urge you to learn more from scientific sources, instead of repeating shallow headline claims.