Nevertheless, the gain of function research with coronaviruses has been documented in the peer-reviewed literature.
The lack of new information from the Wuhan Institute, despite its longstanding research activities, is probably the most compelling evidence in support of the lab escape hypothesis.
If the evidence pointed elsewhere, it would be released. The most likely explanation is that the Institute's fingerprints are all over this thing.
The second most compelling evidence is that to date the reservoir species has not been found.
I don't know exactly what information you would want. Every single paper about virology research from the institute was published with western authors. Had there been something wrong in the raw data or safety logs those authors would have said so.
Instead they say that everything is normal.
There is a weird double standard here of ignoring data that goes against this hypothesis and interpreting things that happened for every single other zoonosis in the world to be indicative of a lab escape. Such as, for example, three people out of six hundred presenting with symptoms of seasonal illnesses in the appropriate season.
You might want to check that. Afaik, it is 4 months .
(read comments below, I may or may not be correct. Sars1 has been found in Civets, bats and humans. We do not yet know the order of transmission and if civets were indeed the intermediate source.)
It took less than 4 months (feb 2003 -> May 2003) from identifying SARS1 as a novel virus to finding the intermediate animal (civet cats) [1] . It took 10 months to identify that for MERS. (Sept 2012 -> August 2013)
Given that we know it originated in Wuhan, have dedicated order of magnitude more funding to it and all the usual suspects have come up as a negative, the lab escape hypothesis does look increasingly more likely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_syndro...