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...
You might want to check THAT out.
They found other species could be infected with SARS-CoV-1 after 4 months and hypothesized that civet cats were the intermediate species, but that still hasn't been proven yet.
After the discovery of SARS-like WIV1 in bats in Yunnan in 2013 it was determined in 2016 that WIV1 or a very closely related virus may have jumped directly to humans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_SARS-like_coronavirus_WIV1
And specifically reference 4:
https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048
"Both full-length and chimeric WIV1-CoV readily replicated efficiently in human airway cultures and in vivo, suggesting capability of direct transmission to humans."
So we STILL don't quite understand the origin of SARS1 and if it used an intermediate species or not.
There's still a very similar mystery as to how the closest animal coronavirus is found in a bat in Yunnan, but it showed up in humans in Guangdong roughly 700 miles away (but since it was in 2003 and there's no biological lab in Guangdong there's no competing lab-leak hypothesis over SARS1, even though the observation is exactly the same).
So if I understand right. While SARS1 was found in civets within 4 months of it being discovered, we have recently (2017) also found it in Bats. Current Phylogenetic studies indicate that the Bats are more likely to have been the original reservoir.
And we found it in civets but that doesn't prove that humans caught it from civets, it could be the other way around, just like SARS-CoV-2 and the minks in Denmark.
The fact that WIV1 seems to infect humans also doesn't rule out the possibility that there might still be an intermediate animal like civets. It is suggestive that there's no need for an intermediate animal, but that doesn't prove anything either way.
So we found a similar virus in civets in 2003 and jumped to a conclusion very fast. We have also found that SARS-CoV-2 infects all kinds of other animals and have found it in them, but we assume most of them caught SARS-CoV-2 from humans due to the massive pandemic going on this time. The few viruses we found in e.g. pangolins don't seem to be similar enough to have passed from pangolins to humans or vice versa. The bat coronavirus we already knew about (RaTG13) is somewhat close but would have needed a decade or two to mutate into SARS-CoV-2.
So we can't say that much for certain about either SARS-1 or SARS-2 at this point, even though we're 18 years or so past SARS-1 we still don't have all the answers.