If this was some sort of lab mistake, as the conspiracy angle suggests, IMO that's much less embarrassing. In the "real" explanation, thousands of mainlanders are regularly eating food contaminated with bat shit, with zero health standards. In the "conspiracy", they're a first-world country doing groundbreaking science, and an accident occurred.
I think they're probably telling the truth.
That's old information. The first cases of the virus had no connection with the wet market, and no connection could later be found other than it was the first major subsequent point of spreading for the virus. So it's much more likely that people spread it at the market, rather than that it came from there.
However, they are indeed disgusting third-world wet markets and the practice of consuming bush meat as well as having live wild animals of all different kinds together in a wet market is an experiment we shouldn't be conducting. The risk to reward ratio is way too high. Remember that HIV likely came from butchering and consuming contaminated chimpanzees in Africa. The world needs to put those kinds of practices behind us, it has cost us far more than it can ever be worth.
The (theorized) problem was that wild-caught land-animals happened to be part of the selection.
Of course you are making some other argument, but I doubt it's the poor people in Wuhan that are eating pangolins.
If the wet market is at fault, it can be blamed on the local party leadership, which was easy enough to do because they continued to screw up during the early stages of the pandemic. One memorable one is when they hosted a massive dinner for 20000 people in close proximity when it was starting to really heat up.
If it's the lab, that squarely falls on the national government, which in all things can and must do no wrong.
A poster above said it perfectly, when your authority comes from competency, you need to show your competent. The CCP has this precarious position in China where the people support it strongly because they've been doing a good job giving people better lives, at least from their perspective. If that turns badly in any way, it could break them.
Yes
> The idea that this is only a problem in Africa and Asia is entirely nonsensical.
No, this statement of yours is nonsensical. What I'm saying is the practice of eating bush meat, and these kinds of wet markets bring very little value by themselves. Compared to animal husbandry in general, not even 1% of the total value. However, they represent an outsized proportion of the risk. So it's a bad idea. One could improve the risk-reward ratio by eliminating them - entirely logical.
"Mislabeled SRA entry is one thing but - it’s clear that it’s impossible (in my hands at least with a -very good- pipeline) to assemble the reference that is in GenBank from the data in SRA"