And by the way, the latest word is that the studies that purported to find COVID circulating in Europe before the Wuhan outbreak were flawed, so their results are not reliable.
Those studies saying that covid was in Europe before Wuhan never made any sense any way.
1.) You'd have to take China's word of when they first detected covid. I absolutely do not and can guarantee that their claim of first detecting it in early December is nonsense.
2.) Those studies were supposed to be based on stored samples of sewage effluent from several European cities. To do anything comparative with what was going on in China, you'd need stored samples of sewage from Wuhan and surrounding cities. If the Chinese have such samples, they haven't offered them up for study. And if they did, you'd still have to trust them that they are actually from the specified cities and time periods. Again, I don't trust the Chinese leadership any further than I can throw them.
But, if someone has written a refutation of that study I would like to see it out of interest.
As far as covid being a bio-weapon - I don't personally think that is likely. It's not that lethal. Not like anthrax or the weaponized versions of smallpox that were developed in the Soviet Union during the cold war. I suppose you could make the case that it was designed for economic warfare which would be a novel application for a bio-weapon. I just don't think that's very plausible. It would be hard to predict the economic impact of the weapon on your adversary's and your own economies. China did end up selling a lot of useless masks and similar items. But over all I think their economy was somewhat more negatively impacted by the pandemic and I think it's pretty undeniable that China's economy has slowed and is in many respects worse off than it was before the pandemic. Recently China has declined to publish unemployment numbers. Given that a lot of their published economic data is fabricated, you can only conclude that unemployment has risen enough that made up numbers wouldn't pass the smell test any more.
No, I think the Chinese were doing exactly what they said they were doing and what Anthony Fauci had be advocating B.C. - Before Covid. They were manipulating bat coronaviruses to attempt to anticipated the next SARs pandemic. I find the whole idea foolish - that you can predict the ways in which a virus might evolve in the wild and experiment and come up with strategies to combat these new viruses. There's just too many ways that any given virus might evolve and too many viruses. The whole thing seems futile to me, but Fauci is a fan of the idea.
Of course instead of predicting the next pandemic, they likely caused it. I do believe is it much more likely than not that sars-cov-2 escaped from the WIV due to extremely lax care in what they were doing, which is pretty typical of how the Chinese conduct business in general.