Yet almost a year later and still no smoking gun showing a clear zoonotic link.
I suppose we’ll never find one because China has no interest in getting to the truth. Cooperation means disclosing things which have the potential to make them look bad so why risk it?
Proving the zoonotic chain of transmission is not a quick or easy thing to do even in a cooperative geopolitical environment. This is not a field that lends itself to snappy "smoking guns". It took years to build the evidence for civet-cats and SARS-1 and we still don't know for certain what the wild ebola reservoir is.
What's missing now is not the reservoir, it's the last link from that reservoir to humans. With SARS, it was fond in less than a year (civets). This time, it remains notoriously missing, despite tens of thousands of animals tested.
I remember in the 1990s reading about expeditions to try to confirm the natural reservoir of Ebola. Apparently we're still trying to figure it out [0, 1]. Covid is subtler and thus harder to track. Definitive proof of origin seems unlikely to arrive quickly or even at all, regardless of who is or isn't acting in good faith.
I suppose we’ll never find one because China has no interest in getting to the truth. Cooperation means disclosing things which have the potential to make them look bad so why risk it?