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A friend of mine brought this video to my attention. At 0:51, journalist Sharri Markson claims

As you can see, this video shows bats in a cage at the Wuhan Institute [of Virology]

This contradicts previous claims, such as ones by Peter Daszak who works for the WHO:

[The Wuhan Institute of Virology] DO NOT have live or dead bats in them. There is no evidence anywhere that this happened.

My questions are as follows:

  • Does Markson accurately characterize the contents of the footage?

  • Do Markson and Carlson accurately characterize the lab itself and the nature of the lab's work (i.e. that it was studying coronaviruses, specifically which ones can infect humans)?

  • Are there experts or authorities who have commented on whether these videos are or are not evidence for the claim that SARS-Cov-2 originated in a lab?

A similar question was asked before on this site, but it was asked over a year ago and none of the answers are particularly recent. All answers say it was unknown whether or not the virus originated from a lab, and there was no evidence to support the claim. I apologize if it has been asked again recently, but I thought it would be a good idea to ask it again when I saw this footage.

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    Of concern that I don't have time to check is whether the videos you've linked to actually make the claims you've written here. Generally, we prefer that you quote items exactly and note time stamps if you're going to link to videos.
    – user11643
    Jun 30, 2021 at 17:23
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    Also, bats in a lab are not evidence of bats in the lab that's at the center of all the claims.
    – Shadur
    Jun 30, 2021 at 18:02
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    This obviously isn't enough for a full answer, but stock footage of bats in a lab, bats flying in nature, and a bat hanging off a hat of someone clearly not in a lab aren't proof that bats were in the lab by any stretch of the imagination. Markson says where she got the original footage from but the link from The Blaze article above links to an article on Sky News that does not exist.
    – DenisS
    Jun 30, 2021 at 18:09
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    They show Peter Daszak denying that there were bats in the lab, but at 3:15 they say he has retracted it and admitted there were: but no footage of that.
    – Weather Vane
    Jun 30, 2021 at 18:23
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    The still image of scientists in the field at timestamp 1:05, can be found from a slightly different angle on the Wuhan Branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences website, here: whb.cas.cn/xw/mtjj/201811/t20181122_5191190.html - this shows Shi Zhengli and her team sampling a bat cave, during part of their 13 year search to track down the originator of the 2003 SARS outbreak (ultimately a bat cave in Yunnan).
    – Showsni
    Jul 1, 2021 at 1:02

1 Answer 1

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We don't know.

All we see in the videos are a group of bats inside a laboratory. That video could have been taken inside any laboratory at any time. It could even be from a movie or TV show.

There is an article showing that a laboratory in Wuhan studied deadly pathogens: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.21487

However, this does not prove nor disprove the videos or that COVID originated from the aforementioned lab.

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  • Even if we know what laboratory it is from can we even say when the bats had been in the lab and if they had been removed?
    – Joe W
    Jul 22, 2021 at 20:45

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