The viral phylogeny and history of it's evolution are a mountain of evidence. Why don't you trust them?
We don't see adaptation to the new host. This means that either the spillover happened a long time before it was detected (months, years), or the proximal host was a primate. Or, the virus could have been adapted to human cells and their surface proteins in relatively straightforward laboratory experiments. Then, if accidentally released, the phylogeny and virus adaptation process would look exactly like the one we are seeing with hundreds of thousands of viral genomes.
A spillover from nature would look like SARS1. There are rapid phenotypic adaptations in the beginning of the epidemic. The initial virus is infectious, but not anything like SARS2. In SARS2, it takes many months for real phenotypic change to appear. The rate of variation is clock-like because there are few easy phenotypic wins to be made.
This is hard evidence. What do you make of it? Maybe you have to understand genetics and evolution to "read" this material, but that doesn't negate it.
Why do you say so? Co-evolving organisms/species and their cross-interaction in a large changing global environment is not a deterministic process, or rather is not a process that we can predict with any great degree of accuracy. What things would "look like" is extrapolation, not evidence.
In any case, my main objection to your argument is that you're drawing inferences from an imperfect dataset and them employing backwards reasoning "Well nothing else explains it except theory A". Sorry, but that doesn't satisfy me. I still want to see actual evidence of actual work being done in an actual lab that corroborates the hypothesis. It is pretty much impossible to keep such large multi-year scientific development projects secret in this day and age. There are dozens of people involved, past employees, lab assistants, etc, etc. I work in biotech (I'm not claiming to be any expert on anything) and maybe that's why I'm finding it difficult.
>The viral phylogeny and history of it's evolution
... point to it being a natural zoonotic spillover event. Wuhan had a virus institute because it is a place where novel viruses are found, not the other way around.
This is not true as far as I’m aware. Novel bat coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2 are usually found deep in bat caves in the south of China, ~2000km away from Wuhan. The WIV was established in the 50s, long before serious coronavirus research was a thing.
We don't see adaptation to the new host. This means that either the spillover happened a long time before it was detected (months, years), or the proximal host was a primate. Or, the virus could have been adapted to human cells and their surface proteins in relatively straightforward laboratory experiments. Then, if accidentally released, the phylogeny and virus adaptation process would look exactly like the one we are seeing with hundreds of thousands of viral genomes.
A spillover from nature would look like SARS1. There are rapid phenotypic adaptations in the beginning of the epidemic. The initial virus is infectious, but not anything like SARS2. In SARS2, it takes many months for real phenotypic change to appear. The rate of variation is clock-like because there are few easy phenotypic wins to be made.
This is hard evidence. What do you make of it? Maybe you have to understand genetics and evolution to "read" this material, but that doesn't negate it.