The Daily Caller has a new report out quoting a Coronavirus expert, Richard H. Ebright, who suggests that it’s entirely possible the coronavirus leaked from a Wuhan lab where they were studying bat viruses:

A molecular biologist who has been quoted as a coronavirus expert by The Washington Post and MSNBC said Thursday in no uncertain terms that the novel coronavirus could have been unleashed due to a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

China’s top virologist on bat-borne viruses, Shi Zhengli, has sworn on her life that the virus did not leak from her Wuhan lab, saying that its spread was “nature punishing the human race for keeping uncivilized living habits.”

But Richard H. Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday that there is a real possibility that the virus entered the human population due to a laboratory accident.

When asked specifically if he believes the virus could have leaked from Shi’s lab in Wuhan, Ebright said: “Yes.”

“A denial is not a refutation,” Ebright said. “Especially not a denial based on ‘nature punishing the human race for keeping uncivilized living habits.’”

Zhengli had worried in December that the coronavirus leaked from her lab…

And while Shi now tells those who question whether her lab could be connected to the release of the coronavirus to “shut their stinking mouths,” she previously said she lost sleep worrying about the possibility that her lab in Wuhan could have been responsible for the virus’s release.

Shi, known by her colleagues as the “bat woman” because of the 16 years she has spent hunting for viruses in bat caves, told Scientific American in March that she frantically searched for any evidence that her laboratory’s records were mishandled upon learning of the virus’s outbreak in Wuhan in late December.

“Could they have come from our lab?” Shi recalled thinking.

“I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” she noted, saying that her studies had shown that southern China posed the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping from animals to humans.

Shi said she breathed a sigh of relief when results came back showing that the sequences of the coronavirus did not match the viruses she and her team had sampled from bat caves.

“That really took a load off my mind,” Shi said. “I had not slept a wink for days.”

Ebright says the possibility of a lab accident “cannot–and should not–be dismissed.”

Ebright, the Rutgers University molecular biologist, told Beijing-based news outlet Caixin Global in February that while there is “no basis to suspect the virus was engineered,” the available data indicates that the virus’s introduction into human populations could be attributed to either natural causes or to a laboratory mishap.

The Washington Post and MSNBC have quoted Ebright saying that theories about the virus being a bioweapon should be “firmly excluded,” but neither outlet included his belief that the possibility that the virus entered the human population through a lab accident “cannot–and should not–be dismissed.”

While researching some of this, I found a Korean news report from February 16 reporting that some Chinese scientists believe this may have leaked from the virology lab instead of coming from the ‘wet market’:

Whichever way it occurred, either naturally or via a lab accident, the one thing we know for sure is that China silenced it’s people and hid it from the world for far too long and should be held accountable. Whether that will actually happen or not, I seriously have my doubts.