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Redfield, whatever else one might think of him, is a top virologist, and his explanation in that 2nd link makes a GREAT deal of sense.

The one thing I would ask him is how many villagers who lived near the bat caves were discovered back in 2014 (IIRC) to have bat coronavirus antibodies? If it was just a few, his hypothesis makes perfect sense. If it was fairly common for the villagers to handle / process for eating bats, and quite a % of villagers had antibodies, then his hypothesis still makes sense. If it wasn’t common for the villagers to handle bats B4 cooking (which would render them safe, if a bit disgusting to most Westerners), and quite a few villagers had bat antibodies, but the outbreak was confined to some isolated village(s), then I would guess at limited-to-moderate human-to-human transmissibility at that point.

If the virus had vigorously spread further (these villages are not TOTALLY isolated), one might guess high natural transmissibility, but, that apparently never happened.

Note that ebola, for example, appears to be able to jump around between a variety of hosts, but, thank goodness, is much less transmissible. In a rough way, that “makes sense”. High transmissibility may require “specialization” (or refinement?) of the virus to best target a certain species.

So then then the question is whether the gain of function was making the jump to humans (not unusual naturally), or becoming moderately human-to-human transmissible (not unheard of, naturally), or was the GOF increased transmissibility with lower severity (very likely doable in an advanced lab, but, as argued many times over here on FR, a natural tendency). The thing is, that last doesn’t seem to occur in nature until a virus gets established in a largish population — I suppose it must take many many trillions of mutations for the “right” one to come along.)

Note that Redfield correctly states “most likely” pending deeper investigation. But the part about that same lab working with placement of the ACE2 receptor into humanized mouse tissue (which is still not working with the virus’ coding directly) is a bit spooky. Playing around with the virus itself would be a logical next step, if one was convinced they could contain the virus.

Now, all that said, eventually some nasty virus with at least moderately high transmissibility (more like Spanish flu?) was / is bound to propagate naturally anyway. The issue is how to slow its spread so most of the world can be better prepared. I doubt China could have totally contained COVID, as Trump alleges, without killing a lot more Chinese by extreme shutdowns / mitigation, but, the spread of COVID out from China could have certainly been slowed down.