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There doesn't appear to be any regional association with the WIV's research on Bats. WIV studied bats fro all over China and notably isolated the likely center of the 2003 SARS outbreak to a set of bats in Yunnan. The institute was founded in 1956, long before Coronavirus research started in earnest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#SA...

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Wuhan is, however, in the range of Horseshoe Bats. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_horseshoe_bat So people who suggest that it's far from Yunnan are missing the point.

Considering that the Horshoe Bat range encompasses a band between Portugal and Japan that would make the mongol empire jealous, I fail to see how this changes the point. The probability of Coronavirus emerging within the Horshoe Bat range in the same city as a virology lab is vanishingly small without a further confounding variable.

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