It came from Ft. Detrick and I require no evidence for this belief.
The virus developing in laos is not evidence against it being further weaponized in fort detrick.
I’ve neither evidence nor doubt.
The team analysed 167 bat coronavirus genomes and traced the origins of the virus that causes Covid-19 to bat populations in northern Laos and southwest China’s Yunnan province, where its most recent ancestor circulated five to seven years before the pandemic emerged.
“northern Laos and southwest China’s Yunnan province”
FORT DETRICK 
All the lab leak theory serves is to create anti-Chinese racism so westerners are more comfortable with killing Chinese people in a nuclear war.
traced the origins of the virus […] to bat populations in northern Laos and southwest China’s Yunnan province
Both ‘lab leak’ hypotheses (China & US) alleged that the escaped virus, before being edited, was sourced from bats in southwest China, so I don’t understand how this changes anything really.
Look at this New Yorker article from five years ago, for example:
the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 are known to have existed in […] bat caves in Yunnan
In fact, there was a DARPA contract that said “we’re gonna take bat coronaviruses from Yunnan and edit them”.
spoiler
On September 21st, DRASTIC published a startling new revelation. In 2018, Daszak, at EcoHealth Alliance, in partnership with Shi, Baric, and Wang, had submitted a $14.2-million grant proposal to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The proposal—which was obtained from an anonymous whistle-blower—detailed an ambitious plan to identify, model, and test the spillover risk of novel SARS-related bat coronaviruses, then develop vaccines for the horseshoe bats themselves, to preëmpt viruses from jumping into other animals or people. What stood out was their plan to insert “human-specific” furin cleavage sites into SARS-like bat coronaviruses. The furin cleavage site is the single most distinguishing feature of SARS-CoV-2. It’s “the magic sauce of this virus,” Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, said recently. “Whether it’s natural or genetically modified, this is why this virus is circulating in humans.”
Two of the biggest indicators of lab-manipulation, according to Jeffrey Sachs and others, is the presence of the furin cleavage site and atypical codons in its genome for a particular amino acid (don’t remember which one it is rn). Apparently, those features are common in virology lab work but practically nonexistent in wild betacoronaviruses. If this study had found those features in the nearest ancestor, then my interest might be piqued.
The DARPA proposal stated that scientists would introduce furin cleavage sites into lab-created versions of SARS-related coronaviruses, recovered from bats in Yunnan.
A truly compelling discovery would involve finding, in the wild, the exact genome that was first discovered in human patients (or a few base pairs removed). That may sound like an unreasonably high bar of evidence, but, if I’m not mistaken, precisely that has been done for the first SARS virus and also a previous pandemic[1] caused by a lab leak, so it really isn’t.
Edit: There is also the serologic antibody evidence cited by China suggesting the virus was in the US first, which is only consistent with the Maryland lab leak hypothesis. Funnily enough, Jeffrey Sachs is ignorant of this; he believes it leaked from the Wuhan lab, but he recognizes that the virology work there was being done at the behest of DARPA and originated with Ralph Baric in North Carolina, and so he rightfully blames the US in that scenario.
Edit2: Leaked emails revealed USAMRIID scientists saying to each other “oh shit, this SARS-2 thing looks like a lab-made virus WTF!?” Weeks later the same scientists published a paper arguing that it was obviously natural and it was silly to think otherwise.
Sachs’s explanation of a hair-brained scheme to infect bats with coronavirus in order to inoculate bats from more dangerous viruses which would protect US troops stationed in SEA somehow is orders of magnitudes stupider than the US developing coronavirus in Fort Derrick as a bioweapon, which means that’s probably what actually happened lol
Yeah, lab editing would involve relatively minor (in terms of number of base pairs altered), so pan-genome scans would still show the pandemic-causing strain as closely related to its parent strain.
The more persuasive evidence is the apparent similarity to the SARS outbreak but I wouldn’t call that proof.
INVESTIGATE FORT DETRICK
Link to the study https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00353-8
