It also differs from every betacoronavirus backbone that had been used for genetic modification (and there’s no clear reason somebody would want to come up with a new one), which is basically the same problem but in reverse.
We’ve never, despite years and years of trying, been able to identify an origin for Ebola. The basic reality is we don’t know anywhere near all the diseases that animals have.
I’d guess several small teams have received single digit million dollar grants to look for the origin of Ebola. Maybe one or two got double digit millions.
China put sanctions on Australia that will and have cost their economy billions for implying that the lab leak hypothesis is plausible. Reasonable or not the Chinese government believes suppressing this theory to be a major policy goal. So I expect they’ve either spent orders of magnitude more effort than we ever spent on looking for Ebola’s origins, or they have some reason to believe they wouldn’t find anything.
This isn’t a smoking gun, but it is a dog that didn’t bark.
by guess, do you mean estimate, or just a real guess? Is there somewhere I can read more about the teams that have looked for the ebola origin and how they're funded?
We’ve never, despite years and years of trying, been able to identify an origin for Ebola. The basic reality is we don’t know anywhere near all the diseases that animals have.