The early samples have reportedly been destroyed. It would be trivial to determine if the virus originated from the lab if the effort was made. Shi was doing gain-of-function experiments with SARS-Cov in a lab without sufficient safeguards, and epidemiological data shows it did not originate at the wet market, but nearby. I don't think it is fully appreciated what types of experiments Shi and others were conducting. They were taking coronaviruses, and making them infect human cells efficiently, both by driving random mutations, and by engineering them to do so.In March, Shi told the Scientific American that in the early days of the outbreak, even she wondered whether coronaviruses were to blame. “Could they have come from our lab?” After all, her lab had collected and sequenced tens of thousands of coronaviruses over the past decade. (She has since adamantly denied that the new coronavirus could have emerged from her lab. Her boss and the WIV issued similar denials.)