Intermediate hosts - Civets

Here’s a good question to open the topic:
How did SARS-1 originate?
Ans: Bats infected civets which infected humans at a wet market, right?

Wrong. There’s no evidence for civets being the intermediate host. It’s a made-up narrative thing - which makes me question the whole origin of SARS-1 - but i’m not going down that rabbit hole!

(Edit: Later, i did venture down there a little bit - it's even murkier than the origin of Covid)

Bat Lady rose to prominence through her studies on SARS-1.  She was convinced that civets had nothing to do with it.  Here is her evidence from a 2006 paper:

During the 2002–2003 outbreaks, none of the animal traders surveyed in the markets, who supposedly had very close contact with live civets, displayed SARS symptoms.  These observations seem to indicate that >1 other animal species may play a role in transmission of SARS-CoV to humans.

Most, if not all, civets traded in the markets are not truly wildlife animals; rather, they are farmed animals...No significant level of SARS-CoV antibody was detected in any of the 75 samples taken from 6 farms in 3 provinces.

Similar results were obtained in wild-trapped civets in Hong Kong; none of the 21 wild civets sampled had positive antibody or PCR results for SARS-CoV.

The lack of widespread infection in wild or farmed palm civets makes them unlikely to have been the natural reservoir host.

Bat Lady's conclusion was that civets at the market (some of which did test positive) were more likely to have become infected by humans rather than the other way around.

In 2013, a WIV/EcoHealth Alliance collaboration announced they had:

...uncovered genome sequences of a new virus closely related to SARS (which) suggests that SARS may have originated from one of these viruses, precluding civets from playing a part in the transmission process.
(note: WIV wasn't called WIV in 2013, but involved much the same personnel.)

The paper states:
Our results provide the strongest evidence to date ...that intermediate hosts may not be necessary for direct human infection by some bat SL-CoVs.

Even Ian Lipkin, who to this day talks about civets being an intermediate host for SARS as if it’s an incontrovertible fact (as he segues into his pangolin theory) admitted back in 2013 that:

(I)t does provide compelling evidence that an intermediate host was not necessary.

Finally in 2017, the same researchers proclaimed they'd found all the building blocks for SARS-1 in a cave in Yunnan - 1000 km away from Guangdong (where the outbreak occurred). Meaning they could theoretically piece together SARS from different bats.  But still no explanation of how that theoretical bat traveled 1000km, without infecting anyone on the way, and no demonstration of this theoretical virus being able to jump from bats to humans (or civets).

So how the hell did we get to the situation where the entire world believes civets were the culprits?

The answer appears to lie in the self-perpetuating industry that is the field of scientists studying zoonotic transfer - the Zoonati.  Let’s take a closer look at this tight-knitted clique.