Here is China making a virus like this one, even acting on the ACE2 receptor and testing it in human cells, publishing it in early 2008:
https://jvi.asm.org/content/82/4/1899
Here they are again, years later, still playing with extremely hazardous coronaviruses that act on the ACE2 receptor in humans:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711
When an outbreak of exactly that type of virus happens right next to the lab, the only reasonable assumption is that it came from the lab. If there were a sudden outbreak of smallpox next to the CDC lab in Atlanta, we wouldn't just shrug it off as a natural occurrence. The same applies here.
"Playing with" as in "identifying and sequencing the virus in wild bats". The editorial notes say "The results provide the strongest evidence to date that horseshoe bats are natural reservoirs of SARS-CoV."
The location is... interesting, but it's also near a large wet market with a wild life section in a big city, pretty much exactly the circumstances you'd imagine to see natural transmission.
It kindles the imagination but it's not really a smoking gun.
Regardless of what the truth is, this study takes a lot of handwavy assumptions and presents them as fact.
All that means is that they didn’t use a gene editor.
In all likelihood, they were experimenting with something in animals in a lab and it accidentally got released.
If you were trying to research transmissibility, then this is probably the most likely scenario.
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EDIT - if you downvoted me, please explain why. I ascribe no malice in my post, and if I am misunderstanding the process, then correct me before downvoting me.
But if you had animals with weakened immune systems and eight years or more of testing (since SARS), then it seems you have enough time for some mutations to happen.
I still have to reject it. Reasons:
1. If the Chinese national leadership had designed it as a bioweapon, they would also have foreknowledge of its characteristics. Once it was clear it was a new coronavirus in late December/early January, they would have just shut things down instead of waiting three more weeks.
2. No nation has attempted to weaponize a coronavirus before, because it makes a terribly non-specific bioweapon. It will almost inevitably come and cripple your economy if you ever did use it on someone else. And it is also very dangerous if one of your labs releases it accidentally.
We know for a fact, based on research published in Nature and in Journal of Virology, that the lab in Wuhan was modifying bat coronaviruses to replicate well in human cells. Some of these modified viruses were changed to use the ACE2 receptor found in humans, just as the pandemic virus uses.
