@Walks_At_Night what is the word on the street?
Who knows? I've seen all kinds of theories. The main one being that it came from some critter in one of those heinous markets they have. They pretty much have a small Noah's Ark of animals bunged into cages and available for slaughter right on the spot. Hardly no sanitary precautions at all - blood and gore everywhere. Certainly not a stretch to think just about anything could brew up in one of those places.
It's my understanding that are a couple of labs in Wuhan were something might have gone awry. A university lab where supposedly some guy got bit with some sort of bat and that kicked it off. Then they also have a big time government lab. Also rumors about that regarding either a bioweapon or SARS vaccine that went awry. Certainly there some factions in China that aggressively are working on stuff.
It was just last year that news of them actually producing
"GMO" human babies came to light.
Stuff happens in these labs - The US Army lab at Fort Dietrick was
closed down due to issues, the Canadian lab had some sort of
creepy theft by PRC operatives and the Russian lab exploded.
https://globalbiodefense.com/2019/09/21/explosion-confirmed-at-russian-lab-storing-smallpox-ebola/Then there was the FBI arrest of the chair of the Chemical Biology Department at Harvard. What's up with that? Nothing good, I'm sure. Harvard certainly didn't act outraged at the G-men: "“The charges brought by the U.S. government against Professor Lieber are extremely serious. Harvard is cooperating with federal authorities, including the National Institutes of Health, and is conducting its own review of the alleged misconduct."
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/28/800442646/acclaimed-harvard-scientist-is-arrested-accused-of-lying-about-ties-to-chinaI'd imagine someone in the spook community knows the real deal but of course, they ain't talking.
Meanwhile, the folks I work with in Beijing are locked down in their abodes or in a few case just simply gone.