zlacker

I grant it's totally possible for this to occur naturally, at random (thank you, genetics) -- but when we haven't found any intermediate host animals and there's a lab at the outbreak location that:

    Developed chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses
    Conducted ’dangerous’ gain-of-function research on the SARS-CoV-1 virus, some of which had been funded by the US government (Asia Times)
    Established a 96.2% match with SARS-CoV-2 and a virus they sampled from a cave over 1,000 miles away from Wuhan
    Injected live piglets with bat coronaviruses as recently as July 2019
    Published a paper on a close descendant of SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV, in November 2019
    Was hiring researchers to work on bat coronaviruses as recently as November 2019

You have to imagine the very real possibility that it was just an accident.