Here's a good article that covers a lot of the misinformation surrounding the virus. Here's the second on the "man-made" virus claims:
https://medium.com/swlh/misinformation-goes-viral-1aad951e4492
The virus is NOT man made. Scientists can compare the sequence of the new virus with other known viruses and determine how similar it is. The most similar virus is a coronavirus found in bats and the differences are due to mutations that occur through natural evolution, rather than an artificial sequence that was suddenly added.There are literally billions of viruses, all with different hosts and life-cycles…some mutations allow those viruses to jump into new hosts. The clearest picture so far is that SARS-COV-2 originated from bats and maybe an intermediate host. The most likely scenario is that this jump from an intermediate host happened in the wild animal market in Wuhan
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30328-7
In addition, the interaction between the virus spike protein (that make the “crown” of proteins that stick out from the balloon-like membrane) and the human receptor ACE2, which allows the virus to get into human cells, is something that would be extremely hard to engineer given the knowledge at the time
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
4/17 UPDATE: There are insinuations that a lab in China working on bat coronaviruses may have let the virus “escape”. There’s a lot of finger pointing by various US agencies, but I’ve yet to see any scientific analysis that makes this claim credible…so far. There’s also precedent for coronaviruses jumping hosts and into humans, both SARS and MERS for example. Indeed, scientists had publicly warned that this would be one of the most probable causes for an international virus outbreak. Here’s a good write up on the evidence for all of this:
A Virologist Explains Why It Is Unlikely COVID-19 Escaped From A Lab
Nearly five months into the first coronavirus pandemic, the debate rages on over the source of SARS-CoV-2, the virus…
www.forbes.com
