Experts know the new coronavirus is not a bioweapon. They disagree on whether it could have leaked from a research lab – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, a biosecurity expert who has been speaking out on lab safety since the early 2000s, does agree with the Nature Medicine authors argument that the new coronavirus wasn t purposefully manipulated by humans, calling their arguments on this score strong. Ebright helped The Washington Post debunk a claim that the COVID-19 outbreak can somehow be tied to bioweapons activity, a conspiracy theory that s been promoted or endorsed by the likes of US Sen. Tom Cotton, Iran s supreme leader, and others.

But Ebright thinks that it is possible the COVID-19 pandemic started as an accidental release from a laboratory such as one of the two in Wuhan that are known to have been studying bat coronaviruses.

Except for SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, two deadly viruses that have caused outbreaks in the past, coronaviruses have been studied at laboratories that are labelled as operating at a moderate biosafety level known as BSL-2, Ebright says. And, he says, bat coronaviruses have been studied at such labs in and around Wuhan, China, where the new coronavirus first emerged. As a result, Ebright says, bat coronaviruses at Wuhan [Center for Disease Control] and Wuhan Institute of Virology routinely were collected and studied at BSL-2, which provides only minimal protections against infection of lab workers.

via thebulletin.org

Those darn Chinese communist virus researchers. Always starting global pandemics.