I will hold comment till I see anything to support this wild ass story.....
Biosafety experts agree that as more countries handle deadly and exotic microbes at containment labs like the one in Wuhan, risks of accidents or terrorism are growing. In a rush to open labs that scientists say can appear motivated by national pride, governments on every major continent now handle dangerous pathogens that were once confined to a handful of institutions like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The release of pathogenic microorganisms from high-containment laboratories, such as the pandemic CoV-19, seems more likely in countries without current, historically solidified standards or legislation,” says Thomas Binz, who leads biosafety efforts at Switzerland’s Federal Office of Public Health.
The showpiece of Wuhan’s virology institute is a facility opened in 2017 as the most secure of its kind: Biosafety Level 4, or BSL-4, which means maximum containment of the kind of pathogens that are deadliest to humans. “Infections caused by these microbes are frequently fatal and without treatment or vaccines,” according to a CDC description of what belongs in such a lab.
The one in Wuhan, China’s first to handle human pathogens, was engineered by a military contractor for the People’s Liberation Army and certified domestically. It has studied HIV, Ebola and now Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus discovered in the city.
In 2003, local authorities failed to identify what was making people sick.
In the three months it took for Beijing to report the SARS outbreak to the WHO, thousands of people had fallen ill, including in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Compounding the fumble, Chinese labs repeatedly risked sparking new outbreaks by mishandling the virus, the government says.
This time, within four days of receiving samples of a mysterious pneumonia from a local hospital on Dec. 30, the Wuhan institute said in a published timeline, its scientists sequenced its genome and determined it was a never-before-seen pathogen, possibly linked to bats and a local market. Scientists elsewhere in China were faster on some aspects of the early hunt.
Initially, as it did with SARS, China’s government downplayed the coronavirus spread, and the People’s Liberation Army dispatched its top biological-weapons specialist, a major general named Chen Wei to Wuhan.
Also, a Northwestern University-trained DNA specialist in China who formerly worked in Wuhan, Botao Xiao of South China University of Technology, published a paper stating “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.”
China’s government and state media issued stern and detailed denials that there had been any accident.
There are unanswered questions about the origin of the virus and a laboratory accident can’t be ruled out.
Biosafety experts from dozens of countries and 50 organizations discussed the hazards of mushrooming numbers of BSL-4 labs without international oversight. A 66-page WHO summary of the three-day event described “a certain level of mistrust between well-established and newly operational facilities.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-epidemic-draws-scrutiny-to-labs-handling-deadly-pathogens-11583349777
During the past two decades, three zoonotic coronaviruses have been identified as the cause of large-scale disease outbreaks⁻Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and Swine Acute Diarrhea Syndrome (SADS). SARS and MERS emerged in 2003 and 2012, respectively, and caused a worldwide pandemic that claimed thousands of human lives, while SADS struck the swine industry in 2017.
They have common characteristics, such as they are all highly pathogenic to humans or livestock, their agents originated from bats, and two of them originated in China.
Thus, it is highly likely that future SARS- or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China. Therefore, the investigation of bat coronaviruses becomes an urgent issue for the detection of early warning signs, which in turn minimizes the impact of such future outbreaks in China.
The purpose of the review is to summarize the current knowledge on viral diversity, reservoir hosts, and the geographical distributions of bat coronaviruses in China, and eventually we aim to predict virus hotspots and their cross-species transmission potential.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30832341
