Since many people keep asking me to comment on the opinions expressed by Chellaney and Carlson and a chIna paper on the SARS-CoV-2 virus here are some comments: the essence has been covered in this article from more than month ago: https://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/2020/02/26/the-plague-historical-biographical-and-current-a-brief-roundup/

To summarize and clarify: 1) I have closely looked at the genome of this virus and its relatives and cay emphatically that it shows no signs of being engineered by humans in the lab. The complete arguments for this are somewhat complex and need understanding of evolution& biochem

and this is hardly the medium where I'm going to talk of any of that. 2) Was it then a natural virus that was cultivated/passaged for use as biological weaponry ? (e.g. like the Rus tried to weaponize Indian Variola strain and Marburg). The evidence for that is also lacking. It

would essentially imply an advance knowledge of a bat or some other zoonotic virus working perfectly in animals. All we know of the chIna-s studies on these viruses shows no evidence that they possessed any such knowledge. In fact their knowledge of these viruses beyond the fact

they isolated many of them is rather pedestrian. 3) Could they have isolated and cultivated the virus in a Wuhan lab and it escaped from there? This possibility cannot be completely ruled out. We know that the Wuhan group had engaged in several studies in identifying & sequencing

numerous SARS-like & other Coronaviruses from bats and other mammals, and also Marburg/Ebola-like filoviruses from bats. They had also studied natural human resistance to these even in collaboration with Indian workers on Eastern bat-hunting tribes of India. So in principle they

they had a lot of these viruses from bats. However, as far as we know they were very active in publish all they had including closely related viruses. We have the time stamps for all their sequence releases and none of those show them possessing this virus anytime before this

epidemic. The bulk of their releases were from 2017 CE. So there is no available evidence that they had this virus in hand before the epidemic. 4) Could they have had this in storage and not yet sequenced it? We cannot rule this out entirely. It might be they had collected bats

with this virus but not bothered to study them for they had already published several related viruses unlikely to get a high profile publication (something chIna-s are known to given an arm or eye for) from the left overs. Could such a collected bat have landed up in the market?

We know of the unscrupulous practice of some chIna researchers/technicians selling lab animals for consumption after experiments are done. So this is not impossible but not something we can say for certain. 6) Would this virus only come from the Chinese horseshoe bat which was

apparently not local? No, that claim cannot be definitively made. Related coronaviruses are found in a range of bats and it could have easily been from local bat or already transmitted from a local bat to some other mammal. The chIna-s claimed they did not find in any animal in

market but apparently found the virus on surfaces in the market. None of this is conclusive information about its origins. To end: there is a finite chance that a natural bat virus escaped from the local virology lab but the evidence for it is hardly stronger than it coming from

the prospective food items of mammalian origin at the market or brought by some bushmeat forager like the e.g. of Yersinia pestis plague in China from last year.