Yeah but the story matters only if it's man made. However what's the story ? "they made a mistake in a lab" ? great.
1. while doing research that has been banned in other nations due to the extreme hazard
2. despite having a history of lab virus escapes that killed people
3. and then they covered it up
BTW, the virus is at least sort of man made. The lab was breeding viruses. There is no evidence that gene editing technology was used, but we do know that the lab has published multiple research papers about making coronaviruses more infectious in humans.
I think there needs to be a damn good justification for purposely making viruses more able to infect and harm humans. Why would you do that????? Mere scientific curiosity is not a proper justification for putting all of humanity at risk.
that's frightening. Do you have any more information about those papers?
https://jvi.asm.org/content/82/4/1899
Here they are again, years later, still playing with extremely hazardous coronaviruses that act on the ACE2 receptor in humans:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711
This one gene-edits the host cells to have both human and bat traits, making it easier to breed bat viruses into becoming human viruses:
It's not correct to call insertion of a plasmid to be gene editing of a host cell, though this could be arguably pedantic.
I'm curious how you concluded that what they did made it easier to breed bat viruses into becoming human viruses?