Short version - until we find a candidate progenitor virus in an animal population, which enables us to work out a likely route of transmission to humans, we don't have enough information to know.
That is enough to say that it will probably happen again in our lifetime from an actual lab leak. We have the technology, the world is large, there are a lot of foolish researchers in it. We need to be more prepared to curtail or cease international travel.
Or would the US and its allies release a virus it knowingly funded (for plausible deniability) in a state it constantly calls its 'greatest adversary & threat' during the 2019 war games?
One of these seems more likely than the other to an objective observer since this isn't the first time the US and its allies have engaged in chemical & bio-warfare against the Chinese.
The foreign aircraft carriers and war ships surrounding the Chinese coast are perhaps yet another clue...
Yes it can. Labs specifically study, and propagate, mutations. A lab can do in years what might take nature decades. If it did originate from a lab, we very likely would never find a close enough progenitor in nature to know where things started (what strain the lab started with).
There is a probabilistic aspect to this though. If we happen to find the exact wild virus population Cov-19 originated from (whether it then mutated naturally or in a lab) then I think we'll nail it. On the other hand if we just find an adjacent population that diverged from the actual Cov-19 source some time ago it could be harder to pin down the route.
It's not a recipe to create virus in a lab. It's a recipe to manufacture copies of the virus in a lab.
Just because China refuses to cooperate (as stated by the article), does not mean that trying to find a natural cause is the only way to resolve the issue.
It's a bit misleading as well as the vast majority of the agencies mentioned in the article do not believe in a natural origin.
>The ODNI report said four U.S. spy agencies and a multi-agency body have "low confidence" that COVID-19 originated with an infected animal or a related virus.
Unless the virus was literally constructed using base chemicals from the ground up entirely artificially, something that as far as we know has never been done and the technology for which doesn't yet plausibly exist, the virus must have a natural progenitor from which it either evolved, was bred or was engineered. That does not exclude the possibility that the virus was engineered from a progenitor virus in a lab and is "artificial" in that sense.
So yes you are technically correct (which of course is the best correct), but could you be more clear what you mean by natural, and what alternatives you think are being excluded?
And if you think that genome synthesis is not possible, look up "DNA printer". But i don't think that's what you mean.
Natural = produced by nature
We know for a fact that coronaviruses were being engineered in unsafe BSL2 lab conditions literally blocks away from the epicenter of the outbreak.
With China's refusal to cooperate, they are asking you to believe that this is all merely coincidence.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
If we can find that original natural source strain of virus, we should be able to compare it to Cov-19 and determine the likely path of development. This has been done many times before for other viruses, such as SARS, MERS, Swine Flu, etc.
Of course the viruses have a natural origin, where do you think the original samples come from?
I don't know where you are interpreting your stance from, and I am sorry if I am being unclear, english is not my first language.. but just because viruses are being engineered in a lab does not mean they build them molecule by molecule, but they do transfer genes between existing viruses.