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The story (or rumor) that I heard from China is that they were testing the modified virus in the laboratory on bats to see the effects. The bats that survived were supposed to be destroyed, but some unscrupulous employee(s) were instead smuggling them out and selling them to the live “fish” market on the other side of the city.

That’s a pretty good story, and would account for the rapid rise in infections. It wasn’t just a single person spreading it, say, six months ago.

“These bats look OK, and besides, they’ll be cooked, anyway.”

[The story (or rumor) that I heard from China is that they were testing the modified virus in the laboratory on bats to see the effects. The bats that survived were supposed to be destroyed, but some unscrupulous employee(s) were instead smuggling them out and selling them to the live “fish” market on the other side of the city.]

Occam’s Razor suggests that it began like every other epidemic - from a random virulent and adaptable disease that crossed from an animal to humans. I don’t doubt that they (and every other bio-warfare facility on earth, including ours, up to the point Fort Detrick was re-purposed for defensive research) want to come up with a useful bio-weapon. The problem is that biology is in the Stone Age, as regards making things not seen in nature. We can cross-breed things and so on, but they are fairly close to what nature has come up with. And mass-producing and packaging smallpox so it fits in a bomb that can be detonated without killing the pathogens is not anyone’s idea of a genuinely new bioweapon.

I don’t think anyone, including the Chinese, has the ability to come up with a useful bio-weapon that’s any more virulent than what’s available in nature. At best, we can replicate nature. Biology has no equivalent of chemistry’s plastics or physics’s space shuttle. It has only recently evolved beyond mere taxonomy - i.e. classifying and naming things. Nobody has the ability to come up with a genuinely engineered virus like the ones in Resident Evil.