lol! They'd been studying these viruses since SARS-COV-1, MERS, and other similar outbreaks. As climates changed and people from developing nations, engineers going to those developing nations, and trade goods were coming out of Africa to the rest of the world, it was just a matter of time.

Wuhan was certainly far from the ONLY lab. Problem was, Wuhan is PACKED, as in like 10 downtown Manhattans crammed in one city core. They had exotic animals running around in wet markets, and a pretty large aging population in the outskirts. It was a perfect storm for an outbreak. But...

It was not the ONLY outbreak going on. Strain A which became strain C that hit the west coast, and they were relatively tame. Unless you were over 70. Strain B, which went through Europe's extensive aging population, and super dense cities, and eventually East Coast US, was just super super brutal. The stealthy spread, and heavy impact once it took hold, that's the kind of brutal shit only nature can create.

Look at HPV or Hep C if you want an examples of something that slowly gets EVERYWHERE and just wipes people out decades later.

Weaponized pathogens, they're made to hit FAST and burn themselves out. That way your forces can occupy the area once the dieoff is over 4-6 weeks later, and it doesn't spread across the damned globe to your allies and your own people, destroying your economy and the supply chain along the way.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2020/04/07/2004999117.full.pdf

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/coronaviruss-genetics-reveal-its-global-travels-67183

https://www.cell.com/trends/molecular-medicine/fulltext/S1471-4914(20)30065-4

Also in biowarfare, you try to target the youngest and healthiest, as in the Hantavirus variants, which would be IDEAL if you wanted to knock out the 20-30 year old non smoking, athletic, peak working and soldiering populations. Sars-cov-2 went after those with chronic health conditions most related to ACE2 malformation, dysregulation, and those with regulatory pathways along Il-2/IL1-7, and the whole daisy chain of dependencies for that. But it went even deeper. Turns out those who really got ripped up, are those with defective protein encoding for mRNA to their T cells. This 0.1 -2.5% maybe be entirely unable to be vaccinated. Meaning if you don't vaccinate something upward of 95% or better, these people will eventually die in later pocket outbreaks.

https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-020-01673-z

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.23.20218511v1.full

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13577-021-00489-0

https://virological.org/t/mutations-arising-in-sars-cov-2-spike-on-sustained-human-to-human-transmission-and-human-to-animal-passage/578

So, in the end, you've got a pathogen than cuts loose those who tied up maybe 85% of public health resources with long term chronic issues, and knocked 20-30 years off the lives of a bunch of asymptomatic people who had certain ACE2 mutations, and would have eventually had chronic health issues in their last 3 decades.

The ACE2 link to chronic health conditions has been know since 2006. https://jasn.asnjournals.org/content/17/10/2637

https://www.jci.org/articles/view/16980

This is certainly NOT a good design for a bioweapon. This is classic nature being a bitch, and wiping out our oldest and sickest, getting around our shot attention spans, half measures, and lack of impulse control. Get stupid, get dead, that sort of thing. The nations with poor public health infrastructure, who can't follow through, and stay on task, get to watch their loved ones and elders burn up.

Those who buy into easy answers and conspiracy theories of the uneducated, nature will come up to bite them in the ass. Like these guys. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/08/the-strange-phenomenon-of-pentecostals-who-decline-hiv-treatment/278860/

It's fun to believe that SOMEONE out there is behind some tragedy, that there's a plan, and eventual conclusion to it all. Rather than someone stumbling around Mr Bean style triggering one disaster after another at random. ;) Of course, that someone is nature. Heat up the planet, it'll compensate by moving that heat into vapor masses, and pushing them to cooler spots. If the storms rip up everything in their path, oh well. Don't live so close to the shore, or build out in tornado alley. :D Dump garbage into the ocean, oh well, hope you didn't need to eat all those fish. And didn't need the birds to control insect swarms like locusts. ;) Leak a bunch of oil and methane into the ocean, no problem, ancient rot microbes from the ocean floor will bloom, degrade it all into CO2, and wipe out pretty much everything the oil didn't.

For those gulf fishermen, they're now out of business. It'll be 3-4 decades before the ocean floor biology is back to normal. Not even a blink of an eye for nature. And not even much of an event if you consider the impact event 66 million years ago. Or the Deccan traps eruptions that belched smog and toxic gases for well over 10,000 years. Odds are the Deccan traps weakened everything, and the impact(s) finished everything off. But not to worry about that if you're a young earth creationist. ;) Never mind that the human genome alone shows 60,000 generations of incremental mutations and branching. Or that certain religions would not have existed had the Sea People from the 1170BC bronze age collapse adapted not tried to piece together the writings of half a dozen religions, and mythical traditions of 9000 years before them. They of course knew most of the writing and tales were metaphors, morality tales, very long epic poems compacted into a few paragraphs, not literal truth like people from the last 150 years seem to believe. lol! Chalk that up to the novel trend of the marginally educated starting religions.