I've said this before, but it bears repeating.
This pandemic is not the kind of thing that could have been engineered. It is possible to make targeted changes to the genome of a virus, but you'd have to know what changes to make.
The reason SARS2 went pandemic, but SARS did not, is that SARS2 has the ability to spread through asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic hosts. We don't know how it does that, even knowing its whole genetic code. Pretty much every virologist on the planet is paying attention to this virus, and no one has come up with an explanation of how the genome of this virus leads to its ability to spread in this way.
I get the impression that the idea behind these conspiracy theories is that if something bad happens, it can't be due to nature, it must be human agency -- the natural is safe and the artificial is dangerous. But this belief is deeply at odds with the biology. Nature wants to eat you. If you disable the immune system of a human, they will quickly die, because the immune system is constantly fending off microorganisms that are all around us, invisibly licking their chops at the thought of getting access to a nutrient-rich human body. Even the good bacteria that live in your gut are being held in check by your immune system. They are beneficial if you have a functioning immune system, but at the same time, they would eat you if they could.
Viruses are, at least sometimes, a bit gentler than bacteria. They just want to hijack your cells, and turn them into virus factories. Think of them as the Borg of the natural world. You will be assimilated. There are some viruses that manage to lie low and live in what appears at first to be peaceful coexistence, but they too are being held in check by the immune system. Weaken the immune system, and now you've got the virus that gave you chickenpox 50 years ago emerging to cause shingles.
New viruses have been emerging from the animal world for at least as long as we have been studying them. This is not the first, and it won't be the last. It's the way nature works.
Only a few generations ago, the leading causes of death were infections, attacks from without by nature. We have managed to dramatically reduce those numbers. Part of it was sanitation. We realized that sewage was contaminating the water supplies, and fixed that problem. Part of it was the development of drugs, especially antibiotics. And the biggest part of it was the development of vaccines. They are not perfect, but they are obviously much, much better than the alternative.
Nature can be quite beautiful. Even microorganisms that cause disease are awe-inspiring in their complexity. I'm not anti-nature. But I also approach it with a healthy dose of caution, because even if we have subdued it a great deal, I know that it only appears tame.
