Please don't parrot conspiracy theories. The virus shares almost 100% of its identity with known pangolin viruses. > The discovery of multiple lineages of pang

Please don't parrot conspiracy theories. The virus shares almost 100% of its identity with known pangolin viruses. > The discovery of multiple lineages of pangolin coronavirus and their similarity to SARS-CoV-2 suggests that pangolins should be considered as possible hosts in the emergence of novel coronaviruses and should be removed from wet markets to prevent zoonotic transmission. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2169-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2169-0 Edit: To clarify, these viruses have approximately 90% identity but in the (oft-suspected and brought up) ACE2-binding spike protein there is a ~97% sequence identity. > In particular, SARS-CoV-2 exhibits very high sequence similarity to the Guangdong pangolin coronaviruses in the receptor-binding domain (RBD; 97.4%) ... Indeed, the Guangdong pangolin coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2 possess identical amino acids at the five critical residues of the RBD. There is another preprint that details more about betacoronavirus recombination. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.10.942748v1.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.10.942748v1.... It's almost certainly the product of a recombination event between a pangolin and bat betacoronavirus, since recombination aggressively involves the spike protein in betacoronaviruses. Since we already have a bat virus with high identity (96%) and now a spike protein with very high identity (97%), both in the same phylogenetic tree with origins to SARS-CoV-2, it's reasonably to assume that this is the product of natural recombinant evolution. Now, it might be the case that it's guided evolution in a Wuhan lab somewhere, but I don't really buy it. Nature is staggeringly good at producing new and innovating viruses, and I believe we will soon find more closely related ancestors to this virus.