It is a fact, purposely infecting test animals and selecting for the most virulent mutations would be INDISTINGUISHABLE from natural mutation, because it is nothing more than accelerating a natural process and selecting for desirable traits. There is no evidence that this has been excluded as a possibility, and any claims otherwise are assumptions, not based on observable empirical data.
That is exactly the method which has been used for over 100 years. That is one of the reasons that most biological warfare labs call themselves things like 'animal disease research centers', and why they maintain large groups of animals.
Covid-19 is often over-hyped in the lethality feature, but it actually does seem to have a more valid, interesting, and unusual collection of features which are eye-opening and help is spread world-wide. r0, incubation time, durability to remain active on surfaces, etc. We can limit the possibilities for the existence of 'SARS-cov-2' to two choices for the purposes of rational analysis here:
- by-chance hop from a bat pool to another species (pangolin, snake, whatever) and from thence to humans.
- artificial selection and refining in a research facility.
It is a known fact that there are research facilities doing these kinds of projects and using bat derived coronavirus. And it is simply beyond doubt creating millions and millions of opportunities for 'gain of function' mutations to pop up (probably under various deliberately mutagenic conditions) and deliberate selection will arrive at a solution more quickly than the alternate. The alternate being a very finite number of opportunities for a species jump to happen and for just the right individual pangolin to be captured and harvested for sale to humans while a number of very 'useful' mutations are happening along the way.
Given the above observations, which are simply not very contentious, it is perfect rational to consider the more likely scenerio as, well, more likely. I would say more likely by many orders of magnitude, but that's getting into being a judgement thing.
One thing it is NOT is 'crazy' to consider the possibility that SARS-cov-2 came from something other than bat soup. If anything, someone who cannot bring themselves to consider the possibility of lab or facility creation has got a problem related to intellectual conditioning by various corp/gov apparatuses.