Not sure about this. From memory right back at the start there was an "expert" on infectious diseases predicting the next likely place of a retro virus outbreak would be Wuhan wet-markets. Yet by 2020 when the outbreak happens the wet-markets have all but disappeared from the city. I think it was either a convenient story, or the leak was planned around the article explaining it. Here we go down the conspiracy hole...

@Hamulus Yes, but "conspiracy theory" has just become a meaningless defensive pejorative.
If there is one thing that we know people do... it is to conspire.

As far as I know about it, which ain't much... a natural "gain of function" into the human population would have needed many generations, and would have left an easy genetic trail to follow.
Meanwhile... every single plausible finger points directly to the bio-weapons lab right down the street, who just happened to have been working on just this sort of thing; as does the associated money-trail that begins with the very people who are trying to tell us that "those aren't the Droids you're looking for...."

@rway At this stage anything we think we know is likely somebody's lie. The one thing which seems most likely though is that this was an own-goal for the species, which in theory would suggest we have a natural flu pandemic still to come perhaps?

@Hamulus I read a research paper from 2008 or so that included work on both COVID-19 and (get this)... COVID-20. That was 13 years ago. So... we still have that one to look forward to when the profit-curve from this one starts to arc downward.
Historically speaking, we've been overdue for a natural pandemic anyway for at least a couple decades now. So, I guess we still are overdue.
Plus... we now have the bulk of the world's human population with diminished immune systems after over-sanitizing and self-isolating for over a year. So we should be expecting outbreaks of all sorts of weird illnesses as they begin to wander out of their caves to participate in their own ecosystem once again.