It has not been confirmed if the corona virus was engineered, but the labs in Wuhan were working on horshoe bat corona viruses; one of them still has a job opening up for it.
At least as far back as 2007, there was a warning in a journal and Nature magazine in 2015 about the risks and benefits of engineering horsehoe bat corona viruses in order to make them able to jump to human. I posted the links earlier
<here> in the crazy covid thread.
People on TV often begin speaking by exalting science and it sounds like an obeisance. Huxley wrote about science in the following way.
Aldous Huxley -
Brave New World on Science
P. 177
"A New Theory of Biology" was the title of the paper which Mustapha Mond had just finished reading. He sat for some time, meditatively frowning, then picked up his pen and wrote across the title-page: "The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to be published." He underlined the words. "The author will be kept under supervision. His transference to the Marine Biological Station of St. Helena may become necessary." A pity, he thought, as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose—well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes—make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere, that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible. He picked up his pen again, and under the words "Not to be published" drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first; then sighed, "What fun it would be," he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness!"
P. 225
That's another reason why we're so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Yes, even science."
"Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.""What?" said Helmholtz, in astonishment. "But we're always saying that science is everything. It's a hypnopædic platitude."
"Three times a week between thirteen and seventeen," put in Bernard. "And all the science propaganda we do at the College ..."
"Yes; but what sort of science?" asked Mustapha Mond sarcastically. "You've had no scientific training, so you can't judge. I was a pretty good physicist in my time. Too good–good enough to realize that
all our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody's allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn't be added to except by special permission from the head cook. I'm the head cook now. But I was an inquisitive young scullion once. I started doing a bit of cooking on my own. Unorthodox cooking, illicit cooking. A bit of real science, in fact." He was silent.