The first cases of the Coronavirus outbreak were officially logged on December 31st of 2019.

Since then, the world has been swept up in a disease frenzy — medical masks are being snapped onto faces, people are avoiding public hubs of transportation, the world over is watching the death toll climb and nervously tallying up confirmed cases; and the 11-million-person city of Wuhan, China, where the disease first appeared, has been quarantined.

The official story goes like this: Coronavirus emerged at a dirty seafood market in Wuhan, China, where wild animals like marmots, birds, rabbits, bats and snakes are traded illegally. This viral form of pneumonia evolved to make the leap from animals to humans, and the vendors, who spend their days in close proximity to these animals, contracted it and spread from there.

Since then, thousands of people have been infected world-wide. The death toll is now at 135 (though that reported number is likely much lower than the reality). And the pathogen is adapting at an alarming rate, making treatment and mitigation extremely difficult.

But there are a lot of questions floating around out there about this official “origin story.” And not just because it came from the mouthpiece of the Chinese communist propaganda state, either. There are some very strange and unsettling elements to this developing outbreak.

Chief among them: the maximum-security, government-sponsored bio-research laboratory in Wuhan, dedicated to studying the deadliest pathogens on Earth…

Before we get into all that strangeness though, we should take a minute to look the disease itself. Because, there are some odd facts about the 2019-nCoV coronavirus — some of which have not been covered or discussed at all by mainstream media sources:

First and foremost, coronavirus has nothing to do with Corona beer (shocker, I know). So, don’t go blaming the Mexicans, they have nothing to do with this.  

Coronavirus is a form of viral pneumonia similar to SARS. But this particular version of the coronavirus is genetically unique — a large middle fragment of the genome is vastly different from any other genomes of any other related diseases, according to research published with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. It’s completely unknown to science and may even be a new subgenus of the strain. Meaning that next to no one on the planet has immunity.  

On top of that, it’s evolving insanely fast, according to research published by Lancet. Scientists sequenced the RNA of coronavirus from 6 different infected individuals from the same household and found that every single one of them had novel strains of coronavirus – suggesting that it mutated between adjacent hosts. That is extremely unnerving. Containing something that can adapt from one person to the next would be a nearly impossible endeavor.

Fortunately, this disease doesn’t have a very high fatality rate (not yet, at least). While the number of infected individuals climbs higher and higher into the thousands, the death toll globally is only at 135. The people who are most at risk of being killed by the coronavirus are those with already-compromised immune systems: people who are already sick, the elderly and the very young.

Nevertheless, the rate at which this disease is mutating and spreading across the globe is alarming. And here’s the real rub: a lot of people are becoming skeptical that this virus came from some local seafood market.

In another article published by Lancet, scientists found that, out of the first 41 patients with confirmed coronavirus, 13 of them had no link to the “source” marketplace whatsoever.

“That’s a big number, 13, with no link,” says Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University.

So where did the coronavirus come from, then?

Bats, most likely, say scientists from Cold Spring Harbor. Because bats are mammals and often act as a transmutation platform for viruses making the jump from animals to humans, this is one of the most likely explanations, they say.

But they don’t really know. Because there’s a missing link, so to speak, between the new coronavirus (2019-nCoV) and the older one (RaTG13). A full half of the 2019-nCoV genome sequence is of totally unknown origin. It just showed up and no one knows from where, or how it developed that genome sequence.

Lucey thinks this disease was out incubating in the world, far earlier than December 31st of 2019. He says that in order for this virus to make that kind of genetic leap forward, to change half its genome, it would have had to have been brooding out in the real world since at least November of 2019.

“The virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace,” he argues. Otherwise, scientists would be able to place where that unknown half-genome came from.

But, if the Coronavirus had mutated naturally somewhere around Wuhan, wouldn’t it have been carried much further than that city alone? We’ve watched this virus spread from Wuhan, to every corner of the globe in a mere two months. Why would its origin be so concentrated and so traceable if it’s been out there since November of last year? Wouldn’t it have spread beyond Wuhan by now?

Which brings us to the next possibility (please grab your tin-foil hats, ladies and gentlemen): an escaped (or released) genetically modified biological pathogen. Something created in a lab which found its way out.

And coincidentally, there is a maximum-security, government-sponsored bio-research laboratory in Wuhan, which studies pathogens just like the coronavirus. What are the odds?

Built in in 2017, this lab conducts research on “BSL-4” — the highest level of bio-contaminates. The lab focuses on the “control” of emerging diseases and has a library of purified viruses within it. It cost $14 million USD to build, and at the time of its approval, many scientists around the world feared about “escaped pathogens.”

“It will offer more opportunities for Chinese researchers,” assured George Gao, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Microbiology and Immunology in Beijing, when the lab was cleared for construction. “Our contribution on the BSL‑4-level pathogens will benefit the world.”

Now, if you’ve read Steven King’s The Stand or watched Resident Evil you’re familiar with this apocalyptic premise: A highly secretive, maximum security government laboratory studying and developing pathogens for biological warfare, suffers some kind of malfunction. Someone fucks up, or there’s a technical issue, and suddenly one of those pathogens is released into the world and essentially ends it. Mankind is brought to its knees and a new chapter in history begins — “the after times.”

Could this be the case in Wuhan? Could this pathogen have slipped out, or even been intentionally released by the Chinese government, to infect the world?

It’s a scary thought. One that isn’t so unbelievable, either. Maybe Lucey is right, maybe this pathogen did come into the Wuhan seafood market before it left it; maybe it came from the nearby biolab.

Conspiracies aside, the spread and evolution of this new and largely mysterious coronavirus is a frightening thing to behold. And, with the hellish Australian bush fires, the nuclear tension between Iran and the US, biblical locust swarms in East Africa, and now the spread of this super-adaptive contagious pneumonia, the situation here on planet Earth seems to be escalating.

2020 has sure been one hell of a year so far.