They are willing to do this dangerous research with the flu. It's not far fetched to think could do this withe COVID-19 in the future.
Basically from my understanding is that is what happened here. There was a lady scientist in China who went deep into the bat caves hundreds of miles from Wuhan and brought back samples from bats. She was looking for a strain or the deadliest strain she could find that one day could inflict humans in an attempt to find a vaccine. She actually ended up replicating the virus, (creating her own exact virus in a dish) and supposedly enhanced the virus to be even worse then it was in an attempt to create a vaccine that would not only take out the worse virus found but any potential mutation of that virus that could be considered even worse. I was going to do a write up on some of the stuff I've run across...sort of like what you did here...a food for thought type of article.