SARS-CoV-2 is said to have first been detected in Wuhan, China in 2019. This may or may not have been the actual origin, but it was certainly the focal point of attention regarding the alleged illness of COVID-19 which is said to be caused by SARS-CoV-2.
With his attention to Wuhan, there were theories developed as to the origin of the illness. Three main theories developed.
- the Wuhan wet market where animal body parts are chopped up and left airborne ripe for disease infection which can spread to humans
- that the virus spread from a bat to another animal and then to humans
- that the gain of function research from the Wuhan lab got leaked out and spread from someone who got infected
So far though, despite numerous requests around the world, not a single government or governmental agency is able to provide proof of isolation and purification of the virus and subsequent proof that this virus causes the illness that people are calling COVID-19. There has never actually been any proof that one causes the other, it's merely an assumption that genetic material or sequencing showing that something is present in your body is actually causing that illness.
Insofar as the claim of originating in Wuhan, China, this is also under doubt as the US team for the military games in 2019 Which Took Pl. in Wuhan, China was suffering from a mysterious flulike illness which left much of the team not performing or performing very poorly for the first time in history. It's possible the origin came from the US, just as the Kansas flu of 1919 which is falsely attributed to the Spanish flu.
There is also the so-called vaping illness of 2019 which mysteriously vanished from people calling it that when similar symptoms were attributed to COVID-19 instead. A supercomputer looking back at COVID-19 symptoms identified the vaping illness as COVID-19 instead.
Getting back to the origin theories, vegans are mostly attached to the first one, the wet market theory. There is no evidence to support it though. The second theory doesn't have much evidence either. The one with the strongest evidence is of the Wuhan lab leak, as a Chinese defector has made claims that it did come from there, as well as lab technicians being ill with a flulike illness, and the Chinese government essentially kidnapping one of the workers to keep them silent.
But many vegans are still so attached to the wet market theory because it corresponds with the desire to have animal exploitation seen as a negative for humans to engage in. Humans shouldn't be engaging in this behavior, and there can be diseases from having chopped up body parts of various animals airborne and ripe for infection from bacteria, viruses or plain old sanitary issues. But the attachment to associate the pandemic with this theory seems firmly rooted in a bias to push forward the goal of ending animal exploitation, as opposed to being rooted in facts.
Maybe it did come from there, but so far there is no real evidence to prove this.