As far as possible, the blog author intends that his readers should assimilate a few ideas and arrive at their own conclusions.
Several authorities have stated that the virus responsible for Covid-19, SARS-CoV2, has "not been genetically engineered." In the first of the videos linked to below, an authoritative scientific figure states that there is no evidence to support that conclusion. What he actually means is: the authorities who made this statement, very early on in the history of the current pandemic, had grounds only for saying that there was no evidence of the sort of gene-splicing that is the layman's and journalist's primary concept of genetic engineering. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but that's not quite the point. The real point is that there are at least two ways of manipulating the genetic make-up of viruses that do not require any direct gene splicing, therefore they will not leave any of the signatures that the various scientific authorities piously looked for.
One method is a variation on the sort of environmental selective breeding that has, over many years, created many different breeds of sheep, suited to different parts of the United Kingdom. Essentially, you dump a herd down in a new environment and keep breeding from it in that environment. If the environment is harsh and lacking in food, sooner or later your sheep will become small, tough and agile (like Soay Sheep), to make the best of what they've got. On the other hand, take a herd of Suffolk sheep who have grown large to suit a more comfortable and frankly lush East Anglian environment and move them to even better pastures in Bedfordshire, and they will grow bigger still in less than a hundred years. Nobody is directly controlling what the sheep shall become: the sheep's own survival and fertility rate is doing that. A sheep generation is only a few years, but even a few weeks could represent an awful lot of virus generations.
To make a virus adapt itself to a new host, it is only really necessary to inject blood from an infected animal at the peak of its infectivity, into several animals of a different species. Then, samples of blood are taken from those animals that actually become infected (it might well only be one to start with), not at peak infectivity but at the point where the animal's immune system is close to getting rid of the virus altogether. Because that is when you are most likely to come across viruses which have a degree of adaptation to the new species. You then take samples from that animal and inject them into more animals of the same species. And you can go on doing this at regular intervals, dependent on the immune response of the new species. Four weeks would be a realistic interval, apparently. The virus will keep on mutating for as long as you care to do this, but the mutations will only survive as long as they better adapt the virus to its new host species. Eventually, and it might take several months or a couple of years rather than a century, the virus will cease to change significantly with each repetition: it will have stabilised in its new host species. By all accounts, SARS-CoV2 does not seem to be mutating all that fast in humans, which would rather suggest that it was already stabilised in humans before it escaped into the wild. (This could be circumstantial evidence for a serious breach of medical ethics by someone or other.)
Another method, which also leaves no trace of artificial gene-splicing, is to create hybrid viruses by infecting one animal (or tissue sample in this case) of the species you have adapted your virus/es to, with two viruses of the same family at once. They will inevitably swap genetic material (RNA rather than DNA with many viruses) and the main work will be infecting a few more test animals or cultures to separate out the different hybrids and selecting the ones you want, much as in the first method above.
A painstaking application and appropriate combination of these two simple methods is all that would be necessary to achieve the sort of novel virus creation being discussed by the professor in the first video, below.
These two videos are not connected with each other in any place other than this blog (by the time of publication at least!) and the two content creators have nothing to do with each other. There are thousands of other videos out there on related subjects, but if you watch these two videos one after the other, with the first one (and the methods described above) still in your mind, you might start having ideas...
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Here is a link to the first video, by Sky News in Australia.
He has lived in China for a decade and is fluent in Chinese.
The other answer to "how can a virus like SARS-CoV2 be created?" is: "by accident, or at least by a series of deliberate actions that were meant to have another outcome."
Because SARS-CoV2 appears to have no cardinal virtues, other than being unusually well-adapted to binding to the human ACE-2 receptor described in the first video. A biological weapon would need to be much more lethal than this: most victims are not even incapacitated for more than a few days and some infected people are not incapacitated at all! A biological weapon is also rarely created without some way of shielding the creator's own population, which seems to be what's missing here.
It does not appear to manipulate the victim's DNA as other viruses (notably HIV) are known to do. In fact, binding to ACE-2 receptors on cell membranes in the lungs and blood vessels is pretty much all that it does: it even reproduces without necessarily damaging the nucleus of the infected cell! The life-threatening symptoms all seem to be related either to the effect that binding itself has on the normal functions of the cells concerned, or to an over-reaction of the immune system to the presence of the virus. (This would explain why vitamin-D seems to help: vitamin D helps the body's immune system to modulate its own responses.)
With regard to the potential breach of ethics. The blog author published (nearly two years ago) a carefully-researched novel "The Lord of Billionaires' Row", which, amongst many other ideas, tried to convey, through adventure fiction, that at least some factions within the Chinese Communist Party see no value in individuals who fail to conform to their ideology and obey their rule, other than the value of the assets that can be forcibly confiscated from them, which even extend to bodily organs which can be harvested and sold for their value on the illegal transplant organ market. If you can take that idea on board, you have within your grasp an understanding of how the SARS-CoV2 virus appears to have come into the world from an unknown animal host (the professor in the first interview took a proper look at bats and pangolins and it wasn't either of those), already exceptionally well-adapted to binding onto specifically human ACE-2 receptors.
A recurring theme in Chinese medical research and medicine-marketing is longevity. There is a search for an elixir of youth that Western medical research largely dismisses as superstition. (In the West, the average lifespan has increased bit by bit as medicine concentrates on cures for specific ways of dying, one by one. This is good enough for Western scientists but perhaps not for others.) The odds are: if the research was generously-funded and done in China, then it was expected one day to extend the lifespans of the elite, rather than kill people. But it wouldn't have mattered if numbers of non-elite people gave their all for the research along the way.
The novel (like this article) is not an exercise in China-bashing, because, for example, it also sets out to show how establishment complacency about the corruption of police officers by UK Organised Crime is now a life and death issue for British democracy, which is going largely unreported, barely debated and is not being opposed in any effective manner. The novel sets out to show that two different political cultures can each create their own unique failure modes. It also shows how corruption in those two different cultures can be working hand in hand, even if minds do not exactly meet!
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