In recent weeks, news has spread that the current coronavirus is the result of something created in a laboratory that then escaped control. This concern also stems from news reporting that back in 2015 experiments were already being carried out in China to create a recombinant SARS-derived coronavirus. Unfortunately, such news finds fertile ground on social media and, especially in pandemic periods, fosters conspiracies and paranoia. This time, however, the news was spread by some authoritative sources. Here I explain how I found out convincing evidence that SARS-CoV-2 did not emerge from a lab but from wildlife exploitation. © 2020 R. Cazzolla Gatti; licensee oekom verlag.This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License CCBY4.0(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0).