I’ve tried searching for how rabies originated and results keep saying Old World bats. What I actually want to know is how did the bats get the virus, how did that very first bat get infected?
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Rabies isn’t exclusively transmitted by bats. Bats in general are just very prone to carrying disease because they consume blood, mosquitoes, infected animals, etc.
Every infectious disease is caused by some type of pathogen, and almost all the time that pathogen is some type of virus or bacteria.
Viruses and bacteria evolve to infect specific types organisms instead of every organism. That allows them to optimize their resources to focus on one specific lifeform instead of every lifeform. The avian flu virus for example, which is in the influenza family, evolved to infect birds. It cannot infect aquatic species for example, it simply won’t survive.
In certain cases however, these pathogens can sometimes actually jump from species to species. Whilst the Avian Flu mostly infects birds, it garnered popularity when scientists saw that it jumped to and showed some signs of infection in humans, though this is extremely rare. The inverse is also true, the human virus Herpes can be spread to dogs.
Rabies is just like that. It is part of a family of viruses called lyssaviruses that evolved to infect mammals, like bats and bush animals. Just like other diseases, rabies evolved many millions of years ago from simple, single celled organisms (see the RNA world hypothesis for more info). It infected an early mammal ancestor, and that ancestor spread it to others. The survivors of the virus evolved into the mammals we know of today and rabies evolved with it.
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