[tveita]

> Here they are again, years later, still playing with extremely hazardous coronaviruses that act on the ACE2 receptor in humans

"Playing with" as in "identifying and sequencing the virus in wild bats". The editorial notes say "The results provide the strongest evidence to date that horseshoe bats are natural reservoirs of SARS-CoV."

The location is... interesting, but it's also near a large wet market with a wild life section in a big city, pretty much exactly the circumstances you'd imagine to see natural transmission.

It kindles the imagination but it's not really a smoking gun.

[burfog]

We won't have a smoking gun unless somebody from the lab tells all, which would involve going to prison in China or claiming asylum in a different country. Such a person might even be ignored unless he provides wikileaks with a hard disk full of lab data.

They were definitely doing more than just "identifying and sequencing the virus in wild bats". They purposely caused bat coronaviruses to become more capable of infecting human cells. It's a cool experiment, but far too dangerous to attempt. One of the modifications was to use the ACE2 receptor. This receptor is found in humans, not bats. The pandemic uses that receptor.