The article discusses a 2014 U.S. ban on virus gain-of-function experiments. Looking it up, I found this 2015 Nature article which also mentions the ban.
Here's a link to the 2017 Wuhan labs research paper that was quoted: "we constructed a group of infectious bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) clones with the backbone of WIV1 and variants of S genes from 8 different bat SARSr-CoVs" https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...