[tripletao]

That's correct. The RdRp was published as RaBtCoV/4991 in 2016, and that's how the link to the Mojiang mine became known. The first publication on SARS-CoV-2 didn't mention that, instead referring to the virus by its new name RaTG13, but others made the connection:

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202005.0322/v2

Of course that's not evidence of anything malicious; the renaming and failure to reference might have just been inadvertent. But it's still a bit weird, and it unquestionably shows at least a 2.5 year delay between sampling and publishing even a fragment of the genome.

That delay isn't evidence of anything malicious either. Research takes time, and any group in any discipline has a backlog of unpublished work. The WIV didn't stop sampling in 2013 though, and no one outside China's physical control knows what else might be in their collection.

[DiogenesKynikos]

RaTG13 was simply uninteresting before the pandemic. It only became worth writing a full paper on after SARS-CoV-2 was discovered. When they wrote a paper about it, they also gave it a more memorable name.

> The WIV didn't stop sampling in 2013 though, and no one outside China's physical control knows what else might be in their collection.

They upload sequences to Genbank (just like they did with RaTG13, years before the pandemic), they have international collaborators, and they give talks at conferences. Tons of people know what they work on and what they have in their collection.

[tripletao]

> Tons of people know what they work on and what they have in their collection.

If that's true, then why has the WIV removed public access from their database? It serves only to remove a valuable scientific resource, and to cast suspicion on China; so why would they do such a thing? Do you genuinely believe that even with the international importance of the topic, no one in China can figure out how to keep a simple database-backed website up?

And again, Deigin et al. report assembly of the genome of a novel coronavirus from contamination in other published reads sequenced in the same facility:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533

As far as I can tell, this virus wasn't previously known outside the WIV. Am I mistaken? I emphasize again that their novel virus is relevant not because it's an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 (it's not), but because if the WIV had one unpublished virus, it gets harder to claim it's ridiculous that they might have had others.