[bigpumpkin]

Correct me if I'm wrong. RaTG13's genome was published in 2020 after the pandemic started by Shi and the Wuhan Institute of technology.

Doesn't seem likely they'll voluntarily publish a paper on a virus they used as the backbone to manufacture SARS-CoV-2...

Even if it was a lab leak, it's unlikely RaTG13 was the progenitor.

[ncmncm]

We don't know if there ever was a wild RaTG13. If WIV is under suspicion, anything WIV said about RaTG13 is equally suspect. If it is faked, one might be surprised they did not fake it in a way less likely to encourage suspicion.

Nobody seriously suspects WIV engineered the SARS-CoV2 to deliberately cause a pandemic, but negligently letting it escape is itself obviously worth covering up. Whether that happened or not, it is their misfortune that it doesn't look more like a natural chimera.

I have assumed early insistence that it was natural was considered necessary to get any possibility of cooperation from the Chinese gov't. Now that they have become uncooperative, there is no more reason to maintain the fiction.

[nomoreplease]

> Shi and the Wuhan Institute of technology. Doesn't seem likely they'll voluntarily

Shi and WIT are not related to WIV, are they? This could be independent and without explicit consent of WIV?

[potiuper]

Shi directs the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Zhengli

The original article, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation comments, and "urban" food security arguments, which rate near the necessity of cannibalism, distract from continuing to ban the most likely sources of zoonotic diseases and wildlife smuggling that are the wet markets.