[tripletao]

Very few research groups in any field have published everything they're working on. Sometimes that's a deliberate choice, to avoid enabling rivals; but even when you're trying to be as open as you can, it takes time to write stuff up.

The WIV has claimed that they'd published sequences for all the viruses they were working with. But in the same way that the Hungarian team found SARS-CoV-2 contamination in Antarctic soil just now, a different team found a novel Merbecovirus in a rice dataset from a different group in Wuhan:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533

That Merbecovirus couldn't possibly be an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2; but if the WIV had one unpublished virus, then it gets harder to claim it's ridiculous to think they had more.

The WIV also had a database of viral genomes, available as a public website. That website went offline around September 2019. The WIV has cited "hacking attempts" as the reason why access was removed. They've made no attempt to restore access in any form, including those that obviously present no information security risk (e.g., a dump on a flash drive).

https://zenodo.org/record/4512260