[baja_blast]

> "Feb. 25, Holmes sends new data about a virus in a Yunnan bat from March 2019"

But the Furin cleavage site is missing from this bat virus which the authors speculated the following after Holmes shared it:

In reference to it, Holmes said, “Bob [Garry] said the insertion was the 1st thing he would add.”

“Yeah,” agreed Andersen, “the furin site would be the first thing to add for sure.”

Garry explained how easy it would be to engineer the virus. “Transmitting a bat virus like RatG13 in HeLa cells and then asking your graduate student to insert a furin site…” he wrote. “It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened given the GoF [gain of function] research [which increases infectiousness] we know is happening.”

So no the virus from Yunnan only fueled speculation, it did not provide evidence ruling out a lab origin.