- There's still no evidence that WIV was doing GOF research there. The SARS-1 GOF research was done in the USA.
- There are horseshoe bats with sarbecoviruses in Hubei province, their range is large.
- Similar to this virus, for SARS-1 there closest known virus in bats is in Yunnan, but SARS-1 emerged in Guangdong, about the same distance away from Yunnan as Wuhan is.
- Calling it a "Chimera" is not accurate and is a loaded term. It is not a Chimera of RaTG13. You can't get from RaTG13 to SARS-2 by splicing some other backbone and then shipping it through a couple dozen generations of mice. RatG13 is also a few decades of evolution away from SARS-2.
- A furin cleavage site has emerged spontaneously in coronaviruses at least 6 times now (not including SARS-2) in both circulating human coronaviruses and in MERS. It has also now been found in sarbecoviruses in Thailand, so we know that nature produces furin cleavage sites in this kind of virus.
- Efforts by China to suppress information sound like an authoritarian government acting like an authoritarian government. This is completely unsurprising.
- Efforts by WIV to do political damage control after the pandemic broke also sound like a lab under an authoritarian government reacting to protect itself and by its people reacting to protect themselves (there may have been relatively banal stuff like financial embezzlement going on in the lab which is being suppressed). This is also completely unsurprising.
- There's no evidence that WIV had live RaTG13 virus either, they took samples from the mine in Yunnan and sequenced it, but that isn't cultured, viable infectious virus.
