Given a genome sequence, any lab with the right materials and equipment can synthetically re-create a virus. This is a simple but, I think, fairly significant point that's been a bit under-explored among covid-origins watchers. technologyreview.com/2020/02/15/844… 
This technology is not new. It's been around in one form or another since the late '70s. The first successful infectious clone, of the bacteriophage QB, was completed in 1978. virology.ws/2009/02/12/inf…
In 1981, in one of the earliest successful viral cloning experiments, a lab produced an infectious clone of poliovirus. This was done by Vincent Racaniello, now host of the popular podcast This Week In Virology and a prominent lab-origin "debunker." science.sciencemag.org/content/214/45…
Coronaviruses apparently faced some difficulty in cloning, but eventually a system was developed by Paul Masters in 1992. After that, a more sophisticated cloning method using cDNA was created by Ralph Baric. jvi.asm.org/content/66/4/1…
Using his patented method of breaking the genome into fragments and stitching them together, Baric was able to clone certain pig and cow coronaviruses that had eluded researchers for years. endeavors.unc.edu/fall2003/baric…
Baric really made his name in 2003 when he was the first person to clone SARS. Significantly, his work on SARS was conducted at Fort Detrick. endeavors.unc.edu/fall2003/baric…
Baric has of course become notorious for his gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, including a 2015 paper in which he, with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, decided to show how dangerous SARS-like CoVs are by engineering them to be really dangerous. nature.com/articles/nm.39…
This research involved cloning the spike protein from a SARS-like virus (SHC014-CoV) circulating in horseshoe bats in China and attaching it to a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. nature.com/articles/nm.39…
One of the interesting things about this study is that the SHC014 spike protein sequence wasn't added to GenBank until May 2020—5 years after the paper was published. Curiously, the correction itself contains an error, incorrectly referring to "SHC015." nature.com/articles/s4159…
SHC014 was originally discovered in April 2011–September 2012 from a bat fecal or anal swab collected somewhere in Kunming, Yunnan Province by WIV researchers, with funding from USAID through Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance. nature.com/articles/natur…
While Daszak was a co-author on the 2013 paper identifying SHC014 and other SARS-like CoVs, his involvement was initially hidden in Baric's 2015 GOF paper. A correction was added in 2016 to disclose USAID funding through Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance. nature.com/articles/nm041…
Important to note that EcoHealth is also primarily funded by the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency (its primary biodefense arm). EcoHealth's DOD backing is heavily obscured on their website and in the media. independentsciencenews.org/news/peter-das…
So you have a DOD-backed NGO at one end of this coronavirus research supply chain and a Ft Detrick-affiliated scientist at the other. One is supplying the raw bat shit and the other is weaponizing it.
RaTG13, the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2, runs something of a parallel track to SHC014. It was discovered around the same time, also in Yunnan Province and its sequence was also not uploaded to GenBank until 2020, though it had been sequenced earlier.
RaTG13 was famously discovered in a mineshaft in Mojiang in 2013. The bat guano sample containing the virus was collected after 6 miners fell ill with a mysterious pneumonia, which their treating doctor attributed most likely to a bat coronavirus. frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
The miners were tasked with removing bat feces. AFAIK it hasn't been established why they were doing this. Given that EcoHealth was collecting bat fecal samples in the same province around the same time, is it possible these miners were actually collecting guano for EcoHealth?
Like the SHC014 sequence discussed above, RaTG13 was sequenced well before it was uploaded to GenBank. According to Shi Zheng-li, RaTG13 was fully sequenced by WIV in 2018. The sequence wasn't added to GenBank until 2020. sciencemag.org/sites/default/…
Nicholson Baker's article makes it sound like WIV kept pulling bat shit out of the fridge and playing with it. But once the virus was sequenced, the sample would be irrelevant, right? And so Daszak's statement about disintegration is meaningless too. nymag.com/intelligencer/…
So why was RaTG13 fully sequenced in 2018? Is it possible it was done so that another lab could print up a clone? This is what Baric had done with WIV1, which was discovered/sequenced by WIV (hence the name). pnas.org/content/113/11…
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