The index case was Dr Liu Jianlun a doctor from the mainland who worked at Guangzhou's Sun Yat-Sen hospital. For weeks there had been rumors of an atypical pneumonia circulating in Guangdong. PRC authorities suppressed discussion of it claimed it was treatable with antibiotics. 
In 2014 when Institut Pasteur "lost" 2400 SARS samples, it also happened after a freezer broke down. The samples were moved to a temporary freezer in a less secure area many groups had access to. Boxes of vials started to go missing, eventually the entire freezer. No paperwork. 
@RealAndyLeeShow Plummer was head of CNML from 2000 until 2014, when he retired at 60. He was an alcoholic, a habit acquired while doing HIV work in Africa.
Zhu is fluent in English and French. A Francophile, he did his PhD in France, supervised by a doctor who was a close friend of Jacques Chirac. During SARS he was Vice President of CAS (WIV's parent). When Institut Pasteur sent a scientific team to help, he saw an opportunity. 
November 2013 is the same time the WIV/CSIRO paper (Ge et al) and sequences (WIV1, RsSHC014, Rs3367) were published. CSIRO still proudly promote the work as "the proof bats are the origin of SARS".
I recently posted a paper showing WIV's "proof" SARS is natural is a fraud. The PLA's Academy of Military Medical Science (AMMS) were also involved, publishing sequences to add links to the evolutionary chain. AMMS sequences seem a higher standard of forgery. 
"One Health" dogma says that it's due to humans/livestock/wildlife being in more frequent contact. But this makes little sense. Urbanization and industrial agriculture mean there's less contact than ever before, while the reduction in poverty mean less consumption of wildlife.
In 2014, Institut Pasteur reluctantly confessed they had *lost* 2400 vials of SARS samples, including the freezer they were stored in. This article by French independent press Mediapart has a detailed description of events. 
BioRxiv has become a critical part of the bioscience publishing pipeline. It has a near monopoly distributing preprints in its field. It connects authors to 177 publishers and has built a community of scientists discussing and posting reviews.
@biorxivpreprint say my paper is inappropriate because my data/analysis aren't new, but a "perspective on existing knowledge". This is false. The data aren't new, but the analysis is. I found important features that WIV overlooked, probably deliberately.
Recombination mimics designs scientists might use for artificial chimeras (or vice versa?). At least that seems the way with many SARS-like coronaviruses. Rather than incremental mutations, these apparently evolved by instantaneous exchange of chunks of RNA with other viruses.
A recent estimate of SARS-CoV-2 fatalities is nearly 30 million, even though most infections aren't severe. In contrast, severe diseases like Ebola rarely kill more than a few hundred. To a bioterrorist, transmissibility might be more desirable than virulence. 
WIV claim to have only ever obtained 3 live bat cov isolates: WIV1, WIV16 & RsSHC014. but I'm not convinced these are from natural samples at all, I suspect they're synthetic chimeras.
ORF8 only exists in sarbecovs. ORF8 of SARS-1 and SARS-CoV-2 share just 20% nucleotide identity, compared to 79% average across the genome. But important features defining the protein structure are conserved e.g. cysteine residues forming internal disulfide bonds. 
@loofymectin asked me what type of Covid vaccine he made, tbh I hadn't looked into it, being more interested in origins.
In 2005-06 while hunting for SARS-like bat coronaviruses in rural Hong Kong, scientists from HKU discovered two new coronaviruses HKU4 and HKU5. These are the first known MERS-like viruses (or merbecovs), although MERS itself was unknown at the time. 
The BANAL viruses were the result of an expedition to bat caves in Laos in July 2020. Pasteur had been part of a group exploring the same caves 3 years earlier, but they never sequenced the >500 bat samples they collected. Pasteur's Marc Eloit didn't respond when I asked why not. 
@Dali_Yang has recently written a book documenting the early days of the pandemic. There was over a month between the earliest cases and any attempt to stem transmission. With prompt action a pandemic could have been averted.
In China his death became a focal point of demands for more transparency. The CCP responded by blaming local police.