Oh boy, so this is where you stumbled. I should have known it would be The Intercept article.

The documents are ancillary, huh? You cited the exact same grant proposal I sent you. So is it ancillary or not?

Here are some really critical points I’m willing to bet you misunderstood:

“We will construct chimeric SARSr-CoVs using WIV1 backbone and the S genes of selected SARSr-CoV strains and assess capacity to infect hACE2, bACE2, and cACE2 Vero cells…”

The WIV1 backbone is NOT the backbone found in SARS-CoV-2. It’s from a completely different human-infectious coronavirus strain. Furthermore, the spike proteins they’re studying would be gathered from bat coronaviruses found in the wild. So, this method is NOT considered GoF research by the NIH nor is it even potentially possible it resulted in the pandemic. They proposed assessing transmissibility by using an already known infectious backbone and an uncharacterized spike protein, not engineering a more deadly virus. WIV1 is already infectious in humans. The spike proteins gathered are the exact same sequences as those already present in the wild. You may still have reservations about this approach, but I’d argue it’s actually safer for studying viruses in this way because you use what’s known as a Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) to infect the cells rather than live virus. Meaning, no storage, handling, or serial passaging of viral samples is required past the initial isolation and the plaque assessments.

You may argue that any viral research which can result in genetic change should be classified unilaterally as GoF, and is too dangerous to be performed, much less at labs we don’t directly regulate. I would disagree on those points, but you’d join a rich debate on the subject which The Intercept article actually points out as well. But the fact remains that none of the above studies were designed to engineer more deadly pathogens for humans, and is ultimately a red herring for the SARS-CoV-2 debate. We know the backbone sequences and they do not match, so you and The Intercept article are barking up the wrong tree.

The same is true for the PLOS study you cited. Same viral backbone, same process. It’s there to assess transmissibility of a naturally occurring virus and try to predict future pandemic potential (of the original SARS-CoV, in their case), not to engineer more effective viruses. Same misunderstanding on its classification as GoF research, too. Even in the Intercept article you cite it talks about the results of other studies as technically “loss of function” in relation to some strains, which is true. But again, all of this is a red herring. SARS-CoV-2 did NOT use the backbone referenced here, and thus this study did not result in a genetically engineered virus that caused the pandemic.

As for citations, I’d point you to this snippet from a review article in Cell:

A near identical nucleotide sequence is found in the spike gene of the bat coro- navirus HKU9-1 (Gallaher, 2020), and both SARS-CoV-2 and HKU9-1 contain short palindromic sequences immediately up- stream of this sequence that are indicative of natural recombina- tion break-points via template switching (Gallaher, 2020). Hence, simple evolutionary mechanisms can readily explain the evolu- tion of an out-of-frame insertion of a furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 (Figure 2).

You keep insisting that I think a lab leak is impossible, when I’ve made it very clear that a lab leak is still a possibility. There were safety concerns at Wuhan long before this whole thing. But a “lab leak” of a stored sample is completely different than “Fauci paid incompetent Chinese labs to engineer deadly pathogens”, and I’ve never seen evidence for the latter. Yet you’ve stated that sentiment here in the comment section, so somehow that unsubstantiated belief lives on. Until our pool of evidence changes, the most likely scenario is a zoonosis from a natural reservoir, or a lab leak from a gathered or cultured sample.

I’m curious why you seem so insistent that the evidence is being hidden and that everyone is silencing you. You come in here with unsubstantiated accusations, and then get angry when people call you out for it. Had you started with sources for your claims, I would have been happy to engage with you on that level. Acting like an ass in any forum isn’t going to get you far. Stop playing the victim.