What I said above isn't entirely accurate. The virus that the researchers created wasn't actually a coronavirus. It was a pseudovirus based on HIV, built to e

What I said above isn't entirely accurate. The virus that the researchers created wasn't actually a coronavirus. It was a pseudovirus based on HIV, built to express the functional spike proteins of interest. This was obviously much safer than creating a highly infective coronavirus, which I doubt anyone could have done back then anyway.