> I'm sure engineering viruses is a difficult task, but we know that they were doing this sort of thing already via funded public projects. Yes, but what they

> I'm sure engineering viruses is a difficult task, but we know that they were doing this sort of thing already via funded public projects. Yes, but what they did is different from (and much easier than) engineering a protein for a new function, because what they did was combine parts of different known virus strains together. If that was the origin of SARS-CoV-2, you would see precise matches to the different origin strains for the different viral proteins. Now of course, the origin might be different secretly collected wild viruses, but at that point the only reason why that's a compelling story is that it sounds exciting...