@SuperOsten @freemayonnaise @Angie_rasmussen @AmonMaritza @koropokkur @Aly @TrevorGoodchild @Viking5050 @epictittus @wing_str this is not surprising that they were working on a vaccine before the pandemic started OR that they were working on it after it started

LOTS of people, myself included, knew that a pandemic was likely in the medium-near term future, and LOTS of people understood that it could have been a SARS-like one. Working on a MERS/SARS-capable vaccine was a no-brainer especially for those in the middle east where MERS was likely to come from.

israel not being a signatory is a big deal though not necessarily related.

It was totally reasonable, in the early days of the pandemic, to suspect covid was 'israel up to no good", before there was evidence of its true origin. However unless you're suggesting that israel decided that a Wuhan meat market specifically was going to be the epicenter for a new pandemic, and that they, twice, dropped samples of a virus that was similar to other viruses nearby in the meat market that just happens to have basically no biosafety protocols in just the right way that it was going to happen anyway sooner or later ...