@feld yeah a critical thing in this article is it mentions that we have on record that Eco Health Alliance people petitioned to do exactly the modification to bat coronaviruses, the EXACT "mutation" that the coronavirus has.

And as I have mentioned before, the excuse is that "coronavirus has spontaneously naturally had that mutation before" but leave out that there are like 15 different types of coronavirus but the type that COVID-19 is has NEVER had a documented case of that mutation happening because it is extremely unlikely to happen naturally for that class.