Did SARS-COV-2 escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

In 2012, six miners in the Mojiang mine in southwestern China’s Yunnan province fell ill after spending more than 14 days removing bat feces. Three eventually died.

Subsequently RaTG13 virii were collected from the area in 2012/2013 by researchers from the lab of Zheng-li Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). In addition, medical samples taken from the miners were sent to them by Kunming University Hospital. Wuhan is approx. 1,200 miles from the caves.

Researchers at the WIV have experimented with live bat viruses (capable of infection) in monkey and human cells. They have also performed many recombinant experiments with diverse bat coronaviruses. Such experiments have generated international concern over the possible creation of potential pandemic viruses.

The Shi lab at the WIV were sequencing RaTG13 genome in 2017 and 2018. RaTG13 is 96% identical to Sars-Cov-2. Crucially, no outside researchers knew about RaTG13 until January 2020.

The WIV was also working with a virii sequence MP789 found in 2019 in a Malaysian pangolin from Guangdong province.

MP789 has an almost identical sequence (but just that sequence) to that of SARS‐CoV‐2. For this to occur naturally, the two viruses must have infected the same cell in the same organism at the same time.

And yet that kind of recombination of virii has been done in labs for over 20 year. WIV has been that with coronavirii since at least 2007.