Remember the central issue is how a bat virus got to Wuhan. So now, in both Yunnan and Laos, the only people who knowingly transported bat virus samples to Wuhan — and only to Wuhan — were scientists. Gilles Demaneuf, a New Zealand-based data scientist who’s been analyzing this issue, says the natural spillover theory has “no explanation for why this would result in an outbreak in Wuhan of all places, and nowhere else.”

As for that missing furin cleavage site, another leaked document revealed in September by Drastic, a confederation of open-source analysts like Demaneuf, sent shock- waves through the scientific community. Dr. Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance, spelled out plans to work with his collaborators in Wuhan and elsewhere to artificially insert novel, rare cleavage sites into novel SARS-like coronaviruses collected in the field, so as to better understand the biological function of cleavage sites. His 2018 request for $14.2 million from the Pentagon to do this was turned down amid uneasiness that it was too risky; but the very fact that he was proposing it was alarming.

Most of the funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology comes from the Chinese not the American government, after all; so the failure to win the US grant may not have prevented the work being done. Moreover, exactly such an experiment had already been done with a different kind of coronavirus by — guess who? — the Wuhan Institute of Virology.