Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research

So it was then, in pursuit of arguments against the virus s lab-madeness, that I got infected by the virus of doubt. What was the source of my doubts? The fact that the deeper you dive into the research activities of coronavirologists over the past 15 20 years, the more you realize that creating chimeras like CoV2 was commonplace in their labs. And CoV2 is an obvious chimera (though not nesessarily a lab-made one), which is based on the ancestral bat strain RaTG13, in which the receptor binding motif (RBM) in its spike protein is replaced by the RBM from a pangolin strain, and in addition, a small but very special stretch of 4 amino acids is inserted, which creates a furin cleavage site that, as virologists have previously established, significantly expands the repertoire of the virus in terms of whose cells it can penetrate. Most likely, it was thanks to this new furin site that the new mutant managed to jump species from its original host to humans.

via medium.com

Maybe there should be a moratorium on this sort of research for a while. You know, out of an abundance of caution.