Really? I'd like to hear more about this. What exactly looks so "suspicious" that it can't be explained by typical recombination events that are known to occur naturally in RNA viral genomes?
The beta coronavirus class has a paucity of naturally occurring furin cleavage sites relative to the other coronavirus clades. I'm just saying that copying sequence from genomes a few species over is very common strategy for engineering projects.
Irony is that this paper is highly doctored to make it look (from the figures) like the opposite point, without outright lying, like they loaded the dendrogram of beta coronaviruses with a ton of sequences that are distinct but "basically from the same collection", to make the pie slice of betas with furin cleavage sites look much much bigger than it should be. Also, the betas are excerpted from the dendrogram of all coronaviruses...
It's pretty complete, and exactly like what I would expect a DARPA/NIH grant to look like. I can't imagine a group of nonexperts drafting this document - correctly - just to make up a conspiracy theory - I'm not a virologist but I am a molecular biologist and biochemist and skimming the leaked document all of the technobabble looks correct to my understanding of science.
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