“SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) appears to be a man made chimeric virus”
I don’t see anything in the paper saying that.
In fact it expressly says that SARS-CoV likely emerged from Chinese horseshoe bats, and that similar viruses living in that bat population could emerge as future SARS outbreaks.
Using the SARS-CoV infectious clone as a template (7), we designed and synthesized a full-length infectious clone of WIV1-CoV consisting of six plasmids that could be enzymatically cut, ligated together, and electroporated into cells to rescue replication competent progeny virions (Fig. S1A). In addition to the full-length clone, we also produced WIV1-CoV chimeric virus that replaced the SARS spike with the WIV1 spike within the mouse-adapted backbone (WIV1-MA15, Fig. S1B). WIV1-MA15 incorporates the original binding and entry capabilities of WIV1-CoV, but maintains the backbone changes to mouse-adapted SARS-CoV. Importantly, WIV1-MA15 does not incorporate the Y436H mutation in spike that is required for SARS-MA15 pathogenesis (8). Following electroporation into Vero cells, robust stock titers were recovered from both chimeric WIV1-MA15 and WIV1-CoV.
Your comment accurately highlights the origin of SARS-CoV, as described in this article. The specific point of this article is that they used SARS-CoV as well as WIV1-CoV (from Wuhan Institute of Virology) to produce the man made Chimera viruses.
Therefore, my assessment is that SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) appears to be a man made chimeric virus