There is not any question that the CCP used this as a biological weapon, though that does not necessarily mean that it escaped from a lab, or even that it was “engineered” or the product of “gain of function” research.
As is typical with any Communist state, the initial reaction was a clown show of incompetence, regional CCP honchos trying to cover up bad news to prevent their masters in Beijing finding out they screwed up.
But once the head guys figured out what was going on, they used draconian means to shut down internal travel, while simultaneously using every lever (diplomatic, propaganda, economic) to keep air travel open between Wuhan and the rest of the world for months.
They knew exactly what they were doing, and did it for their own twisted and evil selfish reasons.
There is no doubt that this was used as a biological weapon, full stop.
There are two Nobel Prize winners in virology-related subjects who say this was bioengineered.
Luc Montaigner, who co-discovered HIV.
And David Baltimore who discovered reverse transcriptase.
The smoking gun is that the spike protein on the coof virus, has an insert of a furin cleavage site (it is ready, willing and able to be cut, by a receptor on human cells).
This opens up the spike protein, allowing the interior of the virus, the RNA, to get into the human cell.
1) It is an insert, extra nucleotides added, not "single nucleo tide substitution" or "oopsie" when the cell replicates the RNA.
2) The nucleic acids used, are using the code for those amino acids, most often used by humans but not bats.
3) IIRC, bats don't have a furin cleavage site. Neither do the most closely related natural viruses known.
4) The bats which supposedly carried the natural virus, live hundreds of miles away from Wuhan.
5) When the coof broke, out, those bats would've been *hibernating*.
6) The spike protein of the coof is pretty lousy and binding to bat cell receptors anymore.
There is some question as to whether the insert was designed and spliced in, or whether they used successive cell cultures, to breed a better and better spike, in the lab.
One of the authors of the gain of function research openly used the words chimeric virus to describe what they were doing in a published paper IIRC with Ralph Baric.
Hey look who showed up, with the same line as before.
Popcorn *intensifies*.