It is defined by what it does.
Like Tim McVeigh's truckload of fertilizer...
In 2015, Dr. Baric, who was able to produce transgenic or humanized mice, published A SARS-like cluster of circulating coronaviruses show potential for human emergence in Nature, announcing the transmissibility of a coronavirus that can be spread to humans and efficiently infect human airway cells. Dr. Shi was listed as a co-author. (In March 2020, Nature added an editorial note to the paper, saying the paper was being used in support of unverified theories that the pandemic was caused by an engineered virus and that there was no evidence this was true. But in the nearly two years since then, much has changed.)
Even in 2015, many virologists, who were unaware that the work was being done in concert with Communist China, responded with alarm, and Nature published their fears too. A virus that grows remarkably well in human cells is extremely dangerous, after all. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” warned Dr. Simon Wain-Hobson of the Pasteur Institute, Paris. And Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefense expert at Rutgers University, cautioned, “The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk.”
The denial, for well over a year that this is a Frankenstein virus, created in a lab, IS the smoking gun. Not a "we were trying to make a vaccine for a virus that might somehow occur in nature when humanized mice migrated to distant caves in China" sort of apology, but a FLAT-OUT DENIAL that the virus was lab created.
Those of us who have been saying from the start that there was a high probability the virus was artificial have been derided as "conspiracy theorists" by people who knew better because they were trying to cover their asses.
As for knowing the CCP was involved, all anyone reading the paper had to do was to look at the author list: the Chinese participants were listed, as was their affiliation with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That was not a hard dot to connect.
But as the heat got turned up and the denials began to fly faster and thicker, the abstract on the paper was changed, and the disclaimer virtually called anyone who put 2+2 together and got 4 a "conspiracy theorist".
Enough bullshit.
Tim McVeigh could have bought all that fertilizer and been opening a tulip farm, too. It might have just been an unfortunate accident that he was parked next to the Murrah Building. But that was not the case, nor the intent.
Using our tax dollars...
These people made a virus that did not exist in nature, and frankly, was an improbable recombination in a natural setting.
They knew what they were doing,
They persisted, allegedly in hopes of gaining some glory is such a thing maybe somehow appeared naturally.
But this reeks of Munchhausen's Syndrome by proxy writ large, where they created a global problem so they could 'save the world' (for prestige and profit).
Trying to polish this turd just isn't going to fly with me.
