to determine whether editing took place. the pro-zoonosis scientists admit as much in their papers. if the claimed intermediate host had been ID'd...that'd be another thing.

but what we do know is that sars-cov-2 is a bat coronavirus (sarbecovirus) with the only known furin cleavage spike in that lineage.

and the lead researcher at Wuhan Virology Institue, Dr Shi Zhengli, was very interested in figuring out how to add furin cleavage spikes to bat viruses in order to study how they might leap to humans.

Shi, working under EcoHealth Alliance (headed by Peter Daszak), submitted a grant proposal to DARPA in 2018 proposing to introduce "human-specific cleavage sites" into bat viruses. She'd done similar work in the past with Ralph Baric at UNC. The grant proposal was rejected, Shi began working in Wuhan, collecting large numbers of unknown bat viruses and experimenting on them. The safety conditions of this lab were not nearly adequate for gain of function research...

it is not clear what sort of experiments were going on at the WVI. Shi and the Chinese govt have every incentive to cover up. As do many other in this field such as Peter Daszak.