They Have Been Messing With The Corona Virus For A While.. Nov 16th 2015 article.

 
It was only a matter of time before 
A: it accidentally got out
B: it was released for nefarious reasons

 This was linked in a comment thread. Sorry, I forget which one. I have been reading too many.
Irish.

Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate

The creation of a chimeric SARS-like virus has scientists discussing the risks of gain-of-function research.

Jef Akst

Nov 16, 2015

Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week (November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine. 

The results demonstrate the ability of the SHC014 surface protein to bind and infect human cells, validating concerns that this virus—or other coronaviruses found in bat species—may be capable of making the leap to people without first evolving in an intermediate host, Nature reported. They also reignite a debate about whether that information justifies the risk of such work, known as gain-of-function research. “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, told Nature.


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