The card-carrying virologists who published just about every influential paper claiming a natural origin of Covid reacted to the Defuse put-furin-cleavage-sites-in-SARS-like-viruses proposal as so: "it really isn't beyond plausibility that someone went ahead and tried some of this stuff. We just need to re-convince ourselves it is coincidence." "That's the problem. There's a big difference between "the lab was working on bat CoVs" to the "the lab was modifying bat CoVs using features we see being unique to SC2"." On whether the FCS was inserted in or out of frame, "it depends on cloning strategy... sometimes ease trumps perfection." On the choice of SARS2 as a backbone, "Well, in the grant they specifically talk about *new* viruses - so a SC2 precursor could have been one of those "low risk" viruses they talk about and then they started fiddling with it." "Peter [Daszak, collaborator of the Wuhan lab] should have seen this coming and it is worse than he was suggesting... very striking that a bat-derived CoV with an FCS turns up in a city that was on a grant proposing to muck around with FCSs in bat-derived CoVs." "this stuff about the DARPA proposal makes me even more angry about the DT letter (if it is indeed Baric) - he knew how suspicious a FCS would look back then." "And his attacks on me for even suggesting we needed to take a look at this. He's a two-faced b***ard, that's for sure." "maybe we could have a chat tomorrow about the Baric/Daszak ****show? I would just like to discuss what our strategy should be so we don't get associated with these f**kers." "... we can't ignore this and I also need to get something back to Tony's team at NIH." "stay off email or carefully curate some emails for the FOI records"