Possible lab origin of Covid and the Faucian bargain

From article by Nicholas Wade – whose Jan 2021 article in New York Magazine helped persuade me of lab origin of Covid [as an accident, tweaked bat coronavirus]:

//Andersen reported to Fauci that “after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” Eddie is Edward C. Holmes of the University of Sydney; Bob is Robert F. Garry of Tulane University; Mike is Michael Farzan at Scripps Research. In their unanimous view, the virus didn’t come from nature and may instead have escaped from a lab.

We knew this much already from emails obtained in June 2021 by a Freedom of Information Act request, as well as from the fact that a teleconference took place the following day (February 1, 2020) to discuss the virologists’ conclusion. But something remarkable happened at the conference, because within three days Andersen was singing a different tune. In a February 4, 2020 email, he derided ideas about a lab leak as “crackpot theories” that “relate to this virus being somehow engineered with intent and that is demonstrably not the case.”
…
As we know from EcoHealth’s grant applications to the NIAID, Shi collected many types of coronaviruses from wild bats and took them back to her lab. There she manipulated the viruses, principally by taking the gene for the spike protein of one virus and inserting it into the genome of another. The stated goal of this research was to find out how close the wild viruses might be to jumping to humans. To this end, she tested the novel viruses in humanized mice—animals genetically engineered to carry in their airways the proteins that the virus targets. The process adapts the virus to be capable of attacking live humans, even though this is not the intent.
…
Though primary responsibility for any lab leak would rest with Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and with Chinese regulatory authorities, Collins and Fauci could share a portion of the blame for having funded gain-of-function research despite its obvious risks and then failing to ensure that grant recipients were taking all necessary precautions.//

https://www.city-journal.org/covid-origin-conspiracy