Interesting research paper came out the other day. Some researchers associated with the Pasteur Institute in France (highly respected) collected virus samples from a whole bunch of bats in Laos, and found one virus that is nearly identical to SARS-COV2 in the Receptor Binding Domain. This is the part of the spike that binds to human ACE2, and lets the virus enter cells. This particular spike binds just as well to ACE2 as SARS-COV2. They showed this virus can infect human cells, and is neutralized by human antibodies against SARS-COV2. They performed a plaque assay, which is a test to show visually the virus killing cells on a culture plate, and it looked just like a SARS-COV2 plaque assay.

Then they figured out all of the molecular binding geometry, and showed why it works just like SARS-COV2! Then they showed how the SARS-COV2 virus is a product of 15 different recombination events, with almost all segments of it's RNA from one of 15 different corona viruses. They have a lovely figure that show all the common parts of all 15 viruses, with each segment labelled as to what other virus they share it with.

This utterly demolishes the "Lab Leak Hypothesis". And it also gives them a virus they can culture that can be used for experiments, that is harmless in humans.

Educating anyone benefits everyone.