Intercept tries to explain the recent developments on the lab leak hypothesis, but it still leaves me a bit confused. Here are the facts as I understand them:

• In 2018, Chinese scientist Shi Zhengli, along with two U.S.-based scientists, together submitted a proposal to U.S. Department of Defense DARPA specifically about inserting a “furin cleavage site” into coronaviruses. Covid-19 has just such a furin cleavage site. This research proposal was not funded by DARPA. Shi Zhengli was known “for her work extracting samples of viruses from bats in Chinese caves”.
• A Chinese national named Ben Hu received funding from USAID and the National Institutes of Health in 2018-2020. There were three grants in total, two of which ran from 2014-2019 and one of which was cut short in 2020 after intervention by Donald Trump. This funding “potentially” involved the furin cleavage site, but from this article at least there does not seem to be conclusive evidence.
• The Wuhan Institute was “known for” experimenting on coronaviruses “alongside” scientists employed by the Chinese military. The article does not make any claims that Shi Zhengli or Ben Hu were employed by the Chinese military.
• Three Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers, including Ben Hu, were hospitalized with Covid-19-like symptoms in November 2019.
• Two investigators from the U.S. State Department spoke to “two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak”. These sources stated that “Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa”.

So, there’s a fair amount of circumstantial evidence and second- or third-hand eyewitness accounts here. And the U.S. State Department is not averse to twisting facts to fit a narrative it thinks is in the U.S. national interest. Nonetheless, there are an awful lot of coincidences here. Maybe the U.S. government would like to pin this on the Chinese government, but there is a certain irony if they managed to f— over all of humanity together. And this would be the first plague unleashed on international humanity as a result of biological engineering.