> There is zero evidence that anyone, anywhere in the world was working to develop SARS-like bioweapons
How do I square that with this claim from the article?
> Eleven of its 23 coauthors worked for the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, the Chinese army’s medical research institute. Using the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, the researchers had engineered mice with humanized lungs, then studied their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. As the NSC officials worked backward from the date of publication to establish a timeline for the study, it became clear that the mice had been engineered sometime in the summer of 2019, before the pandemic even started. The NSC officials were left wondering: Had the Chinese military been running viruses through humanized mouse models, to see which might be infectious to humans?"
What this describes seems like it could be circumstantial evidence of the PLA developing bioweapons. Certainly it isn't proof of anything, and as evidence it's not very strong. But I wouldn't call it 'zero.'
"Running viruses through humanized mouse models" is a pretty normal (though frightening) part of virology. For example, Ralph Baric was doing it back in 2005:
So if the Chinese military had in fact been doing this, I'd guess it was just basic research, in the same way that lots of American basic research links back to DARPA. Of course they fund it because they believe there might be a military application, but I see no reason to think that application would be bioweapons (vs. the same kind of beneficial applications described in the open literature).
Perhaps "no evidence" would have been better phrasing than "no reason"? I do think it's possible that some Chinese (or American, or British, or ...) military officer has at some point wondered if coronaviruses would make good bioweapons, but there's still no evidence.
They don't seem like obvious candidates to me, though. Both SARS v1 and SARS-CoV-2 show unpredictable, stochastic person-to-person spread, via super-spreader events. For a bioweapon that would ideally infect all the enemy but no one else, that's the last thing you want, hard to reliably get started and hard to reliably stop once it starts. So that reinforces my belief that if SARS-CoV-2 was of unnatural origin, it was almost certainly an accident during basic research.
How do I square that with this claim from the article?
> Eleven of its 23 coauthors worked for the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, the Chinese army’s medical research institute. Using the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, the researchers had engineered mice with humanized lungs, then studied their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. As the NSC officials worked backward from the date of publication to establish a timeline for the study, it became clear that the mice had been engineered sometime in the summer of 2019, before the pandemic even started. The NSC officials were left wondering: Had the Chinese military been running viruses through humanized mouse models, to see which might be infectious to humans?"
What this describes seems like it could be circumstantial evidence of the PLA developing bioweapons. Certainly it isn't proof of anything, and as evidence it's not very strong. But I wouldn't call it 'zero.'