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Apparently some actors don’t like the publicity and zenodo was hacked after publishing the preprint...
The authors wrote they work at:

"Rule of Law Society & Rule of Law Foundation, New York, NY, USA."

The premise of being against the injustices present in China seems innocuous enough, but it absolutely calls in to question the objectivity of this study.

That being said, if you're against injustice and corrupt government, and you have Steven Bannon speak at one of your gatherings...

It calls everything about your organization into question...

Science was supposed to be about objectivity. Not who published it or how it was funded... Had to question whether I'm living in the 1600s or 2020...
Very interesting, I hope that this paper gets peer reviewed so we can determine if the whole manmade hypothesis is real or not.
According to the abstract,

> The alternative theory that the virus may have come from a research laboratory is, however, strictly censored on peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Therefore it's unlikely that this paper will be peer-reviewed. And who would be willing to risk their career to go against the consensus (or dogma?) which has already emerged? Certainly if it were peer-reviewed, the only ones willing to do so could only damage its credibility by their status.

Maybe even more troubling than the potential that the virus is engineered. It's that why are American institutions trying to limit distribution on a scientific literature just because of the literature's implications? Chilling...
I doubt the implications are a primary motivator considering the US has been increasingly distancing itself from China anyway. Considering the makeup of academics it seems a lot more likely that you simply don't get to support republican affiliated talking points without having enough clout to survive a credibility attack.

Even if your evidence and procedures are correct you'll still be accused of something vague and indefensible like racism because your observations are somehow at fault for contributing to racist attitudes. As long as Social Justice, and by extension so social politics, focuses on belligerantly attacking any potential for dissent the situation is only going to gravitate more towards voluntary censorship.

This paper seems credible, and there is a lot of other evidence showing that the CCP/PLA was doing genetic modification on coronaviri. So if we assume that the paper is correct, we must next consider whether or not the SARS-Cov2 virus was accidentally or deliberately released. If the release was accidental, the PRC has taken extreme measures to create disinformation and hide the truth. They didn't do that the last time they had a similar accident. If I go any further with this line of reasoning, others will likely call me a conspiracy theorist, so I will stop now.
By my reading, the authors say this was done with subterfuge to try and hide who did it.

It probably is possible to come to a solid conclusion about whether the virus was engineered or not by looking at the genome (I certainly don't have the technical skills to judge this article).

But assuming it was indeed engineered, determining intention (e.g. made to look like it was not engineered, or obfuscating who engineered it) is another level of extraordinary. There would be so many ways to misread the data as evidence of subterfuge, when maybe what you're seeing is just how they routed around technical problems.

It's too bad this got flagged. I would have liked to see more discussion about it.