Was revisiting the Proximal Origin paper to check out the pangolin angle - came across this curious chain.

Prox O: Malayan pangolins illegally imported into Guangdong province contain coronaviruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 (ref 21) .. Although RaTG13 .. remains the closest to SARS-CoV-2, .. some pangolin coronaviruses exhibit strong similarity to SARS-CoV-2. .. This clearly shows that the SARS-CoV-2 .. is the result of natural selection.

I checked their ref for the illegally imported pangolin - it's this paper.
Published Feb 20, 2020
Authors: Tao Zhang, Qunfu Wu, Zhigang Zhang, Chinese Academy of Science, Kunming, Yunan

Interestingly, Garry says Prox O draft was finished by Feb 1 - so their key pangolin claim is reffed to a paper that hadn't been published by that stage - which suggests some communication with the above authors. Nothing wrong with that - just registering it.

But the above paper is still not the source for illegally imported pangolin. In turn, they ref a previous paper which conducted tests on 11 dead pangolin seized by customs.

Authors: Ping Liu, Wu Chen 2 and Jin-Ping Chen (Institute of Zoology, Guangdong Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou)

Received: 30 September 2019 / Revised: 21 October 2019 / Accepted: 21 October 2019 / Published: 24 October 2019

The dates are interesting. Nobody was studying pangolin viruses - the authors talk about how neglected they were as a topic - suddenly a paper appears - right in the Covid-emergence-timeframe.

Jin-ping Chen et al: Recently, the prediction of viral zoonosis epidemics has become a major public health issue... Malayan pangolins could be another host with the potential of transmitting the SARS coronavirus to humans.

Remember, this is pre-Covid's emergence being public.

Either they were incredibly prescient - to the point that the Covid outbreak happened within days of their prediction, or .... this was part of the set-up.

Then there's this: Jin-Ping Chen has previously collabed on this paper in 2014: Evidence for Retrovirus and Paramyxovirus Infection of Multiple Bat Species in China
Pub: 2014

Get a load of the authors on that:

Lihong Yuan, Min Li, Linmiao Li, Corina Monagin, Aleksei A. Chmura, Bradley S. Schneider, Jonathan H. Epstein, Xiaolin Mei, Zhengli Shi, Peter Daszak, and Jinping Chen

Three are from EHA, plus Schneider, a frequent EHA collaborator - with Shi Zhengli from WIV.

What does that prove? Not much. But it's another tantalizing coincidence. We know Prox O was purpose written to counter the conspiracy theorists coz the authors tell us that straight out.

In the desperate scramble to create a zoonotic narrative, was this paper also purpose written - or co-opted and re-edited - to fit the scenario?