Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance was enhancing MERS-CoV in Wuhan as well bat coronaviruses. MERS has a 35% fatality rate.
https://theintercept.com/2021/10/21/virus-mers-wuhan-experiments/
It looks like the world was lucky that it was only SARS-CoV-2 that escaped.
– “Changing the receptor binding site on MERS is sort of crazy,” wrote Jack Nunberg, a virologist and director of the Montana Biotechnology Center at the University of Montana, in an email to The Intercept after reviewing the documents. “Although these new chimeric viruses may retain properties of the MERS-CoV genetic backbone, engineering of a known human pathogen raises new and unpredictable risks beyond those posed by their previously reported studies using a non-pathogenic bat virus backbone.” The researchers’ intent, which some scientists consider integral to defining gain-of-function, remains unclear.