In March 2020, Rossana Segreto made the first public connection between RaTG13 and BtCoV4991 and in April 2020 published a preprint about the possibility they might be the same virus.

In April 2020, Yuri Deigin published the first in-depth analysis of gain-of-function work done at WIV and how it could have led to SARS2 leaking from their lab.

In April 2020, Yuri Deigin traced the origin of RaTG13 to the mine in Mojiang, which then prompted TheSeeker to discover a Master’s thesis and a PhD thesis on an unusual case of pneumonia in the same mineshaft where RaTG13, the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2, was found. Mona and Rahul Bahulikar later published a paper on these Mojiang miners’ cases.

In May 2020, Yuri Deigin was the first to publicly report the deletion of the WIV virus database.

In May 2020, @ydeigin pointed out the peculiar CGG-CGG codons and FauI restriction enzyme site in the PRRA insertion in SARS2 which created a novel furin cleavage site.

In June 2020, after WIV released RaTG13 sequencing data, Francisco de Asis found that RaTG13 was sequenced long before the pandemic rather than after, as was implied in WIV’s February 2020 Nature paper. RaTG13 amplicon fasta headers showed dates back to 2017 and 2018, and also a label referred as “7896” pointing to one of the eight viruses close to SARS-CoV-2 after RaTG13.

In November 2020, Rossana Segreto and Yuri Deigin published their paper “The genetic structure of SARS-CoV-2 does not rule out a laboratory origin”. Their paper was mentioned by several mainstream media outlets, as one of the first peer reviewed papers considering a possible lab origin of SARS-CoV-2. It has since become the most widely cited lab leak hypothesis paper, as well as one with the highest Altmetric score.

In May 2021, TheSeeker has published 3 more PhD theses from WIV which showed there was active work done on RaTG13/BtCoV4991, including full genome sequencing in the 2019 PhD thesis. We also pointed out that the BtCoV4991 spike gene seems to have a 1% difference from the RaTG13 spike gene, raising questions as to whether the two might actually not be identical.