It turned out that 26 of those 27 scientists who signed the Lancet letter had undisclosed conflicts of interests due to connections with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9980015/26-Lancet-s...). Chief among them Peter Daszak, President of Ecohealth Alliance, whom we now know was involved in gain of function research with WIV that involved SARS-like viruses that could bind to the ACE2 receptor (https://journals.asm.org/doi/pdf/10.1128/jvi.02582-15).