近端起源的作者们说，病毒是人工制造的几乎不可能。

私下里，克里斯蒂安·安德森承认：“我们的论文在说‘绝无可能’时语气非常强烈……但在这个阶段，我对那个说法没有那么自信。”

他还指出，在实验室中制造这种病毒远没有他们声称的那么难——德国科学家在不到两周的时间内就为其构建了一个完整的运作系统。

一年后，当一份2018年的资助提案浮出水面，该提案计划在蝙蝠冠状病毒中插入与SARS-CoV-2中看到的确切相同类型特征时，安德鲁·兰博特说：“我们只需要重新说服自己这只是巧合。”

The Proximal Origin authors said it was basically impossible that the virus was engineered.

Privately, Kristian Andersen admitted:“Our paper was pretty strong in saying ‘there’s no way’… but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage.”

He also noted that creating the virus in a lab was not nearly as hard as they claimed — German scientists built a full working system for it in under two weeks.

A year later, when a 2018 grant proposal surfaced that planned to insert the exact same kind of feature into bat coronaviruses that we see in SARS-CoV-2, Andrew Rambaut said:"We just need to re-convince ourselves it is coincidence.”