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It's an argument that is difficult to disprove on the matter of obvious modification in a lab. It is asking the other side to prove a negative. The onus is on finding proof that a modification has occurred. In this case the writer believes that virus RNA synthesis, splicing, and editing is commonplace and therefore it's a balance of probabilities.
The counter argument I heard early on was from virologists saying we don't need to study human-made viruses because mother nature is extremely good at generating interesting viruses to study. Which seems to completely gloss over gain of function research, and that virologists do commonly create and study chimera viruses.
Hell, there are vaccine researchers synthesizing human-friendly viruses to combat COVID19. So I feel like there is a big curtain behind which we will see how the virologists make the sausage, except the whole industry will show that many labs pose an existential threat to humanity.
I have no doubt virus experimentation through splicing and synthesizing is off to the races with little moral / ethical guidance especially in China. Hell, we. have 15-year old technology like CRISPR to edit DNA
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