zlacker

This isn't hard for to check. Yes, basically all research on RaTG13 did appear after the Covid pandemic, as you would naturally expect given that scientists were interested in it given the similarity. Nobody was interested in the RaTG13 previously.

However, the evidence is pretty clear that this was found and published earlier. It was originally described as "BtCoV/4991" and it was described and published as far as I can find as far back as 2016. (The name was changed to RaTG13 to describe that it was collected in 2013 in Tongguan).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/983856042 <-- partial RaTG13 sequence in 2016