A paper was recently published on the assembly of monkey pox virus through recombination technology in a lab. The work was done before the end of 2021 because that was when the paper was submitted for publication, see [1]. I don't understand why one would want go full Frankenstein and build a dangerous pathogen from scratch.
Interestingly, the work was funded by the and performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from the paper:
This work was supported by the National Science and Technology Major Project of China (2018ZX10711001-006) and the Key Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KJZD-SW-L06-02).
YouTube video, see [2].
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1995820X2...!