“Explain to me how in nature HIV genes got spliced into the RNA of the virus?”
When a virus infects a cell, it turns it into a factory for making new viruses. When two viruses infect a cell at the same time, their genetic material might be swapped to make hybrid viruses with pieces of each.
So in this scenario, a Frankenstein virus emerges from some animal with both HIV and a cold. You can do an Internet search for “gene swapping” and “viruses”, and find some interesting articles.
That being said, as the article acknowledges, showing that the virus was not bioengineered does not also show that it didn’t come from a bioweapons laboratory. It could be a naturally occurring virus accumulated in the lab, and then released, accidentally or intentionally. That’s the most plausible explanation for the outbreak that I’ve seen so far.
What happens to the cell, does it eventually die from all of the disturbance caused by the viral invasion?