Hi @jasonliberty, I only did a quick search, and couldn't find the article I referenced. But I did listen to the NBC broadcast again and as to the first part, it seems we even agree about what it means, but the conclusions we draw are where we differ. In particular, we agree on this:

The context seems clear, the alleged emergence of a novel virus in Wuhan and the Chinese samples that were taken in patients from the Wuhan market where it allegedly all began. He’s clearly referring to the researchers who took and analyzed those samples, and he said they didn’t isolate the virus, but hey, maybe he didn’t actually mean what he said, maybe he actually meant that they did isolate it, and that something else was the issue. As small as a sound bite as it is, it’s pretty hard to misinterpret; he either meant what he said, or he didn’t, or there’s some other cryptic meaning of virus isolation that I’m missing here. So I’d love to hear that explanation of yours, I really would.

Yes, he is saying that the didn't isolate the virus in the first patients they found. But this isn't terribly surprising, in my opinion. During the first couple of weeks during which the outbreak occurred, it appears the Chinese doctors were caught off guard and didn't realize they were dealing with a new and dangerous virus. In pre-covid times, if you went to the doctor with flu symptoms, I doubt they would have tried to genetically sequence it as that is expensive. But once they realized that they were dealing with something new and deadly, they took it more seriously, sampled infected patients, and sequenced the virus. But this would likely be after the initial patients had recovered or died and no longer contained the virus. At least, that is essentially what the Chinese guy is claiming.

Now, he could be lying: the question he is being asked is why they didn't share the data on those initial patients. If the "lab leak" theory is correct, then they may have had a protocol in place to test anyone reporting covid-like symptoms as a means of detecting a potential leak from the lab. And in this case, they could have isolated the virus at that time and just held back the results, hoping to snuff out the virus before it could spread. But that is purely speculative and I haven't seen strong evidence that points one way or the other.

thus no amount of genetic sequencing and mapping, no matter how widespread, inherently establishes the existence of new virus named ‘2019-nCoV’/‘SARS-CoV2’, which could only by accomplished with the scientific gold standard of virus isolation and purification

Here's where you start to lose me. There are labs all around the world where scientists can isolate the virus from samples take from local covid-19 patients and genetically sequence the DNA.

An initial failure to identify the DNA sequence in the initial patients is mostly meaningless, except that it could be helpful to trace the origin of the virus (and if the lab leak theory is correct, this would be an obvious reason why the Chinese would not want to share such data, and that was the whole point of the "pointed question" by the NBC interviewer).

As I mentioned previously, a huge number of such studies have been performed (and I referenced several such papers written all over the world) and there doesn't appear to be much dispute about the DNA sequencing between these paper writers. These studies have additionally identified mutated forms of the virus, that's how scientists identify variants. This seems really straightforward to me, I am having trouble following what you find confusing about it.