[DiracSpike]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

Most of what's written in there is debunked by virologists in This Week in Virology in their last few episodes.

1) Virologists doing "gain of function" don't start with a candidate and then change a whole bunch of things. They start with a basically complete virus. There was nothing close enough known to anyone or described to be the candidate for this.

They didn't change a bunch of things, this virus is something like 96% similar to a bat virus from nature. The assertion is that the spike protein was manipulated, which seems consistent with what you're saying here. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say.

3) We haven't found the animal it came from in 15 months supposedly suggests this was created in lab except that it took 14 years to find the one for SARS.

You keep saying this and I don't think you're correct. In May 2003, months after SARS began, they found the virus in civets sold in the market thought to have been the outbreak center. No such evidence for this virus exists, despite a heavy incentive for the Chinese to find it. How could it take 14 years to find the reservoir animals they'd all be long gone by then. Unless you mean something else, but the point is this evidence was found early on for SARS and it's nonexistent for COVID.

4) Apparently the range for the horseshoe bats the betacoronavirus came from is only 50km and it's in the south so it can't have made it to Wuhan. He was wrong about the bats range (it's huge and not 50km), and it wouldn't be relevant anyways due to the fact that virologists believe there was an intermediary host and the wet markets sell animals from all over China.

The range might be more than 50km but it's certainly not the 1000km to Wuhan, so this is a moot point. It's possible that this somehow got into a bunch of animals and then into a seafood market 1000km away but again, there's no evidence of that. None. This is again divergent from SARS where the market was in the home territory of these bats in the south of China.

5) This one is my favorite. He maligns Peter Daszak for "orchestrating" a bunch of prominent scientists to push back against the "China did it" narrative. Here's a snippet from his evidence:
Doesn't that just sound like a scientist asking other scientist to help push against a harmful and counterproductive narrative?

How's it harmful and counterproductive? Or a narrative? That speaks to bias on your part that you don't want this to be true, for some reason. The point is that Daszak has a vested interest in what comes of this investigation. He's heavily involved in gain of function research and had links to the Wuhan lab. His funding could get massively cut if they world cracks down on this. There's a video on YouTube of him talking in December 2019 of how easy it is to manipulate coronaviruses...he's no neutral party in this episode.

6) Wade goes off a few times about what was and wasn't able to be accessed by the investigators. I really suggest listening to the This Week in Virology episode where they interview the actual investors. The accusations really fall apart

I really don't see how anything falls apart here, the evidence keeps piling up. The Fauci emails released today show an exchange he had with Kristian Anderson, a US virus researcher

"“The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” he wrote.

Andersen also noted that he and others “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory” but added that “there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change.”

So more smoke to this virus, and despite the group that Daszak (biased) was able to string together it is absolutely not true that the virology community believes there's no evidence this was engineered, to say nothing of the mountain of circumstantial evidence linking to this to the Wuhan lab and nonexistent evidence linking it to the seafood market.

What do you feel is the strongest point of evidence that it was natural? I'd be really curious to know, because I haven't seen anything besides the inertia of it being what we originally thought and how diseases have arisen in the past, before people thought it would be a good idea to manipulate viruses to make them more infectious. You can poke slight holes in the lab leak but that's not proving natural origin. It seems to be just a status quo theory that people are clinging to, unless you can give what you feel is the strongest evidence point FOR natural origin, I'd honestly be really curious what it is.