[DiracSpike]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

That 4% difference is 1200 base pairs different (Coronavirus genome is ~30,000 base pairs). Genetic engineering didn't happen here as no technology exists to make 1200 manipulations. Which comes to the "evolution from a cell line" as Wade suggests. This particular virus has unique sugar fixing sites which gives it an ability to evade some immune attack. Cell lines don't have an immune system, which suggests this was gained through natural selection. There's more in this link

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539923/

It's also important to keep in mind that this is all in reference (the 96%) stuff to the only baseline viral sample known from this lab, but there's a story out in Vanity Fair about this with this tidbit.

On February 3, 2020, with the COVID-19 outbreak already spreading beyond China, Shi Zhengli and several colleagues published a paper noting that the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s genetic code was almost 80% identical to that of SARS-CoV, which caused the 2002 outbreak. But they also reported that it was 96.2% identical to a coronavirus sequence in their possession called RaTG13, which was previously detected in “Yunnan province.” They concluded that RaTG13 was the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2.

In the following months, as researchers around the world hunted for any known bat virus that might be a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2, Shi Zhengli offered shifting and sometimes contradictory accounts of where RaTG13 had come from and when it was fully sequenced. Searching a publicly available library of genetic sequences, several teams, including a group of DRASTIC researchers, soon realized that RaTG13 appeared identical to RaBtCoV/4991—the virus from the cave where the miners fell ill in 2012 with what looked like COVID-19.

In July, as questions mounted, Shi Zhengli told Science magazine that her lab had renamed the sample for clarity. But to skeptics, the renaming exercise looked like an effort to hide the sample’s connection to the Mojiang mine.

Their questions multiplied the following month when Shi, Daszak, and their colleagues published an account of 630 novel coronaviruses they had sampled between 2010 and 2015. Combing through the supplementary data, DRASTIC researchers were stunned to find eight more viruses from the Mojiang mine that were closely related to RaTG13 but had not been flagged in the account. Alina Chan of the Broad Institute said it was “mind-boggling” that these crucial puzzle pieces had been buried without comment.

So apparently there were other viruses in storage that could have been even more similar to COVID than 96%.

Yes they got extremely lucky and found a few civets that had the virus (think about how lucky that was considering a virus doesn't stay around long in a host after the host recovers). However, scientists knew the civets were not the source as the genome was unlike any other civet viruses and very similar to coronaviruses in bats. The civet was the vessel that brought the virus to humans as humans don't interact with bats much. The cave containing the likely bats that the virus originated from was found in 2017 - 14 years after 2003.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9

They didn't get lucky finding it in the civets though, they found them in the exact market where the outbreak started. It took them longer to find the bats, but so what? The point is there was still early evidence of natural links the way you would expect. That doesn't exist for this virus. It's kind of misleading to say it took over a decade to find evidence for SARS, it took that long to work everything out and get as close to an answer as possible but there was early evidence right away.

It's harmful because a) anti-asian sentiment is already on the rise, b) we're in a super heated political environment and all the "evidence" is basically mudslinging, and c) we need the Chinese to work with us more, not less. It's estimated an average of one person is infected with a novel bat coronavirus EVERY DAY. The next pandemic could be coming any time. Shouldn't we be working more together? How does an accusation without any data behind it help?

I really don't see what anti-asian sentiment has to do with anything. That is not a good reason to look into a perfectly valid theory, that some idiots somewhere might use it as an excuse to be racist. That's a terrible standard. Besides, I don't see how the lab leak would be any more of an excuse for racists to be racist than the wet market theory which requires people eating exotic animals in unsanitary conditions. I would love the Chinese to work with us more but every step along the way they've lied and obfuscated so despite what I want to have happen I don't think it's in the cards. If this investigation hurts the CCP's feelings then it's tough beans, they could have diffused this in an instant by allowing a transparent look at their full viral databases but they didn't. And if we're worried about the next pandemic I'd suggest we should also be worried about these labs that purposefully manipulate viruses to make them more infectious. What matters is the truth, and respectfully these non-scientific reasons to not give this theory weight should not be taken into account at all. In my opinion. How anyone could trust the Chinese government after all we've seen this year is beyond me.

No. That's not how this works. You can't prove the absence of something. How do I prove that? I'll let the above do the talking. You keep referring to this mountain but not one piece of the theory has held water.

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Yes the mountain of circumstantial evidence. The lab in the city. Where they studied these exact type of viruses. Where they had been flagged by the US government for lax safety standards in 2018. Where three researchers got sick in the early days of the pandemic. Versus.....literally nothing to explain how or what or where this virus exploded into view naturally. That is what I'm referring to. All the nitty gritty virology stuff is interesting and in my view, not conclusive of either theory. It could have been conclusive if the Chinese government had let it be so, but they didn't so it's not. You can't prove the absence of something but there's no absence here, its the presence of a virus that somehow burst on to the scene with low genetic diversity ready to infect humans with no natural trace, right in the middle of the one city in China that was researching it's family. The only way you could throw all of that away is if you thought that there was conclusive, no doubt, 100% signature of natural origin. So maybe you do think that, from what I've read it's not conclusive though, and we're stuck with a pretty big coincidence here.