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Originally Posted by jjgallow
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A medical doctor and a physicist (whose expertise is on climate change) writing an opinion column in a newspaper. Hardly the most compelling evidence.
And virologists have roundly debunked their argument. 3-5% of SARS, MERS, SARS-CoV2, etc. is made up of CGG codons, so a CGG-CGG pair doesn't mean a whole lot. Mutations and weighted preferences for different codons are merely a matter of probability, not 100% certainty. Further, CGG-CGG pairs are no easier to insert than any other, so that doesn't mean anything really.
And finally, SARS-CoV-2 is so divergent from basically any other coronavirus that has ever been sequenced, it's exceedingly unlikely that it could have been created through genetic engineering. The difference between it and its closest known relatives is far too large of a gap to bridge with gain of function research. People get taken in by things like "96% similar", but that's decades of evolution.
Their conclusion is that a laboratory origin cannot be 100% ruled out. Which is what basically any credible scientist still says.
But again, they're focused on what was then the closest known relative (RaTG13) as a basis for SARS-CoV-2, when that's not really possible at this point in time. And since that paper was published, there have been closer relatives to SARS-CoV-2 found in nature, including two different samples of bat coronaviruses from Laos. One showed an almost identical receptor-binding domain to SARS-CoV-2 while another is a single amino acid insertion away from generating a furin cleavage site. Both the RBD and the FCS were once talked about as "smoking guns" showing it had likely been engineered because of their affinity for infecting human cells, but newer evidence has now shown that they can easily occur naturally in coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2.