Origin of the Coronavirus

[Fuzz]

New names given for the variants:


https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid...ames-1.6047338


They probably should have been on this sooner.

[GGG]

I’d have perferred hurricane style names.

This system has the problem of running out of letters so they will be reluctant to give it a name in the period between discovery and calling it a VOC

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by GGG

I’d have perferred hurricane style names.

This system has the problem of running out of letters so they will be reluctant to give it a name in the period between discovery and calling it a VOC

You want to name it after people? I don't think that's a good idea. "The Karen variant is emerging as a devastating super spreader, laying waste to New York, Vermont, and parts of Ohio. Scientists warn to avoid Karen at all costs." Hrmmm....

[GreenLantern2814]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

You want to name it after people? I don't think that's a good idea. "The Karen variant is emerging as a devastating super spreader, laying waste to New York, Vermont, and parts of Ohio. Scientists warn to avoid Karen at all costs." Hrmmm....

It’s going to be so hard to explain why nobody is named Karen 20 years from now.

[DeluxeMoustache]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

There's no reason to believe this is what happened. Most virologists are saying that gain of function research would never have used the changes seen in this particular one. There's millions of different Coronaviruses in Nature, why settle on one the models would suggested won't work in humans? These mutations happen literally all the time in nature and there's nothing but innuendo that something was changed in a lab when these changes occur naturally. That's a big reach



Well yes, they were specifically studying Coronaviruses because it was a great spot to do so due to SARS originating from the wild nearby. In fact, the Wuhan Lab was built because of SARS so they could test the nearby wildlife and monitor coronaviruses that were changing nearby. Again, the lab was built there because it was the best place to study coronaviruses nearby.

If they knew it was a lab leak, they would've known the progenitor and would've pointed to it immediately. This is very silly speculation. Because a nation routinely lies does not mean that imaginary things are then true when they say no.


Why?


This whole lab leak theory goes like this:

There's zero evidence to suggest it , but we feel they're shady and they're denying it, so I believe it to be true.


The actual people who did the actual investigation say they saw no reason to believe anything other than natural origin which happens all the time (like all the last pandemics that have happened).

I refer you to this article which discusses the lab leak theory and the natural origin theory

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-...-box-at-wuhan/

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

You want to name it after people? I don't think that's a good idea. "The Karen variant is emerging as a devastating super spreader, laying waste to New York, Vermont, and parts of Ohio. Scientists warn to avoid Karen at all costs." Hrmmm....

Yes, that way you can cheer for the variant that gets named after you. They could be named after prominent anti maskers. I propose the Powlowski variant.

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by DeluxeMoustache

I refer you to this article which discusses the lab leak theory and the natural origin theory

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-...-box-at-wuhan/

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.
2) The codon nonsense isn't correct, and the rarity of the Furin site is also wrong.
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.
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.
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:

The emails obtained via public records requests show that EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak drafted the Lancet statement, and that he intended it to “not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person” but rather to be seen as “simply a letter from leading scientists”. Daszak wrote that he wanted “to avoid the appearance of a political statement”.

Doesn't that just sound like a scientist asking other scientist to help push against a harmful and counterproductive narrative?
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


The Wade blog was the same "this is possible and the Chinese lie, so it must have happened" all over again. It was an incredibly slanted piece really light on data. He really suggests a cabal of virologists created a monster virus and it escaped, then they all covered it up without any proof except vague "they're not trustworthy" insinuations, and "well it's possible". Then looking at natural origin (again, dozens of examples just like it out there) he suggests it isn't likely due to a codon issue he's wrong about, a Furin cleavage site he's wrong about, and other stuff virologists disagree about.

It's a really slanted blog

[Firebot]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

There's no reason to believe this is what happened. Most virologists are saying that gain of function research would never have used the changes seen in this particular one. There's millions of different Coronaviruses in Nature, why settle on one the models would suggested won't work in humans? These mutations happen literally all the time in nature and there's nothing but innuendo that something was changed in a lab when these changes occur naturally. That's a big reach

Well yes, they were specifically studying Coronaviruses because it was a great spot to do so due to SARS originating from the wild nearby. In fact, the Wuhan Lab was built because of SARS so they could test the nearby wildlife and monitor coronaviruses that were changing nearby. Again, the lab was built there because it was the best place to study coronaviruses nearby.

If they knew it was a lab leak, they would've known the progenitor and would've pointed to it immediately. This is very silly speculation. Because a nation routinely lies does not mean that imaginary things are then true when they say no.


Why?


This whole lab leak theory goes like this:

There's zero evidence to suggest it , but we feel they're shady and they're denying it, so I believe it to be true.

Meanwhile, thousands of viruses become human pathogens naturally (literally every single one ever!) but we're going to believe that in this specific case they found a pathogen that affects humans but somehow no one had been infected yet, then they bring it to a lab to test it but oh noes it escapes, and we should believe that because they're shady. I don't get it.

The actual people who did the actual investigation say they saw no reason to believe anything other than natural origin which happens all the time (like all the last pandemics that have happened).

Natural origin is by a million times the most likely, but I'm supposed to believe it either occurred naturally but by a miracle the scientists found it before it had jumped to a human or other animal but then they got careless, or that a virologist that knows an awful lot things not a single virologist elsewhere knows and made it but oh noes it escaped. Could any of that be possible? Sure, but then why not speculate more? Maybe the Russians made it but didn't want the blame? Or maybe the US did it? There's an equal amount of evidence there...

There's a very good reason why the US is pursuing the lab theory right now. The Biden administration has received enough intelligence to demand answers on the origin of the pandemic.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/worl...eory-1.4579879

“The Biden administration has now studied the mountain of disturbing evidence that we were confronted with in the last few months of the Trump administration,” said David Asher, who led a state department investigation into the origins of Covid. “It is jaw dropping. And as they have noted, a great deal more needs to be assessed.”

Days before Biden was sworn in, the state department issued a fact sheet on the Wuhan institute that said several researchers had fallen ill with Covid-like symptoms before the first publicly known case. It also said the institute had worked secretly with the Chinese military.

The only reason why the world didn't push the lab theory earlier is because it got politicized right away and giving any credibility to the Trump administration could have impacted election chances.

Why on earth would you believe that Biden would throw the Republicans and Trump a bone and suddenly side on the lab leak theory when he had zero reason to do so? There's a reason why he is, because there is enough intelligence pointing to it being a probable cause. Even Fauci has changed its tune on it, likely having seen the same evidence as Biden did and doing so from a medical SME perspective.

This has been 100% political from the start.

Again, the fact that Biden is leading the push for a full investigation in the lab and made a statement on it when he has zero to benefit from it politically should make you stop and rethink your stance.

Yes viruses mutate naturally all the time, but there's too much corroborating evidence surfaced recently pointing to a potential lab leak and China's refusal to allow a proper investigation. There's a reason why the US is looking into the possibility of this being a lab leak when a year ago it was shelved as a conspiracy nut theory.

[Firebot]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57268111

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1

As scientists with relevant expertise, we agree with the WHO director-general (5), the United States and 13 other countries (6), and the European Union (7) that greater clarity about the origins of this pandemic is necessary and feasible to achieve. We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data. A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest. Public health agencies and research laboratories alike need to open their records to the public. Investigators should document the veracity and provenance of data from which analyses are conducted and conclusions drawn, so that analyses are reproducible by independent experts.

Finally, in this time of unfortunate anti-Asian sentiment in some countries, we note that at the beginning of the pandemic, it was Chinese doctors, scientists, journalists, and citizens who shared with the world crucial information about the spread of the virus—often at great personal cost (8, 9). We should show the same determination in promoting a dispassionate science-based discourse on this difficult but important issue.

Again, the Chinese state government hid this for months. Their official stance is they learned of a SARS like pneumonia very late December and acted on it within days, December 27 to be exact. The report of pneumonia like illness at the Wuhan lab months prior directly contradicts this.

[GGG]

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.
2) The codon nonsense isn't correct, and the rarity of the Furin site is also wrong.
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.
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.
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?
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


The Wade blog was the same "this is possible and the Chinese lie, so it must have happened" all over again. It was an incredibly slanted piece really light on data. He really suggests a cabal of virologists created a monster virus and it escaped, then they all covered it up without any proof except vague "they're not trustworthy" insinuations, and "well it's possible". Then looking at natural origin (again, dozens of examples just like it out there) he suggests it isn't likely due to a codon issue he's wrong about, a Furin cleavage site he's wrong about, and other stuff virologists disagree about.

It's a really slanted blog

Do you have a link to the this week in virology episodes that discuss the codons and cleavage sites theories. It’s tough to find non-dismissive content refuting the lab theory.

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by Firebot

There's a very good reason why the US is pursuing the lab theory right now. The Biden administration has received enough intelligence to demand answers on the origin of the pandemic.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/worl...eory-1.4579879



The only reason why the world didn't push the lab theory earlier is because it got politicized right away and giving any credibility to the Trump administration could have impacted election chances.

Why on earth would you believe that Biden would throw the Republicans and Trump a bone and suddenly side on the lab leak theory when he had zero reason to do so? There's a reason why he is, because there is enough intelligence pointing to it being a probable cause. Even Fauci has changed its tune on it, likely having seen the same evidence as Biden did and doing so from a medical SME perspective.

This has been 100% political from the start.

Again, the fact that Biden is leading the push for a full investigation in the lab and made a statement on it when he has zero to benefit from it politically should make you stop and rethink your stance.

Yes viruses mutate naturally all the time, but there's too much corroborating evidence surfaced recently pointing to a potential lab leak and China's refusal to allow a proper investigation. There's a reason why the US is looking into the possibility of this being a lab leak when a year ago it was shelved as a conspiracy nut theory.

No, I'm not a virologists but I am a pharmacist with a special interest in infectious disease. I also was referring to actual Virologists, including the Vincent Racaniello (who literally wrote the book on Virology), Robert Garry (who worked on determining the genetic origins of this virus), and the virologists and scientists who actually went to China and investigated it. I wasn't quoting Irish Times article about a political matter.

The Biden administration said it remains the least likely scenario, but he wanted a full investigation to determine the origins. Sorry, but it's a political entity who has incentive to look tough on China. There's no reason for a Biden administration asking for a more thorough investigation to be anything more than political posturing. As for Fauci, he hasn't changed his tune at all. He said recently he still believes it was likely a natural origin but you can't say for 100% certain, so he supports an investigation(https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.new...595882%3famp=1). I don't see a change in belief there.


I keep seeing "there's a mountain of evidence" it "too corroborating evidence". Like the 3 researchers who got respiratory symptoms in November 2019. A reasonable explanation could be that 3 out of hundreds of researchers may have gotten the flu as it was during a flu season. I don't see a mountain. A really good quote on this situation I heard was "when you mix politics with Science, you get politics)

I don't think there's anything wrong with investigating and it's definitely a possibility, but there's so much misinformation circulating most of the "evidence" so far is innuendo. I'm certainly amenable to changing my view, but I've yet to see anything that would change view that the process that has lead to every viral disease known to man didn't happen here.

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by GGG

Do you have a link to the this week in virology episodes that discuss the codons and cleavage sites theories. It’s tough to find non-dismissive content refuting the lab theory.

It's here I believe:

https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-762/

[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.

[opendoor]

Originally Posted by DiracSpike

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.

For one, 96% isn't that similar; it's potentially decades of evolution. And it's also worth remembering that the 96% similar bat virus (RaTH13) was:

• collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology
• was previously unknown and its sequence had never been published
• was only made public when researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology published their findings noting the similarity to SARS-CoV-2

If they had been manipulating that virus, accidentally leaked it, and were looking to cover that up, would it really make sense for them to tell the whole world that they had that virus in their lab? I mean, if you want to get really conspiratorial, couldn't they have kept that virus under wraps and then "found" it in a cave after the fact to support natural origin?

You keep saying this and I don't think you're correct. In May 2003, months after SARS began, they found the virus in pangolins 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.

They found a very similar virus in civets and postulated that it passed from bats, to civets, to humans. However, it took 14 years to find an actual source, which was a population of bats that had strains of coronaviruses that were the building blocks of SARS-CoV-1, that could adequately explain the lineage. And ultimately they believe that the civets didn't play any evolutionary role, just that they were infected at a similar point in time to humans (and likely spread it to humans). So that is to say, the virus could have plausibly spread to humans without the civet's involvement, so the lack of an identified intermediate host for SARS-CoV-2 isn't inherently problematic.

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by DiracSpike

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.

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/

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.

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

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.

The 50km range is only important to point out because it's actually 1000's of kms. You're right it's moot, but not for the reasons you think. The market was not in the home territory of the bats that caused SARS. Yunnan is literally 1000km from Guangdong. You see why Wade is being misleading here? He knows the bats that caused SARS were found 1000km from the outbreak. And he knows the range of that bat isn't 50km.

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.

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 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

What did the rest of the email say?

https://www.politifact.com/factcheck...ment-virus-wa/

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.

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.

Sent from my Pixel 5 using Tapatalk

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

It's here I believe:

https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-762/

Thanks for the link

I think the strongest arguements they make are the epidemiological ones. Essentially for 3 lab techs to go to hospital means hundreds of community cases which the serology doesn’t back and that the way the virus broke out of seeing a few unconnected cases followed by the main jump is consistent with natural evolution

I think they fail to discuss the gain of function experiments as a cause and instead focus on debunking the actively engineered theory but otherwise a really good rebuttal of most of the arguments.

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by GGG

Thanks for the link

I think the strongest arguements they make are the epidemiological ones. Essentially for 3 lab techs to go to hospital means hundreds of community cases which the serology doesn’t back and that the way the virus broke out of seeing a few unconnected cases followed by the main jump is consistent with natural evolution

I think they fail to discuss the gain of function experiments as a cause and instead focus on debunking the actively engineered theory but otherwise a really good rebuttal of most of the arguments.

Except the 3 lab cases tested negative for SARS COV2 antibodies in March/April. And if you needed 100's positives in the community to get three people seeking care, one would assume you would've also needed 100's of other lab researchers that were positive before there were 3 seeking care too, no?

Again, in order for it to be gain of function they would have had to have this complete virus minus a few changes. And it would've been super easy to say "we found the original virus" in whatever coven they found the one they did gain of function in.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

Except the 3 lab cases tested negative for SARS COV2 antibodies in March/April.

Again, in order for it to be gain of function they would have had to have this complete virus minus a few changes. And it would've been super easy to say "we found the original virus" in whatever coven they found the one they did gain of function in.

Yeah that’s why I agree the epidemiological evidence is the strongest piece in favour of natural emergence. It does not appear that the pattern of release is well explained by lab release.

Was that somewhere in the video you linked or is there a good source as to why the gain of function research argument isn’t valid?

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by opendoor

For one, 96% isn't that similar; it's potentially decades of evolution. And it's also worth remembering that the 96% similar bat virus (RaTH13) was:

• collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology
• was previously unknown and its sequence had never been published
• was only made public when researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology published their findings noting the similarity to SARS-CoV-2

If they had been manipulating that virus, accidentally leaked it, and were looking to cover that up, would it really make sense for them to tell the whole world that they had that virus in their lab? I mean, if you want to get really conspiratorial, couldn't they have kept that virus under wraps and then "found" it in a cave after the fact to support natural origin?

They found a very similar virus in civets and postulated that it passed from bats, to civets, to humans. However, it took 14 years to find an actual source, which was a population of bats that had strains of coronaviruses that were the building blocks of SARS-CoV-1, that could adequately explain the lineage. And ultimately they believe that the civets didn't play any evolutionary role, just that they were infected at a similar point in time to humans (and likely spread it to humans). So that is to say, the virus could have plausibly spread to humans without the civet's involvement, so the lack of an identified intermediate host for SARS-CoV-2 isn't inherently problematic.

I was thinking more about the civets they found with SARS-1. The reason they were able to find them was that virtually everyone who caught SARS got horribly sick. About 11% died and a even more were hospitalized. While it's not settled, there didn't appear to be any asymptomatic spread. It would've taken only a handful of cases to be able to see something new was spreading and that small number could be contact traced back to a wet market, test all the animals and boom, you find a civet that's got it once you have sequenced the virus.

In this case, there's lots asymptomatic disease, mild disease, and a less defined incubation period. There's also the fact that it's flu season and minor respiratory illness would be fairly common. To have someone in the hospital with unidentified respiratory illness isn't uncommon, and it would've taken a few of those to see something is new. How much community spread was there at that point, and how much time had passed since the first infection? Weeks at least. It's even quite plausible the wet market in this case was simply a mass spreader event rather than the point of origin. Contact tracing for SARS-1 would've been much, much easier.

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by GGG

Yeah that’s why I agree the epidemiological evidence is the strongest piece in favour of natural emergence. It does not appear that the pattern of release is well explained by lab release.

Was that somewhere in the video you linked or is there a good source as to why the gain of function research argument isn’t valid?

Mostly here:

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