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To this day, scientists who support the theory that the virus is a mutation that emerged from Wuhan's 'wet market' have not been able to find a convincing candidate for the animal in which this mutation actually occurred.

The official explanation is the new virus was 96 percent identical to a bat virus, RaTG13, found in Yunnan province in southern China.

But as Chinese professor Botao Xiao pointed out in a paper in February, no such bats are sold at the city's markets. And the caves where they live are hundreds of miles away.

That paper disappeared from the internet. Mr Xiao perhaps mindful of the fate that awaits those in China who promote inconvenient truths disavowed it.

Many scientists privately assumed an engineered virus released via a laboratory accident was at least as likely as the idea of a series of stunningly unfortunate chance mutations.

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The lab's highest security 'P4' section was built with French help in a deal signed off by Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier. But after it opened in 2015, the French contingent due to work there were pushed out by China's military.

A WHO spokesman said of its investigation: 'We will follow the science.'

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However, the London-based molecular geneticist Dr Michael Antoniou commented that this line of reasoning fails to take into account that there are a number of laboratory-based systems that can select for high affinity RBD variants that are able to take into account the complex environment of a living organism. This complex environment may impact the efficiency with which the SARS-CoV spike protein can find the ACE2 receptor and bind to it. An RBD selected via these more realistic real-world experimental systems would be just as "ideal", or even more so, for human ACE2 binding than any RBD that a computer model could predict. And crucially, it would likely be different in amino acid sequence. So the fact that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't have the same RBD amino acid sequence as the one that the computer program predicted in no way rules out the possibility that it was genetically engineered.
Limits to computer modelling

Dr Antoniou said that the authors' reasoning is not conclusive because it is based largely on computer modelling, which, he says, is "not definitive but only predictive. It cannot tell us whether any given virus would be optimized for infectivity in a real world scenario, such as in the human body. That's because the environment of the human body will influence how the virus interacts with the receptor. You can't model that accurately with computer modelling as there are simply too many variables to factor into the equation."

Dr Antoniou added, "People can put too much faith in computer programs, but they are only a beginning. You then have to prove whether the computer program's prediction is correct or not by direct experimentation in a living organism. This has not been done in the case of this hypothesis, so it remains unproven."

It is even possible that SARS-CoV-2 was optimized using a living organism model, resulting in a virus that is better at infecting humans than any computer model could predict.

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Hincemm said:

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For amercer...

Define very common?

I guess we'll have to disagree that it's that big of a jump to think China would lie. I'm not the type to call it the "China virus" and don't consider myself xenophobic, but if you don't think that the Chinese government habitually lies on a vast majority of topics (work camps, South China Sea, espionage, and the list goes on), then I think you're mistaken.

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amercer said:

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If something won't even kill lab animals why would you bother?

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Newoldarmy said:

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I generally enjoy cleavage whether natural or scientifically enhanced.

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