Newoldarmy said:

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Most likely is that it was engineered in Wuhan for nefarious purposes and escaped due to incompetence.

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Infection_Ag11 said:

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B-1 83 said:

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Infection_Ag11 said:

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Quote:

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I'd say if that money or money from our military helped fund what eventually led to the accidental or intentional release of the virus, they absolutely deserve some of the blame..

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Then you are forced to argue they should never be giving grants to anyone, anywhere, ever on the basis that someone might lie about the funding utilization and it slip through the cracks. And scientific innovation both here and globally suddenly takes a huge it.

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You are genuinely clueless about the nature of Chinese and the Chinese Communist Party.

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I think it is you who doesn't understand how intertwined our economies and scientific endeavors are. At present, thousands and thousands of American and Chinese scientists operate in each other's countries or with each other's funding on numerous projects and this relationship has tremendously benefited your life in ways you likely wouldn't know about unless I told you. You use no less than 10 objects/products/services every day that are at least in part due to this relationship.

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Infection_Ag11 said:

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Double Diamond said:

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Just seems unlikely that in city that works on dangerous virus that the leak didn't come from the lab.

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But that's not evidence, that's essentially magical thinking. It's drawing a casual relationship between two things without any good reason for doing so.

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Infection_Ag11 said:

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It most likely represents a species jump. The virus doesn't contain the genetic hallmarks of gain of function research.

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notex said:

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Infection_Ag11 said:

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It most likely represents a species jump. The virus doesn't contain the genetic hallmarks of gain of function research.

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There is literally zero evidence of a species jump. If this were the case, even by a preponderance of the evidence standard, another species (or at least a single specimen) with the virus would have been found. Really, it's beyond a reasonable doubt at this point though.

The double CGG spike protein insertion alone, and proximity to WIV (working with/for Peter Daszak) vs. the supposed bats with the disease precursor (over 500 miles away) are vastly less likely to have been the provenance.

Please stop spreading disinformation on this forum. Thx.

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Infection_Ag11 said:

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nortex97 said:

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notex said:

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Infection_Ag11 said:

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It most likely represents a species jump. The virus doesn't contain the genetic hallmarks of gain of function research.

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There is literally zero evidence of a species jump. If this were the case, even by a preponderance of the evidence standard, another species (or at least a single specimen) with the virus would have been found. Really, it's beyond a reasonable doubt at this point though.

The double CGG spike protein insertion alone, and proximity to WIV (working with/for Peter Daszak) vs. the supposed bats with the disease precursor (over 500 miles away) are vastly less likely to have been the provenance.

Please stop spreading disinformation on this forum. Thx.

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Exactly. Take it to F16 if you want to spread a political narrative. There's nothing scientific or evidence-based in any way about 'species jump.' It's just a political foil non-experts believe.

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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-79484-8

And those aren't from some random journal, they're from Nature. That's arguably the most reputable scientific journal in the world, and some of the names of those studies are the best in the world in their fields.

https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9241

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-020-01151-1

https://virological.org/t/exploring-the-natural-origins-of-sars-cov-2/595

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badbilly said:

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Infection_Ag11 said:

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nortex97 said:

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notex said:

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Infection_Ag11 said:

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It most likely represents a species jump. The virus doesn't contain the genetic hallmarks of gain of function research.

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There is literally zero evidence of a species jump. If this were the case, even by a preponderance of the evidence standard, another species (or at least a single specimen) with the virus would have been found. Really, it's beyond a reasonable doubt at this point though.

The double CGG spike protein insertion alone, and proximity to WIV (working with/for Peter Daszak) vs. the supposed bats with the disease precursor (over 500 miles away) are vastly less likely to have been the provenance.

Please stop spreading disinformation on this forum. Thx.

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Exactly. Take it to F16 if you want to spread a political narrative. There's nothing scientific or evidence-based in any way about 'species jump.' It's just a political foil non-experts believe.

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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-79484-8

And those aren't from some random journal, they're from Nature. That's arguably the most reputable scientific journal in the world, and some of the names of those studies are the best in the world in their fields.

https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9241

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-020-01151-1

https://virological.org/t/exploring-the-natural-origins-of-sars-cov-2/595

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On Jan. 31, 2020, shortly after the SARS-CoV-2 genome had been decoded, Kristian Andersen, the five virologists' leader, emailed Dr. Fauci that there were "unusual features" in the virus. These took up only a small percentage of the genome, so that "one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered." WSJ
They knew early on, this is not my opinion but the opinion of virologists.

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In July, the NIH attempted to backtrack. It reinstated the grant but suspended its research activities until EcoHealth Alliance fulfilled seven conditions, some of which went beyond the nonprofit's purview and seemed to stray into tinfoil-hat territory. They included: providing information on the "apparent disappearance" of a Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher, who was rumored on social media to be patient zero, and explaining diminished cell phone traffic and roadblocks around the WIV in October 2019.

But conspiracy-minded conservatives weren't the only ones looking askance at Daszak. Ebright likened Daszak's model of researchbringing samples from a remote area to an urban one, then sequencing and growing viruses and attempting to genetically modify them to make them more virulentto "looking for a gas leak with a lighted match." Moreover, Ebright believed that Daszak's research had failed in its stated purpose of predicting and preventing pandemics through its global collaborations.

It soon emerged, based on emails obtained by a Freedom of Information group called U.S. Right to Know, that Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity.

Under the subject line, "No need for you to sign the "Statement" Ralph!!," he wrote to two scientists, including UNC's Dr. Ralph Baric, who had collaborated with Shi Zhengli on the gain-of-function study that created a coronavirus capable of infecting human cells: "you, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn't work in a counterproductive way." Daszak added,

"We'll then put it out in a way that doesn't link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice."

Baric agreed, writing back, "Otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact."
Baric did not sign the statement. In the end, Daszak did. At least six other signers had either worked at, or had been funded by, EcoHealth Alliance. The statement ended with a declaration of objectivity: "We declare no competing interests."

Daszak mobilized so quickly for a reason, said Jamie Metzl: "If zoonosis was the origin, it was a validationof his life work. But if the pandemic started as part of a lab leak, it had the potential to do to virology what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did to nuclear science." It could mire the field indefinitely in moratoriums and funding restrictions.

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TAMUallen said:

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The source of Covid is the lab China. Question is if it was deliberately released or if it was accidental.

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In the case of the gain-of-function supercharge, other sequences could have been spliced into this same site. Instead of a CGG-CGG (known as "double CGG") that tells the protein factory to make two arginine amino acids in a row, you'll obtain equal lethality by splicing any one of 35 of the other two-word combinations for double arginine. If the insertion takes place naturally, say through recombination, then one of those 35 other sequences is far more likely to appear; CGG is rarely used in the class of coronaviruses that can recombine with CoV-2.

In fact, in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn't present in any other virus.

Although the double CGG is suppressed naturally, the opposite is true in laboratory work. The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG. That's because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it. An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.

Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab's gain-of-function researchers would have made?

Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this factthat the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchersimplies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.

When the lab's Shi Zhengli and colleagues published a paper in February 2020 with the virus's partial genome, they omitted any mention of the special sequence that supercharges the virus or the rare double CGG section. Yet the fingerprint is easily identified in the data that accompanied the paper. Was it omitted in the hope that nobody would notice this evidence of the gain-of-function origin?

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