Regardless of what actually happened in this case (FWIW I still believe a natural origin was most likely), the Chinese authorities covered up everything to do with the lab and destroyed potential evidence before a proper investigation could take place. In court cases we have a norm that evidence you destroy is treated as evidence against you, for good reason.
Destruction of evidence is considered only evidence of consciousness of guilt and cannot be used to prove guilt alone. The court also has to consider that an innocent person may commit destruction of evidence to avoid wrongful prosecution from situations that look damning.
> Early in the epidemic, the Chinese government discouraged its press from reporting on SARS, delayed reporting to WHO, and initially did not provide information to Chinese outside Guangdong province, where the disease is believed to have originated.[19] Also, a WHO team that travelled to Beijing was not allowed to visit Guangdong province for several weeks.[20] This resulted in international criticism, which seems to have led to a change in government policy in early April.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002–2004_SARS_outbreak
There was no BSL4 lab in Guangzhou and they didn't sterilize the market there right away, so in that case they were able to eventually track the virus to its origins--yet the reaction of the Chinese government was basically the same.
Americans have a fairly severe problem with assuming that other nations and people's will react with transparency to the US if they have nothing to hide. This is the same problem we saw with Hussein and the way that he tried to block the weapons inspectors and it turned out by his own admission that it was due to him not wanting to appear weak in the view of Iran and Hussein was preoccupied with Iran: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/02/saddam-hussein...
At a minimum the US government should not be funding any biological research in places without adequate transparency/controls.
We can't do it because of the CCP, not because of epistemological reasons.
They somehow had tighter controls than Apple developing a new iPhone, before they had any reason to.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517719113
Pretty bad secrecy.
We knew WIV1 existed as well because they published it 3 years earlier:
Your point? I'm not sure if you had one. Next time, just post the date up instead of some snarky RTFM that doesn't even fit the thread.
It’s a bit like Jaime Meitzl (sp?) said - for the first time in history you find a unicorn (furin binding site in a coronavirus) next to a lab that asked for funding to make regular horses into unicorns. But the lab says it’s “natural origin”.
Other coronaviruses have an FCS and they have evolved multiple different times, independently:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...
The fact that we knew that adding an FCS to a virus would likely enhance its ability to produce a pandemic really isn't a smoking gun that we actually did it, because we're just studying and copying what nature is already doing (who is actually a much better geneticist than we are, with vastly greater tools).
And since you want to talk about suspicious "unicorns" how about the idea that a lab worker was infected in the lab, and then the only thing that they did was visit the wet market. They didn't infect anyone they lived with, or go to any restaurants, or go visit grandma and this Typhoid Mary/Mike has no existence outside of working in the lab and visiting the wet market. And this idea gets worse if you include more workers in WIV having supposedly been exposed.
What fits with the facts better is that they genetically engineered the virus in perfect secrecy and deliberately let it loose in the wet market, which is just insanity--nobody gains anything from doing that, but it is also impossible to argue against.
If your only defense is that this is not the most commonly used way to add a FCS to coronaviruses, that seems pretty thin.
You realize that is going to rapidly descend into circular logic.
You might interested in this paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2
"Discovery of a novel merbecovirus DNA clone contaminating agricultural rice sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China"
MERS is really nasty, this is clearly evidence of engineering, and guess what the system is unpublished.
Personally I suspect this paper (which came out a while ago but got "boosted" recently) is the reason for DOE "confidence update".
Media have not reported on this and "the usual" zoonosis advocates have been remarkably silent about it.
While it is in the same group of beta coronaviruses that MERS is in, the HKU4 virus was first found in Kowloon and the "HK" stands for "Hong Kong" (although it would be a mistake to assume that says much more than where it was found and not what its range is throughout China)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111821/
And coronaviruses undergo recombination (XBB.1.5 is a recombinant which is all over the news) and that produces "Chimeric" viruses in nature. Finding evidence of "gene splicing" in samples and determining it must be humans ignores the fact that nature does it better than we do, and really points at how politically biased that article is.
They want you to believe that WIV imported MERS-like viruses from Saudi Arabia and were fucking around with them in the lab, and not that those viruses are found all over China naturally and nature fucks around them constantly in much higher volume than we can.
This is an engineering product.
As for "politics", sure there is a lot of that going around but you can verify this finding yourself with freely available software using the published sequences.
Cadhla (who works for EcoHealth alliance BTW) points out that it was HZAU who registered the rice sequences - which is not hugely relevant since the source of the contamination could be from anywhere (with an unpublished HKU4 reverse genetics system...).
Andreas points to incomplete sequence coverage (not unusual in a contamination scenario) and claims it might be "not dangerous work" because the sequence gap leaves open the possibility that the missing bit was non-functional. True but weak. It's 33 NTs of highly conserved sequence, what does he really think it would be?
Flo's comments are bizarre and seem to be claiming that https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 is plagiarizing https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr353109 (the team's earlier paper which included the same finding). The claim that a reverse genetics systems for HKU4-like COVs was previously "published" is particularly weird since it was this team that had previously disclosed it.
The theory was that it was a virus they'd have sampled from immunocompromised miners working in the same caves that the bats with the most closely related viruses inhabit. They had some references to a report with something like that happening some time prior.
It's so far the only theory I've read that seems to match the evidence.
The evidence doesn't seem to indicate that it was engineered, or that it was a product of gain of function research on animals. I think there would have been more solid evidence pointing in that direction by now, if that was the case. They would have published something related to it, or non-Chinese researchers connected to the lab would have known something.
Yet there's no evidence of any related animal resorvoir, and the virus was very well adapted to humans from the very start. And everything points to the virus passing through the lab somehow. Those things put together seems to point at them having sampled a virus that already made the jump to humans, and that somehow during the sampling, or retrieving the sample from storage, the virus escaped.
https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/33905/20211012/china-r...
There's a lot of economic activity in China that is close to bat habitats and there's evidence that cross reactivity to sarbecoviruses exists in a significant amount in rural china.
The researchers collecting samples were a very tiny slice of the human-to-bat-virus exposure that is going on in China all the time.
And we know that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't last very long on surfaces, it isn't transmitted by fomites. It needs to be aerosolized and breathed in. It isn't likely that the researchers were collecting live viable virus in the samples that they brought back to the lab. What they were sequencing was overwhelmingly going to be "dead" mRNA.
The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak happened. They didn't start spreading it around their apartment building, they didn't infect people in restaurants, didn't infect elderly relatives who wound up in the hospital, etc.
It makes "more" sense that they deliberately genetically engineered the virus and released it in the wet market entirely on purpose.
Except that SARS-CoV-2's epidemiological dynamics are well-known to be overdispersed? Almost all lineages die out, and a few explode due to repeated super-spreader events. It's therefore unlikely that the first cluster will be discovered at the site of introduction. For example, SARS-CoV-2 was presumably first introduced to other continents at airports and seaports; but that's not where the first clusters were found.
There's also the question of ascertainment bias, whether cases were found in the wet market simply because that's where the authorities looked. I assume you've seen those endless debates, which seem basically unresolvable to me given the limited information available.
The infected lab worker causing exactly one massive superspreading event in the wet market without infecting anyone else, making it look exactly like zoonotic spillover, without leaving any other contacts around Wuhan is much less believable to me. That sounds like a thousand to one odds or much worse.
That's indeed unlikely, but it's a strawman. As I've noted repeatedly above, most lineages die out. If the introduction into humans occurred outside the market (naturally or otherwise), then it's quite likely that patient infected others outside the market; those lineages just died out. I remember Trevor Bedford showing genomic evidence of all the failed introductions into Seattle before the spread finally went exponential, early in the pandemic.
Pekar et al. is basically a more sophisticated version of your argument, with numerical models of the phylogenetic and epidemiological dynamics. I don't think it's convincing (since they chose their power law pretty arbitrarily), but at least they acknowledge and purport to model that stochasticity.
I've lived in the United States all my life, you're just missing the point.
No it isn't. The were studying SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1.
They sequenced RaTG13 but that is too far away from SARS-CoV-2 with a thousand random mutations across its genome. And there's no evidence that they ever recovered culturable virus from RaTG13 or were able to culture it--there's a vast gap between sequencing a virus and culturing it.
We also know about their SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1 work because they published it. Before the pandemic they had no reason to keep work on RaTG13 secret.
This is a case of Schrodinger's BSL4 lab. We know they built chimeras of other viruses because they told the world about that, we know they sequenced RaTG13 because they published that sequence, but there's a SARS-CoV-2 progenitor backbone that they found, which for some reason they picked to be the backbone in a new set of experiments, which they had perfect secrecy over and nobody has ever found any evidence of it.