zlacker

>>lazycr+(OP)
First gen Chinese, grew up in NA. Have contact with relatives "on the ground".

My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them.

Which is exactly what this issue is about.

That's not to say we have compelling evidence that this was a lab virus, either. I think, for me, it's a, "we don't know, but I wouldn't be shocked at all if it was a lab virus".

>>ttz+rc
Do we / did we even have the tech co be able to build this in a lab? I don't think we do.

It MIGHT have been possible but Occam's Razor says it's more plausible it evolved naturally and just jumped species.

FAR FAR FAR more plausible.

>>getpol+Vj
There was a great article in New York Magazine covering the background here and the possibilities.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...

It turns out we've been doing "serial passage" research for some time, which is where we leverage natural selection to do our genetic engineering for us, rather than manually editing genes. This is how we engineer viruses to jump species - on purpose.

> They did it using serial passaging: repeatedly dosing a mixed solution of mouse cells and hamster cells with mouse-hepatitis virus, while each time decreasing the number of mouse cells and upping the concentration of hamster cells. At first, predictably, the mouse-hepatitis virus couldn’t do much with the hamster cells, which were left almost free of infection, floating in their world of fetal-calf serum. But by the end of the experiment, after dozens of passages through cell cultures, the virus had mutated: It had mastered the trick of parasitizing an unfamiliar rodent.

In fact, "we" (meaning humanity) have even been experimenting with serial passage into humans.

> A few years later, in a further round of “interspecies transfer” experimentation, Baric’s scientists introduced their mouse coronavirus into flasks that held a suspension of African-green-monkey cells, human cells, and pig-testicle cells. Then, in 2002, they announced something even more impressive: They’d found a way to create a full-length infectious clone of the entire mouse-hepatitis genome. Their “infectious construct” replicated itself just like the real thing, they wrote.

The whole article is really worth a read.

>>Amezar+Rl
Right, and combine this with a history of lab leaks both in China and the west (which the article outlines) and a lab leak scenario is perfectly plausible. It is however hard to tell whether it was a lab origin because serial passage is also the route the virus would have taken if it naturally evolved outside a lab to infect humans.