zlacker

>>ruarai+(OP)
This article is written by a journalist who is clearly knowledgeable about safety practices and mistakes in US labs, but does not consider the extensive knowledge we have about the sequence of SARS-COV2. The preponderance of evidence supports a natural origin of the virus.

This is no way exonerates the Wuhan government from possible culpability—indeed government officials did deliberately suppress information—but this investigative opinion doesn’t pass scientific muster. Misinformation.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

>>tbenst+Zu1
I think you are confusing “lab leak” with “lab manufactured.”

>>garmai+rv1
On the contrary. A leak implies that something was contained. Notwithstanding the complete lack of evidence for a leak—and one could waste a lifetime trying to disprove claims that have no evidence-if of natural origin, the virus was already infecting animals and/or people.

>>tbenst+Qw1
The lab had samples of a disease that is remarkably close to COVID-19: https://nypost.com/2020/08/15/covid-19-first-appeared-in-chi...

>>garmai+jA1
No, they didn't. The ancestors of RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 diverged decades ago. RaTG13 is not the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.

>>Diogen+S53
You have no way of knowing that it diverged decades ago. That's a guess based on the number of mutations. But as we've seen with COVID-19, these viruses have more of a punctuated equilibrium behavior around mutations. "Decades" worth of mutations can happen in a single immune-compromised host in a matter of weeks. (And fwiw I'd love a source for that "decades" claim. The strains are much more closely related than that.)

RaTG13 is the closest virus found in the wild to SARS-CoV-2. Samples of it were shipped to the Wuhan lab, which does so-called "gain of function research"--AKA experimenting with artificially sped up mutation rates. Not very long thereafter, SARS-CoV-2 shows up in the surrounding metropolitan area with a very, very similar genome. They're the nearest siblings on the phylogenetic tree.

It's only politics which keep people from calling this the smoking gun it really is.