zlacker

>>datafl+(OP)
The origin of COVID-19 is going to be one of the biggest news stories in 2021-22 IMO. China's global reputation is going to take a hit. I don't think they did this intentionally. I think everyone had the best of intentions and either they found something deep in a bat cave or there was a lab mishap. I've gone down the rabbit hole on this issue. Here are some interesting links https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=R01AI110964&hl=en&as_sd... is the papers done by a NIH grant to Eco Health Alliance. This shows they were looking for new variants of Coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7089274/pdf/114... This shows they were artificially synthesizing Coronaviruses and incubating them in monkey cells. Dr. Peter Daszak seems to be in the center of a lot of this and IMO had a conflict of interest being on the WHO COVID-19 origins report.

>>Bayesi+M41
I thought you misrepresented the linked paper - as it was clearly about checking some cross-immunity and not recombining genes - but then I found out deeper in the abstract:

""" Since SHC014 could not be success fully isolated, a recombinant virus (rWIV1-SHC014S) was constructed based on the WIV1 backbone with the replacement of SHC014S gene, as described previously (Zengetal.,2016). The S sequence of SHC014 was amplified with primer pair (F-SHC014-Bsa I, 5′-AGTGGTCTCAACGAA-CATGAAATTGTTAGTTTTAGTTTTTGCTAC-3′ and R-SHC014-Bsa I, 5′-TCAGGTCTCAGTTCGTTTATGTG-TAATGTAATTTGACACCCTTG-3′), digested with BsaI, and inserted into an artificial bacterial chromosome along with the other viral cDNA fragments."""

>>zby+g81
Recombination virus is commonly made everywhere, including US or China. Researchers made it mostly for getting genes for later use, antibody/antigen analysis in this case. Using virus/BAC is a very common lab technique and is very different from "intentionally making virus as a weapon to kill human". You can reconfirm with any of your wet-lab biotech majored friends. Please run an sequence analysis between rWIV1-SHC014S and the current COVID-19 virus before drawing misleading conclusion.

One analogy for developers: Bad persons are using git to develop ransomware, and company X is also using git, therefore company X is developing ransomware.

>>xjlin0+Pf1
you are right, except sars-cov-2 happened to appear 500 meters away from said lab...