2. There is no spike protein anyone knows of which would have been used in this research
3. The PRRAR furin cleavage site is not one humans would have tried it is unlike any other known furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses
4. There are now many known related sarbecoviruses which have been found with furin cleavage sites
5. Furin cleavage sites have independently evolved in multiple different branches of coronaviruses, probably a dozen times that we know of now.
6. The furin cleavage site is short and can easily happen through recombination with another virus due to coinfection.
7. This is very likely what happened due to infection with the SARS-CoV-2 ancestor and an HKU9-like virus.
It is not particularly suspicious that the thing which we were worried about happening and causing a zoonotic spillover event is the thing which actually happened.
They were going to experiment with multiple backbones, experimenting with multiple variations of spikes, looking specifically to try novel types of furin cleavage sites.
There was no public reporting of what happened with this research. We don't know what they have because WIV database was taken offline. They claimed to have searched it, but what they claimed was the closest match in the database was not, in fact, as close as a sequence they had published. Given that demonstrable lie, there is no way to verify any claim about what sequences were or were not known and possibly involved in this research.
Furthermore the person who submitted the proposal was also the person who broke ethical standards to preemptively shut down all discussion of a human release.
That isn't to take away from the possibility of a natural spillover. The facts that you say about that are facts. But accidental release is also possible. And the lack of transparency from those who are most likely to have made the mistake heightens suspicions, it does not lessen them.
It is research that "sounds like" what happened with the SARS-CoV-2 zoonotic spillover, but that isn't a strange coincidence. They were researching the thing they were worried about happening, and then it happened. Their research proposals naturally rhyme with what actually occurred because they had studied and understood the problem enough to guess more or less accurately what the process would be. There are still massive gaps in between this proposal and SARS-CoV-2 that you could fly a plane through.
It's like seeing smoke billowing out of a building and refusing to accept that there's a fire until you see the flames. Very convenient that your standard of evidence surpasses anything we can possibly obtain after the CCP scrubbed everything.
The stuff you cite is circumstantial at best. Yes, given the seriousness of covid i would like someone to investigate it, but i would hardly call it billowing smoke.
> Very convenient that your standard of evidence surpasses anything we can possibly obtain after the CCP scrubbed everything.
Is that really relavent? Say CCP would in theory destroy evidence if such a situation arised. That's not an argument that says it is china's fault, its just an argument that we might not ever know. Its not like the people arguing that it was natural aren't using lack of chinese whistleblower as the evidence for naturalness.
At the very least i'd like evidence that suggests there is a higher probability that it was a chinese experiment than a natural occurance. Occam's razor and all. Arguing that it might be impossible to know what happened, increases uncertainty, but doesn't affect the relative probabilities.
In other words, your argument is like saying occam's razor concludes that fire extinguishers start fires because they are always found in the vicinity of fires.
Also I think many on this thread greatly underestimate the adaptive and evolutionary capabilities of nature. Having done some wet lab myself, I'm impressed at the ability of nature to do lateral gene transfer, and also it's damn hard to make any experiments work. Plus there are multiple layers of safety and containment around any lab experiment. Movies make engineering look like AI robots in labs and biology experiments that work on the first try, and people who say lab near outbreak must implicate the lab have probably spent more time watching movies about outbreaks than trying to engineer organisms themselves. Having spent a lot of time trying and failing to engineer organisms, occam's razor screams to me that the most likely explanation is natural evolution.
The real lab of concern are the hundreds of millions of people living in close contact with animal reservoirs, performing millions of competitive, uncontrolled evolution experiments daily, with single hosts sometimes simultaneously infected by multiple viruses, thus facilitating lateral gene transfer... and this continues to be the status quo. If you can accept that MERS and SARS CoV-1 are naturally evolved, then occam's razor would indicate that SARS CoV-2 is just one point in a series, and yet another coronavirus outbreak is likely to emerge in the next decade or so, from a dense urban area near animal reservoirs.
Distracting ourselves by fantasizing that only humans could be so devious to create such a virus makes us miss a very important opportunity to try and prevent the next outbreak through careful monitoring and research.
So, if you believe that we should have fire departments and fire extinguishers near ignition sources then, maybe we should have /more/ labs like Wuhan's in high risk areas, not less. And we'd want to encourage more cross border cooperation, not antagonize it, because viruses don't give a damn about your politics.
It's concerning that threads like this, on a forum as ostensibly pro-science as HN, are pushing ourselves further away from science and transparency...