zlacker

It's not "quite unlikely" for a virus to adapt to humans when you are digging through a lab archive of wild coronaviruses and injecting mice that express human proteins with them to see how sick they get. For example the president of EcoHealth, which sponsored bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, raved in November 2019 about all the exciting work they were doing filtering bat coronaviruses and even recombinant viruses for ones that look like they could infect humans and infecting humanized mice with them [1].

Researchers at the same lab published a study in 2017 where they tested the infectivity of 8 artificial coronaviruses (having been edited with 8 different spike proteins) on primate and human cell lines [2].

[1] https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1197631383470034951?s...

[2] https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j... "Rescue of bat SARSr-CoVs and virus infectivity experiments"

>>analyt+(OP)
Hmm, that is not quite what I said.

If it did come from this research, which is being done openly with the help of many international collaborators, I don't understand how this could have happened without the virus being known to many more people, especially given the amount of time that passed from the first human infection to detection (which was enough for it even reach Europe!). It would be very surprising for no one else to know about it whereas normally such results are shared quite rapidly.

This is why the very person you quoted, and other people that were involved in such research that live outside of China, find the theory of a lab escape from this kind of research exceedingly unlikely.

>>sudosy+k2
The conflict of interest on their part is obviously massive. And given what we know about asymptomatic transmission and the minor symptoms in many young, healthy people, it could be weeks or longer from the initial infection (wherever it was) until anybody noticing anything unusual.

>>analyt+n4
Likely, no one would notice anything unusual at all for months.

The WIV simply doesn't hide samples for long enough for this to be a likely scenario.

By the way, it's estimated there's multiple hundred infections by novel coronavirus pathogens in China every year. So why would the much lower number of viral escapes be considered beyond it when we have the additional constrait of the sample not having been shared with anyone, whereas normally this is done?

>>sudosy+f5
Did they immediately publish the details of every gain-of-function coronavirus experiment they ever did, or does it sit in a notebook or a private database for some period of time? A lag time of 4-6 weeks seems reasonable here, not 6 months. There still seems to be room for a natural origin, but to say a lab escape is completely impossible because one of maybe a dozen people (or less) would have been both willing and able to be a whistleblower doesn't seem right.

>>analyt+57
They don't immediately make articles about them no. However, they don't work alone - if you read articles from the WIV on the matter every single one of them is made in collaboration with international researchers, which would have had access to notebooks and private databases.

4-6 weeks is lower than what we've seen abroad - in Italy between the likely patient zero in September 2019 and the first official case in late february, 5 months had gone.

>>analyt+(OP)
They put 8 natural spike proteins on a well-known backbone, WIV-1. SARS-CoV-2 is not made up of any known viral backbone. It's an entirely novel virus, which differs from all previously known viruses throughout its entire genome. This is very much not what you would get from these sorts of infectivity studies.