zlacker

>Everyone knows that mutations that increase transmissability generally hurt morbidity. Is there some reason you think this supports zoonotic hypothesis? It is public knowledge RaTG13 was collected from a mine shaft where a similar virus killed 50% of infected workers and where WIV was doing significant sampling work.

Why would this support either hypothesis? The cleavage site clearly has nothing to do with RATG-13 and it is probably one of the main drivers of SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis. See here:

-https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03237-4

-https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7457603/

But before you say "See! Gotcha! That means that the cleavage site is the smoking gun!"

It also looks, from a molecular perspective, like a natural recombination event. See here:

-https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2020.0078...

>>jedueh+(OP)
> Why would this support either hypothesis?

So why did you bring it up? The observation doesn't support zoonotic hypothesis at all, although it could support lab leak if we assume GOF was done on a natural or modified virus with a higher IFR rate, such as the ones known to be present in Tongguan where WIV sampled RaTG13.

Similarly -- it isn't clear why you are talking about the cleavage site. You appear to think it argues against some sort of hypothesis. But you haven't stated what you think the most credible lab-leak scenario is and why. It isn't even clear that COV came from RaTG13.