zlacker

I quoted this bit in another comment, but Steven Quay (interviewed by the US gov as mentioned in tfa)

The “engineered” comments refer to common amino acid sequences from lab practices, they leave a signature because ordinary biology is more random.

  The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that arerarely used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site. When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair.  For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV-2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair.

>>eutrop+(OP)
Perspective on the rarity of the CGG pair:

https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1391507272887455746

Basically, it's somewhat rare but not wildly so. FCoV has an RR pair, the first is coded as CGG, and the second as CGA, a difference of one base pair.

>>raphli+x3
I grant it's totally possible for this to occur naturally, at random (thank you, genetics) -- but when we haven't found any intermediate host animals and there's a lab at the outbreak location that:

    Developed chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses
    Conducted ’dangerous’ gain-of-function research on the SARS-CoV-1 virus, some of which had been funded by the US government (Asia Times)
    Established a 96.2% match with SARS-CoV-2 and a virus they sampled from a cave over 1,000 miles away from Wuhan
    Injected live piglets with bat coronaviruses as recently as July 2019
    Published a paper on a close descendant of SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV, in November 2019
    Was hiring researchers to work on bat coronaviruses as recently as November 2019

You have to imagine the very real possibility that it was just an accident.

>>eutrop+(OP)
This kind of pattern hunting easily steps into a logical fallacy where meaning is derived from noise. We also need to know how many other viruses contain codons not typically found in other viruses. If in fact every virus has one or two unique traits, then we could likewise claim that all viruses are engineered. Not saying that is the case, just want to caution against the perils of searching for patterns in large data sets like this.