EcoHealth just got defunded by the US Congress with bipartisan support: https://twitter.com/GReschenthaler/status/144122144752803020...
> We will conduct in vitro pseudovirus binding assays, using established techniques, and live virus binding assays (at WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] to prevent delays and unnecessary dissemination of viral cultures)
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(I'm assuming, of course, that it wasn't the article title that got subsequently changed. If that was the case, ignore the above.)
Just look at what an investment in BioNTech would have done if you bought in October 2019:
https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BNTX:NASDAQ?window=5Y
You'd be 25x in less than 2 years.
How convenient for the Gates Foundation to invest $55 million in September 2019! https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-det...
The chief innovation of mRNA vaccines is that instead of using expensive egg cultures, you can reproduce viral proteins inside the vaccinated patient themselves. This presumably means much cheaper manufacturing.
Additionally, you can drive long-term vaccine sales, since antibodies based on a single protein (spike) are more likely to fail compared to immunity based on the complete protein structure. We're already seeing this now with the 'need' for booster shots in response to variants driven by these leaky vaccines.
Coincidence 1.) Wuhan is roughly 1800 KM away from the caves in Yunnan province where previous bat-borne coronaviruses jumped to humans harvesting bat guano in earlier SARS outbreaks. It is a massive metropolitan area, and far more cosmopolitan than many westerners believe. They don't eat bats in Wuhan, and bats were never present at wet markets. Possible for a virus to jump from bats to humans here, but unlikely based on priors and the realities of horseshoe bats being highly unlikely to come into contact with urbanized humans at a level to transmit a virus that isn't adapted to human lung receptors.
Coincidence 2.) Wuhan has 2 different facilities where bat-borne coronavirus research took place. There are only a few of these labs in the entire world, and none others in all of China.
Coincidence 3. ) Unlike both SARS-1 and MERS, where animal reservoirs for both were found within months, almost 2 years later, no animal reservoir has been identified for SARS-2. Unlike both MERS and SARS-1, SARS-2 has never been particularly infectious to other animal species. SARS-1 in its early stages was still highly transmissible between bats. SARS-2 never exhibited this characteristic.
Coincidence 4. ) The evidence that would have easily exonerated the labs was deliberately destroyed by the CCP early in the pandemic, with extensive blocking of access to any and all foreign investigators.
Coincidence 5.) The same city where this outbreak occurred was a known location, based on other grants to EcoHealth Alliance, of researching bat coronavirus experiments involving the use of "humanized mice". No, "humanized" isn't some novel, sci-fi or conspiracy theory idea. They are genetically modified mice which are routinely used in research. The variety used in the lab were engineered to have human ACE-2 receptors lining their respiratory tissue. Sounds crazy, I know, but here's the grant summary (it was awarded) for the research, and notice the "humanized mice" at the very end of the text: https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
All of this evidence is circumstantial, but every day that goes by where no zoonotic reservoir is identified (the CCP isn't looking at all, because they know the answer) increasingly points to this being a lab accident and a subsequent coverup by a paranoid authoritarian regime, along with a scientific community desperate to prevent virology from being impacted the way nuclear energy research was by Chernobyl.
They didn't just "sit on it". EcoHealth and Peter Daszak deliberately and aggressively attacked anyone who pointed to lab-leak origins as conspiracy theorists and bigots. They did so in an article in The Lancet journal where they also stated they had no conflicts of interest.
Reading this statement, knowing what you know now, and it becomes very clear how sinister and calculated the misdirection was:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
And look at the end of the letter, at the sentence: "We declare no competing interests." That's a blatant lie, as we now know.
Those of us who have been seeing this for a long time were attacked, bullied, and tarred as bigots because of these irresponsible scientists desperately trying to cling to their grant funding. My comment history on HN has numerous comments, from months and months ago, where I was attacked, downvoted, and called an anti-Asian bigot for saying what is now obvious. Talking about this before the 2020 election resulted in immediate accusations of being a Trump sycophant/white nationalist, along with banning and deletions from social media. As a lifelong heterodox thinker, I always sort of shrugged my shoulders at being surrounded by people who predominantly just go with the herd on things. But this entire situation has now made me actively despise the "herd". After being a lifelong liberal Democrat who got demonized, bullied, and yes, beaten up for opposing the Iraq war in the conservative area I grew up in, I was shocked to realize that the other side isn't any different. Just a little more sophisticated. They don't physically assault you, but they'll try to get you fired, and equate you with a Nazi in a heartbeat.
As a result of this pandemic, my mother-in-law and aunt are dead, a friend took his own life when his charter fishing business went under, and my wife's mental health has been crushed. I myself was infected a month before I was eligible for the vaccine. Luckily it was a mild case, but I still don't have my sense of smell. Billions around the world had it worse than me, and it is unforgivable that the media, big tech, and the scientific community have colluded to obfuscate the true origins of this manmade disaster. The Soviets would have dreamed of having this kind of cover as Chernobyl spewed radiation into the atmosphere.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.26.428212v1
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/phylogeo...
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.5847...
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic...
Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist who directs the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard School of Public Health, called review panels “a small step forward.”
Recent disease-enhancing experiments, he said, “have given us some modest scientific knowledge and done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics, and yet risked creating an accidental pandemic.”
Therefore, he said, he hoped the panels would turn down such work.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih...
What's not being reported even in this Intercept article is that Fauci and the Eco Health Alliance are heavily involved with each other. One week before Daszak et al released their ridiculous "lab leak is a conspiracy theory" Lancet article, as revealed in Fauci's emails (which supposedly revealed nothing), Fauci had a conference call with Daszak and other Eco Health folks, after discussing the fact that the lab leak hypothesis was gaining traction.
They have a big conference call, the Lancet article is posted a week later.
Here's all the details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNxoVFZwMYw
I know "Bro, just watch this youtube video" is lame-ass evidence in general, but Dr. Martenson has been incredibly data-driven and level-headed throughout the pandemic, is a pro-masker, and his views have evolved over time with new data.
From your second link: "Finally, the poly-basic (furin) site present in SARS-CoV-2 is absent in both RshSTT182 and RshSTT200."
Your third link doesn't discuss furin cleavage sites very much.
Your fourth link literally doesn't contain the substring "furin".
Your fifth link literally doesn't contain the substring "furin".
Your sixth link at least partially supports your claim with a single mention of furin, saying "The two viruses shared part of the furin cleavage site unique to SARS-CoV-2", but the whole truth is that while they have insertions at the S1/S2 cleavage site in the spike protein, they do not contain the full furin cleavage site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RmYN02
From your seventh link: "None of these bat viruses harbors a furin cleavage site in the spike."
(Protip: in this claim #4 of yours under discussion, you should change "sarbecoviruses" to "betacoronaviruses".)
Because the Trump administration decided that along with a bunch of other offshore collaboration funding decided to pull the money (America First!). There's a Vincent Racaniello episode on Microbe TV that explained what happened there. I don't remember the episode but here's his channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/VincentRacaniello/videos
I think if folks would listen more to virologists than the press they'd find out that it's incredibly difficult to engineer new viruses (that's actually in his coursework - also on his channel), but it's also incredibly difficult to create stable "gain of function" (for weaponising) which has been suggested as the source of SARS2 and that whole Wuhan conspiracy theory thing.
It isn't as simple as altering the proposal. You're speculating a very large and hidden process using sequences that were kept perfectly secret and have not been leaked, with virus backbones that would take considerable effort to create but which were never shared publicly (and kept perfectly secret before SARS-CoV-2 happened before there was any need for perfect secrecy). We have this leaked information from 2018 about the proposal with the WIV1/SHC014 backbones which leaked because it was not kept with perfect secrecy. Yet they managed to do all that work in perfect secrecy without any leaks. That is the hallmark of a conspiracy theory. It requires a bit of a time machine because Daszak would have to have known in 2018 to tighten up his "OpSec" in response to the pandemic that hadn't happened yet and leaks that hadn't yet occurred.
Things are also getting worse for the lab leak theory on other fronts, I just stumbled across this a few minutes ago:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02519-1
If there's multiple lineages from multiple zoonotic spillover events that makes the lab leak theory a poor fit and will require a lot more mental gymnastics.
https://www.bbc.com/news/57932699
"That organization - the US-based EcoHealth Alliance - was awarded grants strating 2014 to look into possible coronaviruses from bats.
EcoHealth received $3.7m from the NIH, $600,000 of which was given to the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
So, in early 2018 they propose specific modifications to the virus, and in the end of 2019 such a modified virus emerges right near their lab...
Btw, in their first $666K (with Wuhan getting $160K) 2014 tranche of the $3.3M grant award, the "Are Human Subjects Involved" is already "Yes" with IRB review already pending - see p.13 here https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21055989-understandi...
I from the start (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23340283) was saying that one of main reasons of doing it in Wuhan was the human testing.
And you know what, northern Laos where the RBD was found, and south Yunnan, where the well documented sars outbreak happened (which presumably led to the discovery of ratg13), share a border with each other
Original letter: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Lancet responding to criticism: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[0]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-29/coronavirus-melbourne...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-state-depart...
Now while we do have effective Covid vaccines (at least for some variants of the virus), knowing the exact origin of a major pandemic, either it came from a natural source or a lab, is of major importance for science, medicine and public health.
Arguably we're lucky COVID was not as deadly as some other viral pandemics of the past** and we have to gather as much info as possible on its origin and distribution in order to prevent something like this (or worse) happening in the future.
But, this nature piece is really problematic. When removing likely sequencing errors, the independent "spillover events" appear to fit perfectly into a single phylogeny with each node separated by a single mutation. And the A clade descends cleanly from the B clade. There are not enough mutations between them to support a complex explanation like multiple spillovers. This is linked but not explained properly by the nature piece https://virological.org/t/evidence-against-the-veracity-of-s...
Reading the introduction, it looks like it would have been incredibly useful data to have for the origins of COVID-19 since much of the work looks like it would have been surveillance for bat coronaviruses. I note that the second work program would be research on effectively vaccinating bats to prevent spread of coronaviruses. Australia did something similar by vaccinating horses against Hendra virus.
Unfortunately it doesn't matter in the end what evidence is put forth. People are going to believe the lab escape hypothesis because there are powerful interests intent on pushing that narrative. The arguments in favour of lab escape seem plausible, even if they conflict with the molecular evidence. Most people don't know enough about the arcanery of molecular biology to trust it over the hearsay of documents and politicians.
0. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop...
It would be nice if they could be left up in YouTube, but it’s either removing them right after the stream ends, or YouTube takes it down and blocks his account, which has happened multiple times in the last 18 months.
You can find all of them in his website after registration (e-mail and password): https://www.mccairndojo.com/
Some of the videos are still available in YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy2-l7Y87DC_3SBAKPk2M1Q
His surviving Twitter account: https://twitter.com/w_mccairn
As a reference never hurts, specially in a topic prone to disinformation, here's a link to the WHO's page on its official list of members of their "Global Study of the Origins of SARS-COV2".
Dr. Peter Daszak, Ph.D (EcoHealth Alliance, USA) is listed as a member.
https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the...
But that doesn't invalidate the animal transfer hypothesis. Because that isn't how science works -- or even just how KNOWLEDGE works. No one[1] operates under perfect certainty; we collect stronger or weaker evidence for various possibilities.
This grant application doesn't "prove" that SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from a lab. But nothing "proves" it wasn't. The existence of this grant application is evidence supporting the lab leak hypothesis, demonstrating conclusively that someone in the world was thinking, prior to the pandemic, about performing modifications to coronaviruses similar to what we have observed in the virus.
[1] Except mathematicians: https://xkcd.com/263/
This is why there has been a lot of attention on certain animals, such as raccoon dogs and minks. It turns out that a lot of the early infections linked to the various Wuhan markets were from shop owners and employees who either sold or were in close contact a small number of animal species. It also turns out that these animals can be infected by SARS-CoV-2. See https://ncrc.jhsph.edu/research/animal-sales-from-wuhan-wet-....
The issue is that (as far as I'm aware) there's no immediate evidence that SARS-CoV-2 jumped to humans from any of these animals, only that there was an (again, as far as I'm aware) unknown intermediary species. However, because the animals at the wet market were disposed of, there's no way to definitively link SARS-CoV-2 to them.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
The closest relative to this virus (it's not even that close, just 95% similarity) was found in a bat cave hundreds of miles away. They flew it in Wuhan and made experiments on it (this is all documented, not some crazy theory). Something tells me it's more likely to escape from the lab right there, rather than somehow infect people for hundreds of miles undetected. Your analogy is wrong, the lab is not really a fire extinguisher, because a fire extinguisher cannot cause fires on it's own! Lab leaks happen all the time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
A better analogy is: a nuclear scientist works with heavy metals at a lab (far away from home), suddenly his family gets radiation poisoning. I wonder if it was the scientist that made a mistake, or should we focus all our search for natural radiation sources in the family's house? Sure, it's always a possibility, but what is it more likely? Also, you should at least acknowledge that the person is working with radiation and investigate that possibility thoroughly.
Those lab safety measure were criticized by the US state department https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
> And we'd want to encourage more cross border cooperation, not antagonize it, because viruses don't give a damn about your politics.
The Chinese took the virus database offline 2 months before the official outbreak...what a coincidence. And what a cooperation effort. Renaming the closest relative virus to hide it's trail. And a lot more.
Yeah, we need more cooperation, and China needs to do it first. They created this mess, the least they can do is cooperate rather than hinder investigations. We need better lab security and better protocols worldwide.
I feel this claim is simply not believable nor possible to take at face value, given that in order for a proof of impossibility to even be considered you need supporting evidence and a falsifiable model, which you have none.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_impossibility
Given this, do you have any reference that supports your assertion? I'd like to hear your rationale to claim that something like this is outright impossible.
>“I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory,” Andersen added.
Although that was from Jan 2020 and I'm sure more evidence has come in since then to shed more light.
https://twitter.com/WendellHusebo/status/1400098956747718660
To your last question, releasing such a thing would basically assure your (and your people's) own destruction in addition to your target's, as we've seen by how difficult it has been to control COVID. So you'd have to want everyone dead, and generally speaking the people who would be willing to actually do something like that don't have the resources and knowledge to make it happen.
[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2012/06/fouchier...
No, I left out the weasel words from the original claim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
Either GP's claim is factual and indeed he is aware of proof of impossibility, or he is not and he's just knowingly spreading disinformation.
> If you're objecting to the idea that well-accepted scientific theories (...)
I object to the idea of random people on the internet knowingly spreading disinformation with baseless claims that fly on the face of critical thinking, and then resorting to vague appeals to authority, inversions of the burden of truth, and outright bullying to force-fed their disinformation.
If there is any proof whatsoever supporting the claim that such thing is impossible then just support your claim and present the evidence or source. Don't expect everyone to just take your word for it, specially after you tried desperately to invert the burden of proof.
It's not a "weasel word", "Scientific theories placing a low enough probability to match lay usage of 'impossible', and clarifying that you mean as much" isn't a weasel word; it's being precise, and scientific theories do classify things that way.
>Either GP's claim is factual and indeed he is aware of proof of impossibility, or he is not and he's just knowingly spreading disinformation.
There's a third possibility: OP is aware that some scientists think the mainstream scientific theory places a low probability on the claim in question, but does not rise to the level of an impossibility theorem.
>I object to the idea of random people on the internet knowingly spreading disinformation with baseless claims that fly on the face of critical thinking, and then resorting to vague appeals to authority, inversions of the burden of truth, and outright bullying to force-fed their disinformation.
I don't see how the parent did any of that, just how another commenter is overreacting to ideas they don't like.
Are you seriously telling me that if I look through your posting history, I won't find a single case of you suggesting something without posting links to rigorous proof?
If you're going to scream bloody murder at the idea that any unsupported idea would ever be uttered here, you could maybe glance at the sibling comments in the thread, like mine:
People have asserted in this thread that it would take 30-40 years for the closest known natural covid relative to aquire the necessary 1000 mutations and turn into covid. And yet here we are, almost 2 years since the pandemic started, with no identified natural reservoir for covid.
Where is the covid source?
-----
Consider https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00991-0.pdf, a pro natural origins review of the literature. They tie themselves into knots to explain that the infamous furin cleavage site, while absent in the closest covid relative, could have naturally occurred, even if they admit they have zero actual evidence for that.
> Although the furin cleavage site is absent from the closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 (Andersen et al., 2020), this is unsurprising because the lineage leading to this virus is poorly sampled and the closest bat viruses have divergent spike proteins due to recombination (Boni et al., 2020; Lytras et al., 2021; Zhou et al., 2021). Furin cleavage sites are commonplace in other coronavirus spike proteins, including some feline alphacoronaviruses, MERS-CoV, most but not all strains of mouse hepatitis virus, as well as in endemic human betacoronaviruses such as HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-HKU1 (Gombold et al., 1993; de Haan et al., 2008; Kirchdoerfer et al., 2016). A near identical nucleotide sequence is found in the spike gene of the bat coronavirus HKU9-1 (Gallaher, 2020), and both SARS-CoV-2 and HKU9-1 contain short palindromic sequences immediately upstream of this sequence that are indicative of natural recombination break-points via template switching (Gallaher, 2020). Hence, simple evolutionary mechanisms can readily explain the evolution of an out-of-frame insertion of a furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 (Figure 2).
On the flip side, Nicholas Wade claims that Peter Daszak grant application proposes exactly that:
> The..grant proposal..now puts beyond doubt that engineering cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses was a technique to be explored at..Wuhan
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/new-routes-to-making-covid-1... (medium paywall, sorry) via https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1441190122360225797.
Half a million stories get submitted to HN every year. Plenty get moderated in some way; plenty are in some way ghoulish. I'm afraid I don't remember them all; I hardly remember any of them. It feels like you may be putting too much weight on one data point, if you're asking "how you live with doing that" about a specific story from years ago. The answer is that the moderation principles here are clear and we try our hardest to apply them even-handedly.
Incidentally, you can't derive any political agreement or disagreement from the way we moderate HN - we moderate stories and comments all the time that we personally agree with and/or consider important. If you scroll back through moderation comments on HN you'll find that commenters from every political and ideological angle get moderated, because people on all sides break the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). I'm not claiming that we have no bias, but certainly we work hard at this and have a lot of practice at it.
If you would please start doing a better job of adhering to those guidelines now, I'd appreciate it.
If you take the other hypotheses, it goes like this: some bat coronavirus -> jumps to an unnamed animal -> jumps to a human. There is an unknown entity in this equation, which is the third party animal. This is necessary for the theory to work.
If you make me chose between a theory that has all the elements and one that might or might not find a mythical animal in the future...I think Occam's razor favors the one with all known elements. Otherwise, ad-absurdum, you can win any argument stating it's Occam's razor: you just introduce a single magic black box which can substitute any number of entities.
I am not doing this to blame China. I blame China for the opacity of the response, which at times seemed like they didn't care what happens with everyone else. I can blame China regardless of how this virus appeared. I also blame our top scientists, which covered their asses instead of coming out with everything they know and work for the greater good.
What I do want is better bio-labs safety protocols, something that can be monitor by third party inspectors, say from UN, just like we have for nuclear facilities. Lab leaks happen, it's not a Chinese thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
>All but one scientist who penned a letter in The Lancet dismissing the possibility that coronavirus could have come from a lab in Wuhan were linked to its Chinese researchers, their colleagues or funders, a Telegraph investigation can reveal.
Source: https://archive.ph/dXc0n
>All but one scientist who penned a letter in The Lancet dismissing the possibility that coronavirus could have come from a lab in Wuhan were linked to its Chinese researchers, their colleagues or funders, a Telegraph investigation can reveal.
Source: https://archive.ph/dXc0n
I don't know whether Bayesian search is currently being used to search for the unknown reservoir species from which SARS-COV-19 jumped to infect humans (assuming a natural cause).
Under this approach, the longer the search goes on, the more we may lessen our confidence in the prior assumption that it was a natural infection.
One particular reference (point) the documentary was revolving around was the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies which has been pointing out the problem with zoonotic epidemics/pandemics vs. populations and wild ecosystems intertwining too much. (AIDS, SARS, MERS)
Maybe that's interesting enough:
"Thus, it is highly likely that future SARS- or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China. Therefore, the investigation of bat coronaviruses becomes an urgent issue for the detection of early warning signs ..."
Bat Coronaviruses in China, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6466186/ from March 2019
That said, all this conspiracy discussion is giving the research a bad taste. I mean they cannot build up a lab in a bat cave or ignore the whole issue. And this is not the first epidemic/pandemic of this sort.
OTOH, there is the furin cleavage site issue. Have your read the OA?!
> Since the genetic code of the coronavirus that caused the pandemic was first sequenced, scientists have puzzled over the “furin cleavage site.” This strange feature on the spike protein of the virus had never been seen in SARS-related betacoronaviruses, the class to which SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the respiratory illness Covid-19, belongs.
> Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has espoused the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab, agreed. “The relevance of this is that SARS Cov-2, the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction,” said Ebright, referring to the place where two subunits of the spike protein meet. “And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses.”
* None of the known coronaviruses closely related to covid have such a feature. There is a lot of FUD in this space, which amounts to saying: Horses and seals are mammals, seals have flippers, therefore that horse with flippers you just saw has occurred naturally. Those stallions might have been quite horny.
* The OA 2018 grant proposes to perform gain of function work and create a FCS in SARS viruses at WIH. This research proposal has not been publicly disclosed by scientists that supposedly are investigating covid origin. WTF?
* The OA 2018 grant proposal mentions a database of 180 coronaviruses that are not publicly disclosed to this day. Apparently WIH stopped publishing coronavirus sequences after 2015. WTF? https://twitter.com/franciscodeasis/status/14160891976650014...
The closer relatives of covid without a FCS at the S1/S2 junction we find, the more damning for the WIH and their American friends. And perhaps we'll find the genetic ancestors of covid in the wild, and the WIH (proposed) work might have been a bizzarre coincidence. We don't know. But the stonewalling and the sneering at the public asking legitimate questions must stop.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-should-we-make-of...
The 30-40 year figure assumes the related virus is a direct ancestor and it stayed within the same species, which is quite a big if. It's useful as a metric within a single population, but not exactly evidence hard enough to play genetic detective.
If they just share ancestors that time is basically halved towards the most recent common ancestor, which puts it back somewhere in the mid 2000s. When evolving in parallel, within different species, the divergence grows really quick. Also when viruses jump species the mutation rate skyrockets at the beginning[0][1] to adapt to the novel host, which could easily account for most of the difference between RaTG13 and Wu-1 anyway.
Interviewer: You say these are diverse coronaviruses and you can’t vaccinate against them, and no anti-virals — so what do we do?
Daszak: Well I think…coronaviruses — you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot of what happen with coronavirus, in zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work a lot with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab. So you can get more predictive when you find a sequence. You’ve got this diversity. Now the logical progression for vaccines is, if you are going to develop a vaccine for SARS, people are going to use pandemic SARS, but let’s insert some of these other things and get a better vaccine.
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdYDL_RK--w
more info: https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...