"Let’s look at the big picture: A novel SARS coronavirus emerges in Wuhan with a novel cleavage site in it. We now have evidence that, in early 2018, they had pitched inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-related viruses in their lab,” said Chan. “This definitely tips the scales for me. And I think it should do that for many other scientists too.”
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."
And then what's more, they sat on the fact that they had requested funding for this research for the last 18 months, when the world has been desperately trying to find any relevant information on the virus' origins. The fact that they did not put this forward themselves in in and of itself suspect.
What you're saying is worth looking deeper into, but it's not enough to start making claims yet, imo. There are probably hundreds or thousands of proposals and papers floating around now that talk about different things one can do with genetic engineering. If something should arise that is related to the concepts in some of those papers you wouldn't necessarily jump to the conclusion that there's a causal connection. Not without more information, anyway.
"it is the aspect of the genome which is hardest to square with a natural origin" This doesn't tell me it's artificially created. The most this tells me is it's not well understood.
"The fact that they did not put this forward themselves in in and of itself suspect." It could be related. Or it could be unrelated and there maybe some other explanation. My point is, when you want to charge someone with a serious crime, which I think this falls under, you need to come with some pretty strong evidence that directly ties whoever is involved to the events of the crime. This evidence may very well exist and it's not been shared publicly.
"Leaked DARPA proposals adds weight to lab-engineered sars-cov-2 hypothesis"
...or something along those lines. The problem is that "points to" is a pretty strong direct relationship. But these docs aren't directly related apparently (since the research was rejected by DARPA). It just shows that labs were potentially interested in creating such viruses. But that does hint that such a scenario could have been possible.
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.
Like me, you probably viewed it as a deliberate attempt to distract from his administration's incompetence. Like me, you probably decided right then and there that it was a natural virus and recognized that a bulk of the people saying otherwise just HAPPENED to be people who wanted Trump re-elected.
There comes a point where you have to recognize that you have made decisions with incomplete information and emotional biases, and that those decisions sometimes need to be completely cast out, with an objective, reasoned look at the latest facts.
At this point, the evidence that you reasonably state needs to be found has long been eradicated by the second most powerful nation state the world has ever seen. An authoritarian one, with the ability to make any critic disappear. There will never be an actual smoking gun, because the CCP had months of knowledge of what they had accidentally released before the rest of the planet knew it existed. All of the evidence was within their borders. The eradication of this evidence is itself an incredibly strong indication of guilt, particularly combined with the mountains of circumstantial evidence that point to this being a lab leak. If a detective walks into a suspected murderers bedroom, and finds that all of the surfaces have been bleached and the carpet has been ripped up, he doesn't have definitive evidence that the suspect is a murderer. But he does have evidence that they are trying to hide something.
I’ve found some hope among opponents with disagreeing beliefs, and I think remaining optimistic (reasonably) is an important piece of retaining the power to drive forward change in this area. Let’s remain supportive and hopeful in ultimately the same goal as our opponents: caring for and providing safety, love and compassion for all humans.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-should-we-make-of...
I have access to both LSD and psilocybin mushrooms and I'd be curious to see if I could alleviate my anosmia. At this point it's been 7 months and although I have some sense of smell restored there are massive parts of my spectrum that I have not recovered.
I recently accidentally drank spoiled orange juice because I couldn't tell at all that it was spoiled from the smell and even the taste.