Re: manufacturing viruses generally: this is just scarless DNA editing and it's been around for over a decade. It's not unique to this situation at all, it's the modern bread-and-butter of molecular biology and related fields. It has been possible to produce lab strains without obvious signs of engineering for a long time. This isn't really a counterpoint to the idea of engineering a virus, just want to point out that it's not special or damning that they also started using these very standard techniques in their own work.
Re: the genome looking like it came from East Asia, this is because it has homologs from bat coronaviruses in caves in and near China. A lab-engineering theory would require that it specifically be made to look like it came from certain areas of China or that after realizing it had gotten out of hand, they used internally documented origins of the genome, which would've had to come from a library of bat viruses from those areas, to create a scapegoat.
It's possible, but it's multiplying the coincidences you'd need to have and that always damages theories. Though to be clear, I don't put the malice outside the capacity of the US MIC. I am more dubious about their competence, though.
Yes, SARS-CoV-2 has horseshoe bat coronavirus homologs. The closest-related ones have been found in China, Laos and Cambodia but trying to put together phylogenetic trees with limited data means it could be from any number of similar bat coronaviruses.
What is most notably against the idea of lab engineering is the ACE2-binding moieties and their genomic determinants. This would not be something engineered from scratch via bespoke design, it would require shotgun-ie strategies like serial passage, but the genome itself suggests otherwise: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095063/
It's also important to note that scarless recombinant DNA techniques are ubiquitous and that any argument about the possibility of stitching together bat coronavirus DNA with something else applied to basically any lab working with coronaviruses - including imperialist lab-leak theories about the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Finally, consider that we already had SARS and then MERS. Your hypothesis has to be better than the null one, which has to be the animal reservoir hypothesis - something that keeps happening over and over again and about which many scientific papers have been warning us for years and years. Coronaviruses have a lot of animal hosts and jump between them frequently, posing a continual danger
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Re: manufacturing viruses generally: this is just scarless DNA editing and it's been around for over a decade. It's not unique to this situation at all, it's the modern bread-and-butter of molecular biology and related fields. It has been possible to produce lab strains without obvious signs of engineering for a long time. This isn't really a counterpoint to the idea of engineering a virus, just want to point out that it's not special or damning that they also started using these very standard techniques in their own work.
Re: the genome looking like it came from East Asia, this is because it has homologs from bat coronaviruses in caves in and near China. A lab-engineering theory would require that it specifically be made to look like it came from certain areas of China or that after realizing it had gotten out of hand, they used internally documented origins of the genome, which would've had to come from a library of bat viruses from those areas, to create a scapegoat.
It's possible, but it's multiplying the coincidences you'd need to have and that always damages theories. Though to be clear, I don't put the malice outside the capacity of the US MIC. I am more dubious about their competence, though.
deleted by creator
Yes, SARS-CoV-2 has horseshoe bat coronavirus homologs. The closest-related ones have been found in China, Laos and Cambodia but trying to put together phylogenetic trees with limited data means it could be from any number of similar bat coronaviruses.
What is most notably against the idea of lab engineering is the ACE2-binding moieties and their genomic determinants. This would not be something engineered from scratch via bespoke design, it would require shotgun-ie strategies like serial passage, but the genome itself suggests otherwise: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095063/
It's also important to note that scarless recombinant DNA techniques are ubiquitous and that any argument about the possibility of stitching together bat coronavirus DNA with something else applied to basically any lab working with coronaviruses - including imperialist lab-leak theories about the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Finally, consider that we already had SARS and then MERS. Your hypothesis has to be better than the null one, which has to be the animal reservoir hypothesis - something that keeps happening over and over again and about which many scientific papers have been warning us for years and years. Coronaviruses have a lot of animal hosts and jump between them frequently, posing a continual danger
deleted by creator