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I'm not sure you can rule out "engineered as you described above." WIV had recently published research on, and had an active grant to perform (at the time of t
by cameldrv 6y ago
I'm not sure you can rule out "engineered as you described above."
WIV had recently published research on, and had an active grant to perform (at the time of the outbreak), chimeric Coronavirus research, and they were one of the two world leading labs in this. In that research, they were transplanting the spike gene from one virus to the "backbone" of another. You could call this "engineering" or "gain of function" depending on your perspective.
The thing that raised people's suspicions about this is that the spike RBD strongly resembles a virus sequence they released recently (Pangolin-CoV), and the backbone strongly resembles another virus they recently published (RaTG13). That suggests that there was some sort of recombination event. That recombination could have occurred in nature, in an animal that was simultaneously infected with two viruses, or it could have occurred in the lab.
- andi999 6y agoSources, please.
- AndrewBissell 6y agoThis article delves into the spike protein and its furin cleavage site which some have argued looks engineered: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca... Incidentally (or perhaps not?), there is some evidence that the furin-cleavage site is what makes the virus resistant to hydroxychloroquine, which can be countered by combining it with a TMPRSS2 inhibitor: https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1009212 https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
- selimthegrim 6y ago96% is strongly resembles?
- XorNot 6y agoThey're viruses from the same family of viruses. "Strongly resembles" is not strong evidence. Which you note by pointing out that this is the exact thing we'd expect from a natural event.
- cameldrv 6y agoThis is older but it shows the BLAST of the two viruses. They're more than the same family. RaTG13 is the closest sequence ever discovered (in open literature) to SARS-CoV-2. https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748 https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...