3 ms·
What you would expect to find in a natural zoonotic origin is a series of close ancestor relatives of the pandemic version, some capable of causing mild disease
by photochemsyn 5y ago
What you would expect to find in a natural zoonotic origin is a series of close ancestor relatives of the pandemic version, some capable of causing mild disease in humans (as with MERS and SARS for example). See this 2013 description for example:
"We hypothesize that the direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was produced by recombination within bats and then transmitted to farmed civets or another mammal, which then transmitted the virus to civets by faecal–oral transmission. When the virus-infected civets were transported to Guangdong market, the virus spread in market civets and acquired further mutations before spillover to humans."
For someone to fabricate a plausible natural origin story, they'd have to create a similar series of genetic variants based on ancestral bat strains, intermediates on the way to Sars-CoV-2. So, it'd be very difficult if even possible.
- fsckboy 5y agofirst of all, you're agreeing with me, I said I'd want to see proof, and you're saying what the proof would need to consist of. However, you are not addressing that there has been zero natural origin evidence, but they've all along been saying it's the likeliest, despite the Wuhan lab, and they've not been considering gain of function even though the US has been funding it in China at that lab.
- photochemsyn 5y agoThe fact that the virus just popped out of nowhere more or less without the normal pedigree is strong evidence against a natural origin theory. It's pretty clear at this point that it was a lab escape, in my opinion.
- fsckboy 5y agoyou mean a gain-of-function research and then lab-leak. There could be a lab-leak of a naturally occurring virus, but you're saying experimentally man-made virus. I agree with you, but I think it's necessary to be precise.