3 ms·

What about the request to use gain of function research to add furin sites to coronaviruses? That seems to me the smoking gun, since this lab asked for funding

What about the request to use gain of function research to add furin sites to coronaviruses? That seems to me the smoking gun, since this lab asked for funding to do exactly that. It’s a bit like Jaime Meitzl (sp?) said - for the first time in history you find a unicorn (furin binding site in a coronavirus) next to a lab that asked for funding to make regular horses into unicorns. But the lab says it’s “natural origin”.

lamontcg 4y ago
The PRRAR FCS not a known FCS prior to the pandemic so it is unlikely the lab would have genetically engineered it and they would have used something like RRXRR instead. Other coronaviruses have an FCS and they have evolved multiple different times, independently: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612... The fact that we knew that adding an FCS to a virus would likely enhance its ability to produce a pandemic really isn't a smoking gun that we actually did it, because we're just studying and copying what nature is already doing (who is actually a much better geneticist than we are, with vastly greater tools). And since you want to talk about suspicious "unicorns" how about the idea that a lab worker was infected in the lab, and then the only thing that they did was visit the wet market. They didn't infect anyone they lived with, or go to any restaurants, or go visit grandma and this Typhoid Mary/Mike has no existence outside of working in the lab and visiting the wet market. And this idea gets worse if you include more workers in WIV having supposedly been exposed. What fits with the facts better is that they genetically engineered the virus in perfect secrecy and deliberately let it loose in the wet market, which is just insanity--nobody gains anything from doing that, but it is also impossible to argue against.
- kranke155 4y ago
  Why would it have happened only in the market? Seems to me that it’s plausible they just managed to cover up other points of origin for the pandemic in Wuhan and that the market was the first super spreading event. If your only defense is that this is not the most commonly used way to add a FCS to coronaviruses, that seems pretty thin.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    And the evidence of the cover up is that there's only evidence at the wet market? You realize that is going to rapidly descend into circular logic.
Natsu 4y ago
See also: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fviro.2022.834808/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fviro.2022.8348...

lamontcg 4y ago

The PRRAR FCS not a known FCS prior to the pandemic so it is unlikely the lab would have genetically engineered it and they would have used something like RRXRR instead. Other coronaviruses have an FCS and they have evolved multiple different times, independently: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612... The fact that we knew that adding an FCS to a virus would likely enhance its ability to produce a pandemic really isn't a smoking gun that we actually did it, because we're just studying and copying what nature is already doing (who is actually a much better geneticist than we are, with vastly greater tools). And since you want to talk about suspicious "unicorns" how about the idea that a lab worker was infected in the lab, and then the only thing that they did was visit the wet market. They didn't infect anyone they lived with, or go to any restaurants, or go visit grandma and this Typhoid Mary/Mike has no existence outside of working in the lab and visiting the wet market. And this idea gets worse if you include more workers in WIV having supposedly been exposed. What fits with the facts better is that they genetically engineered the virus in perfect secrecy and deliberately let it loose in the wet market, which is just insanity--nobody gains anything from doing that, but it is also impossible to argue against.

kranke155 4y ago
Why would it have happened only in the market? Seems to me that it’s plausible they just managed to cover up other points of origin for the pandemic in Wuhan and that the market was the first super spreading event. If your only defense is that this is not the most commonly used way to add a FCS to coronaviruses, that seems pretty thin.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  And the evidence of the cover up is that there's only evidence at the wet market? You realize that is going to rapidly descend into circular logic.

Natsu 4y ago

See also: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fviro.2022.834808/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fviro.2022.8348...