3 ms·
The story about how various miners working in a cave with bats in it in China got pneumonia in 2016 and that virus was worked on at WIV seems most likely.
by rogerkirkness 4y ago
The story about how various miners working in a cave with bats in it in China got pneumonia in 2016 and that virus was worked on at WIV seems most likely.
- lamontcg 4y agoRaTG13 is a thousand mutations and several decades of evolution away from SARS-CoV-2, you don't get from having RaTG13 in a lab to SARS-CoV-2. There's no evidence that WIV recovered whole virus of RaTG13 or cultured it. SARS-CoV-2 is not a chimera of a RaTG13 backbone and an ACE2-attaching spike, there's a lot more mutations involved. You also don't get there from serial passage experiments in a lab, you need serial passage through decades and many millions of infections in nature, we can't operate at that scale.