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I highly recommend that you read through https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-boo

I highly recommend that you read through https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r... and watch the underlying debate (starting here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1vaooTKHCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1vaooTKHCM), it does a really good job of laying out the arguments for and against lab leak in a very thorough and evidence-based way like you're asking for here.

photochemsyn 1y ago
"Viral" by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley is worth reading. But I don't think there's much doubt now that Sars-CoV2 was the result of reckless gain-of-function research conducted jointly between China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, America's Baric Lab in North Carolina, and facilitated by funding through EcoHealth Alliance, the NIH and the NIAID. Whoopsie.
- nightpool 1y ago
  There's a lot of doubt, actually. Peter responds to this possibility in a lot of detail in the debate I linked: Even if WIV did try to create COVID, they couldn’t have. As Yuri said, COVID looks like BANAL-52 plus a furin cleavage site. But WIV didn’t have BANAL-52. It wasn’t discovered until after the COVID pandemic started, when scientists scoured the area for potential COVID relatives. WIV had a more distant COVID relative, RATG-13. But you can’t create COVID from RATG-13; they’re too different. You would need BANAL-52, or some as-yet-undiscovered extremely close relative. WIV had neither. Are we sure they had neither? Yes. Remember, WIV’s whole job was looking for new coronaviruses. They published lists of which ones they had found pretty regularly. They published their last list in mid-2019, just a few months before the pandemic. Although lab leak proponents claimed these lists showed weird discrepancies, this was just their inability to keep names consistent, and all the lists showed basically the same viruses (plus a few extra on the later ones, as they kept discovering more). The lists didn’t include BANAL-52 or any other suitable COVID relatives - only RATG-13, which isn’t close enough to work. Could they have been keeping their discovery of BANAL-52 secret? No. Pre-pandemic, there was nothing interesting about it; our understanding of virology wasn’t good enough to point this out as a potential pandemic candidate. WIV did its gain-of-function research openly and proudly (before the pandemic, gain-of-function wasn’t as unpopular as it is now) so it’s not like they wanted to keep it secret because they might gain-of-function it later. Their lists very clearly showed they had no virus they could create COVID from, and they had no reason to hide it if they did. COVID’s furin cleavage site is admittedly unusual. But it’s unusual in a way that looks natural rather than man-made. Labs don’t usually add furin cleavage sites through nucleotide insertions (they usually mutate what’s already there). On the other hand, viruses get weird insertions of 12+ nucleotides in nature. For example, HKU1 is another emergent Chinese coronavirus that caused a small outbreak of pneumonia in 2004. It had a 15 nucleotide insertion right next to its furin cleavage site. Later strains of COVID got further 12 - 15 nucleotide insertions. Plenty of flus have 12 to 15 nucleotide insertions compared to other earlier flu strains. .... COVID’s furin cleavage site is a mess. When humans are inserting furin cleavage sites into viruses for gain-of-function, the standard practice is RRKR, a very nice and simple furin cleavage site which works well. COVID uses PRRAR, a bizarre furin cleavage site which no human has ever used before, and which virologists expected to work poorly. They later found that an adjacent part of COVID’s genome twisted the protein in an unusual way that allowed PRRAR to be a viable furin cleavage site, but this discovery took a lot of computer power, and was only made after COVID became important. The Wuhan virologists supposedly doing gain-of-function research on COVID shouldn’t have known this would work. Why didn’t they just use the standard RRKR site, which would have worked better? Everyone thinks it works better! Even the virus eventually decided it worked better - sometime during the course of the pandemic, it mutated away from its weird PRRAR furin cleavage site towards a more normal form. COVID is hard to culture. If you culture it in most standard media or animals, it will quickly develop characteristic mutations. But the original Wuhan strains didn’t have these mutations. The only ways to culture it without mutations are in human airway cells, or (apparently) in live raccoon-dogs. Getting human airway cells requires a donor (ie someone who donates their body to science), and Wuhan had never done this before (it was one of the technologies only used at the superior North Carolina site).
  - photochemsyn 1y ago
    It's equally likely that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was testing constructs created in the Baric Lab in their bat and mice models, and this was initiated during the 2014-2017 ban on gain-of-function research in the USA that Fauci vocally opposed. The reality here is that there are thousands of mammalian viruses that don't infect humans that could be modified to infect humans via specific modifications of their target mammalian cell-surface receptor proteins, as was done in this specific case of a bat coronavirus modified at its furin cleavage site to make it human-targetable. Any modern advanced undergrad student in molecular biology could explain this to you, if you bothered to listen. So first, we need an acknowledgement of Covid that vastly embarrasses China and the USA, and second we need a global treaty banning this generation of novel human pathogens from wild mammalian viral types... I guess I won't hold my breath.
    - fc417fc802 1y ago
      > there are thousands of mammalian viruses that don't infect humans that could be modified to infect humans via specific modifications of their target mammalian cell-surface receptor proteins Are you claiming that's what happened here? What virus do you propose was modified in such a manner? Where was it sourced from? Why was it not on the published lists of discovered viruses? > as was done in this specific case of a bat coronavirus modified at its furin cleavage site to make it human-targetable Did you even read the comment you're responding to? It details why the furin cleavage site does not resemble something that you would expect humans to have produced.

photochemsyn 1y ago

"Viral" by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley is worth reading. But I don't think there's much doubt now that Sars-CoV2 was the result of reckless gain-of-function research conducted jointly between China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, America's Baric Lab in North Carolina, and facilitated by funding through EcoHealth Alliance, the NIH and the NIAID. Whoopsie.

nightpool 1y ago
There's a lot of doubt, actually. Peter responds to this possibility in a lot of detail in the debate I linked: Even if WIV did try to create COVID, they couldn’t have. As Yuri said, COVID looks like BANAL-52 plus a furin cleavage site. But WIV didn’t have BANAL-52. It wasn’t discovered until after the COVID pandemic started, when scientists scoured the area for potential COVID relatives. WIV had a more distant COVID relative, RATG-13. But you can’t create COVID from RATG-13; they’re too different. You would need BANAL-52, or some as-yet-undiscovered extremely close relative. WIV had neither. Are we sure they had neither? Yes. Remember, WIV’s whole job was looking for new coronaviruses. They published lists of which ones they had found pretty regularly. They published their last list in mid-2019, just a few months before the pandemic. Although lab leak proponents claimed these lists showed weird discrepancies, this was just their inability to keep names consistent, and all the lists showed basically the same viruses (plus a few extra on the later ones, as they kept discovering more). The lists didn’t include BANAL-52 or any other suitable COVID relatives - only RATG-13, which isn’t close enough to work. Could they have been keeping their discovery of BANAL-52 secret? No. Pre-pandemic, there was nothing interesting about it; our understanding of virology wasn’t good enough to point this out as a potential pandemic candidate. WIV did its gain-of-function research openly and proudly (before the pandemic, gain-of-function wasn’t as unpopular as it is now) so it’s not like they wanted to keep it secret because they might gain-of-function it later. Their lists very clearly showed they had no virus they could create COVID from, and they had no reason to hide it if they did. COVID’s furin cleavage site is admittedly unusual. But it’s unusual in a way that looks natural rather than man-made. Labs don’t usually add furin cleavage sites through nucleotide insertions (they usually mutate what’s already there). On the other hand, viruses get weird insertions of 12+ nucleotides in nature. For example, HKU1 is another emergent Chinese coronavirus that caused a small outbreak of pneumonia in 2004. It had a 15 nucleotide insertion right next to its furin cleavage site. Later strains of COVID got further 12 - 15 nucleotide insertions. Plenty of flus have 12 to 15 nucleotide insertions compared to other earlier flu strains. .... COVID’s furin cleavage site is a mess. When humans are inserting furin cleavage sites into viruses for gain-of-function, the standard practice is RRKR, a very nice and simple furin cleavage site which works well. COVID uses PRRAR, a bizarre furin cleavage site which no human has ever used before, and which virologists expected to work poorly. They later found that an adjacent part of COVID’s genome twisted the protein in an unusual way that allowed PRRAR to be a viable furin cleavage site, but this discovery took a lot of computer power, and was only made after COVID became important. The Wuhan virologists supposedly doing gain-of-function research on COVID shouldn’t have known this would work. Why didn’t they just use the standard RRKR site, which would have worked better? Everyone thinks it works better! Even the virus eventually decided it worked better - sometime during the course of the pandemic, it mutated away from its weird PRRAR furin cleavage site towards a more normal form. COVID is hard to culture. If you culture it in most standard media or animals, it will quickly develop characteristic mutations. But the original Wuhan strains didn’t have these mutations. The only ways to culture it without mutations are in human airway cells, or (apparently) in live raccoon-dogs. Getting human airway cells requires a donor (ie someone who donates their body to science), and Wuhan had never done this before (it was one of the technologies only used at the superior North Carolina site).
- photochemsyn 1y ago
  It's equally likely that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was testing constructs created in the Baric Lab in their bat and mice models, and this was initiated during the 2014-2017 ban on gain-of-function research in the USA that Fauci vocally opposed. The reality here is that there are thousands of mammalian viruses that don't infect humans that could be modified to infect humans via specific modifications of their target mammalian cell-surface receptor proteins, as was done in this specific case of a bat coronavirus modified at its furin cleavage site to make it human-targetable. Any modern advanced undergrad student in molecular biology could explain this to you, if you bothered to listen. So first, we need an acknowledgement of Covid that vastly embarrasses China and the USA, and second we need a global treaty banning this generation of novel human pathogens from wild mammalian viral types... I guess I won't hold my breath.
  - fc417fc802 1y ago
    > there are thousands of mammalian viruses that don't infect humans that could be modified to infect humans via specific modifications of their target mammalian cell-surface receptor proteins Are you claiming that's what happened here? What virus do you propose was modified in such a manner? Where was it sourced from? Why was it not on the published lists of discovered viruses? > as was done in this specific case of a bat coronavirus modified at its furin cleavage site to make it human-targetable Did you even read the comment you're responding to? It details why the furin cleavage site does not resemble something that you would expect humans to have produced.