[tropo]

That article is misdirection. It says that we have not been able to find anything in the genome that proves modern gene editing technology was used.

Well, so what? People aren't generally making that claim. The only thing disproven is a straw man.

Nothing in the article rules out the possibility of a lab creating the virus via conventional breeding, by passing the virus through human cells and/or by infecting cells simultaneously with human viruses. Nothing in the article rules out the possibility of a lab accident; indeed there have been several lab accidents in China that released dangerous viruses.

Look at this research:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18077725

It is 2008 research from the lab in Wuhan. They created a virus by combining SARS-CoV with HIV, targeting the human ACE2 molecule as receptor. These features match those of our current pandemic. (India reported the HIV link, and the use of ACE2 is widely known)

We shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the possibility. Note also that China is actively trying to point people away from this line of inquiry. We should resist that effort.

It's worth remembering that the very term "conspiracy theory" was first used to deflect attention from an actual conspiracy. It was a very successful psy-op, and it lives on to this day.

[throwaway963577]

I spent 5 years doing QA on synthetic oligos/genes used by just about everyone in synthetic biology. In my experience, edits are easy to detect if you know where to look--methylation patterns, unusually large numbers of start codons, and relatively few areas of high GC content.

But I'm also a Chinese agent, so take that with a grain of salt.

[tropo]

By "edits", you seems to be referring to something else. I think you mean something like CRISPR Cas9.

That is a straw man. I'm definitely not claiming that any such technology was used. The virus modifications in the Wuhan lab are older than the existence of most of that technology.

We didn't need modern technology to create the dog from the wolf. It's the same here, with viruses.

Breeding viruses in a lab is not detectable compared to what happens in nature.