[sterlind]

I don't understand that argument. Wouldn't serial passage through human lung cells produce efficient bindings? Is that sort of artificial selection not what they meant by "laboratory manipulation?" If they mean it's not the product of genetic engineering then sure, but leaving out the possibility of serial passage is misleading at best.

[sgt101]

The rapid evolution (gain) between the wild virus and Alpha and then Delta and now Delta+ indicates to me that if there was a gain of function experiment in the evolution of this virus then it was stopped far too early!

Also it seems tuned to infect Mustelidae - like the Mink in Belgium and Holland, and Ferret Badgers. The thing about that is that why would that be if you were passaging it through mice? Mustelidae are going to be a pretty difficult lab target in comparison to mice (they bite, they're big, they take a season to mature). The fact that Ferret Badgers were sold for meat in the Wuhan market is pretty interesting in this context (although none of the animals tested had Cov19).

[Amezarak]

Ferrets are commonly used in serial passaging and gain of function research.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...

> In 2011, a tall, confident Dutch scientist, Ron Fouchier, using grant money from Fauci’s group at NIH, created a mutant form of highly pathogenic avian influenza, H5N1, and passaged it ten times through ferrets in order to prove that he could “force” (his word) this potentially fatal disease to infect mammals, including humans, “via aerosols or respiratory droplets.”

https://www.salon.com/2020/11/29/covid-19-mutations-spread-m...

> Because ferrets are the animals most like humans in terms of how their immune systems respond to influenza, scientists have experimented with them to make existing viruses more deadly, a biowarfare concept known as "gain of function" research.

[taneq]

I don’t know if it counts as “rapid” given the infected population and time scale involved. Getting from the original COVID-19 to Delta+ in a lab would take a long time compared to in the millions of infected humans ‘in the wild’.

[sudosysgen]

It's a single nucleotide mutation. I don't see how the dozens of nucleotides from before would have been easy but the last nucleotide would be impossible.

[loceng]

COVID-19 could be the base discovered that they saw in lab experiments gaining function, evolving rapidly, and so an ideal candidate as the base starting point - where now there's the four variants - and who knows how many more variants may escape with the mRNA vaccine most effective only for the original strain and arguably exponentially less effective against the evolving variants.