[lamontcg]

We know it wasn't engineered and wasn't due to gain of function. SARS-CoV-2, RatG13 and RmYN02 evolved from a common ancestor decades ago:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33500788/

If SARS-CoV-2 was a spike spliced onto a backbone it wouldn't look like they evolved from each other (similar to a photoshopped picture with different shadows and noise).

It also didn't arise from serial passage since the distance is large enough that the 1,000 base pair difference would take passage through many, many millions of animals, not something that could be accomplished in a lab. 30-50 years of evolution is an awful lot of serial passage, and only nature can accomplish that large of a serial passage experiment.

It is also very unlikely that the lab found SARS-CoV-2 or the immediate ancestor and cultured the live virus without publishing the sequence. They did culture WIV-1 and used the WIV-1 backbone, but they also published the sequence years before they did that and did it all in the open. That's the reason why people know about that. Before the pandemic there would be no reason to keep a SARS-CoV-2 sequence secret, and they earned their living by sequencing sarbecoviruses and publishing them. And still its unclear how a lab leak would happen with this virus, since you need to both culture the live virus and somehow aerosolize it and snort it in -- as we've learned it doesn't transmit by surfaces and restaurants doing deep cleaning after COVID issues are just engaging in sanitation theater.

The actual bioreactors where it formed are all sitting right out in the open. All the bat caves across China, all the factory farms which have tightly packed intermediate animal hosts. All the humans interacting with those animals through factory farming or collecting bat guano for fertilizer. All the mixing that occurs by those animals being transported across china. There's a million times more serial passage and animal-animal or animal-human contact happening right out in the open.

[tim333]

Not true. We know it didn't come from any viruses that have been published but the Chinese have been pretty diligent at taking down databases and hiding information and there are almost certainly many viruses they have that we don't have the details of that they could have used.

I have to say the data hiding is pretty suspicious. If it was a natural virus it would be useful to have a look at WIVs extensive research on bat coronaviruses and have a look at the other nine they took from the Mojang mine along with RaTg13. If they have nothing to hide why hide that stuff as soon as we have a pandemic that it would be relevant for?

[lamontcg]

Well lets be clear then that there is zero published evidence and all that remains is a perfectly executed cover up (which is both unprovable and unfalsifiable).

[tim333]

I'd say a fairly shoddy cover up. These things are not unknowable - someone could leak the database. Someone could find the natural source if it came from nature and so on.

While they have taken down the WIV database there is quite a lot of information in other papers and PhD thesis that came out before the outbreak and so were not censored. For example this stuff https://mobile.twitter.com/ydeigin/status/142816212306298881...

[lamontcg]

That's a preprint by two "independent researchers" that they apparently had to submit to the physics arxiv because medrxiv wouldn't take it, which is discussing pangolin sequences done by a lab in Guangdong. I don't know why you think that has any relevance to the WIV database.

And until someone actually leaks some information, you still have zero information. You believe on faith that it must exist. There's no point in arguing with you about it. At least its obvious now that the lab leak hypothesis is starting to resemble a religious belief.