| > then a twitter thread from a virologist debunking everything with a thread about how the lab leak theory is ridiculous As someone who has followed this closely one thing I noticed is the disingenuousness of many of these virologists in their arguments. Here is a list of disingenuousness points I always here: 1. "But it took almost a decade to find the origin of SARS" this is misleading since they are talking about ancestral origin (i.e. what bat it came from and how it evolved) but when people say no animal has been found they mean proximal origin i.e. what intermediate host infected patient zero. And for SARS1 they found that within months, MERS less than a year despite having less than 600 cases at the time. 2. "The lab is there because that's where the viruses are", now this one is more of a direct lie since it's just completely false, they just expect no one will check up on that claim. 3. "Mutating a virus leaves marks so we know it was not modified", this is false the technology to leave seamless edits has been around for a decade and is the standard practice. But there are many common locations they may insert a change typically in S1/S2 junction which surprise surprise SARS2 furin cleaveage site is located. It also happens to be where they proposed to insert furin cleaveage site's in the DEFUSE proposal. 4. "We do not have the technology to create a virus from scratch", this argument is a straw man since what people argue happened was SARS2 is a modified animal virus taken from field samples, and possibly enchanted through serial passaging in humanized mice models |
They sterilized the wet market this time. With SARS1 the market was open and there were infected animals there when they went and looked. The reaction to this pandemic was to attempt to sterilize everything.
> possibly enchanted
It wasn't "possibly enchanted".
SARS-CoV-2 is still 1,000 mutations and a couple decades of evolution away from the closest known animal virus that WIV might have had, and which there's no evidence that they had that live virus in the lab. And you don't get from one to the other from forming chimeras or from serial passage experiments. The mutations were all distributed around the genome.