There is an article on Nature one month ago on this topic:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
> Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus
Also, people quickly forget that humans have been selectively evolving plants and animals for thousands of years without touching the actual genomes.
Just saying it "came from a lab", makes it sound man made. If you don't want misunderstandings, you need spell it out and make it absolutely clear. It doesn't even sound like there is a clear narrative about how it "escaped from the lab", just a lot of rumors. Rumors about a rumor, certainly doesn't sound more credible than China's official stance, and their credibility is already very low.
Note that that the Wuhan CDC, the lab ~300m from the market, the lab that was experimenting on bats, is not the BSL4 Wuhan Institute of Virology miles away from the seafood market, that everyone loves taking about. It's probably a level 2 or 3 lab.
Escape from a lab doesn't imply man made any more than tiger escaped from zoo implies that the tiger was born there. SARS escaped from BSL3 labs on China on multiple occasions, that doesn't imply that SARS was man made.
https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/threatened-pandemics-and-lab...
1. while doing research that has been banned in other nations due to the extreme hazard
2. despite having a history of lab virus escapes that killed people
3. and then they covered it up
BTW, the virus is at least sort of man made. The lab was breeding viruses. There is no evidence that gene editing technology was used, but we do know that the lab has published multiple research papers about making coronaviruses more infectious in humans.
I think there needs to be a damn good justification for purposely making viruses more able to infect and harm humans. Why would you do that????? Mere scientific curiosity is not a proper justification for putting all of humanity at risk.
that's frightening. Do you have any more information about those papers?
https://jvi.asm.org/content/82/4/1899
Here they are again, years later, still playing with extremely hazardous coronaviruses that act on the ACE2 receptor in humans:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711
This one gene-edits the host cells to have both human and bat traits, making it easier to breed bat viruses into becoming human viruses:
It's not correct to call insertion of a plasmid to be gene editing of a host cell, though this could be arguably pedantic.
I'm curious how you concluded that what they did made it easier to breed bat viruses into becoming human viruses?
That does not mean the virus could not be derived within a lab using recombination methods in other animals and sourcing the starting novel virus from bats. In fact, this type of research was the exact research being done at the Wuhan Virology lab.
I would like to see the exact research they tried to do there. Navigating through their published research list, I couldn't locate any, but I am not an expert:
What a lot of people are trying to do is execute the classic psychological trick; make the problem go away by finding someone safe to blame.
Won't work for SARS-COV2. It doesn't care.
This article consists of some publicly known facts, along with some anonymous sources in the British government's emergency committee (the Cabinet leaks like a sieve so this is entirely plausible). It also cites an academic, some report from Beijing News (whilst noting that the report was retracted) and an academic paper that was uploaded and then deleted. It's written in a pretty neutral tone and explicitly calls out cases where its sources may have issues. The article is no different to the sort of speculation routinely found in Bloomberg, the WSJ, NYT, the Guardian etc.
What we're seeing here is just another day in no-platforming land. To the left what is said doesn't matter, who says it is everything. Based on prior experience I'd be willing to bet that virtually none of the people spitting fire over a Daily Mail or National Review link here have even read the articles, let alone rigorously apply the same purported standards to every news link they see posted.