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China has consistently exhibited shady behavior when dealing with this virus. The Nature paper showing that the virus came from pangolin has been found to be fabricated.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x https://mobile.twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/132034405523096371...

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Anyone who still believes this came from a wet market is a conspiracy theorist.

This was an accidental release of natural (but artificially-selected) virus from a lab studying SARS and related coronaviruses.

Some of us have been saying this for 10 months now.

I think (so this is a personal theory) what we are seeing is that a version was circulating earlier that was highly contagious. It got to Wuhan and maybe through an accidental cross-infection, potentially an individual working at the lab, inherited some RNA to mutate into something far more deadly.

What no one is saying is how the earlier version differed, but was obviously not killing that many people or we would have heard about it. Anecdotally there was just a spike in hospital pneumonia cases.

Nice source you have there.

Missed the deconstruction of the infamous set of articles/preprints, thanks. Not being a virologist, one could only superficially browse GISAID/NCBI data at the time, but RaTG13 appearance a la deus ex machina was almost immediately fishy.

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