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Comment by padobson | Hacker News Reader

At least one of the emails [0] shows Fauci had evidence of a possible lab leak in January 2020. If the virus' genome is inconsistent with evolutionary theory, that's a major red flag - and very early on in the pandemic.

We should continue to search for the reservoir animal and continue to pressure China to provide blood tests from researchers at the Wuhan lab. Without either exculpatory evidence for the Wuhan lab or clear evidence that it was a reservoir animal, the Wuhan lab leak theory should not be dismissed

Fauci was still saying [1] a reservoir animal was the most likely cause of the jump to humans a few days ago, despite having contrary evidence before almost anyone else.

I don't know why he isn't qualifying that more, but it's hard to see how it's not politics.

[0]https://twitter.com/JamesCTobias/status/1399811395043004418/...

[1]https://youtu.be/ilt_NcaIIRk?t=143

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The third tweet in the thread you linked[1] demonstrates why it would have been a bad idea to treat those initial findings as a "major red flag".

[1]: https://twitter.com/JamesCTobias/status/1399882478488334337

The third tweet demonstrates nothing.

The linked Nature paper in the third tweet [0] may demonstrate why a reservoir animal is more likely than the virus being artificially engineered, but damned if I can understand the reasoning in it. Maybe someone with a biology background or just plain smarter than me can explain it better.

In any case, my original point still stands, without exculpatory evidence for the Wuhan lab or the discovery of a reservoir animal, the lab leak theory should not be dismissed and any attempt to do so is just politics.

[0]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

one of the simplest forms of engineering a virus is called; serial passageing with artificial selection

this means passing the pathogen from one individual to others then selecting based on desired character to inocculate the next cohort of hosts; this will amplify the frequency of the desired character.

this process will also occur naturally, accompanied by natural selection.

this produces a genome that is devoid of the base pair level artefacts that can be observed when molecular genetic tools are used to edit and splice a genome. molecular editing produces sequence artefacts its like leaving a bit of your scissors behind when you cut a string. this is easy to spot; a smoking gun.

artifically directed selection is not easy to spot but would be evident in the case that frequencies of characters or traits are not distributed according to the laws of transmission genetics

Fauci is a scientist, not a politician. His emails show that he follows the scientific method. This means conclusions can change as new, more convincing evidence is uncovered.

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