It most likely did, though.
It most likely did, though.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7836551/
in which the final claim is "Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2."
Er, that's not really strong support for the naturally occurring hypothesis, it's a refutation against 'naturally occurring is impossible'.
The spontaneous evolution of furin sites is rare in the specific clade of SARS-CoV-2, so if it's support it's very weak. The phylogenetic trees presented in the paper are VERY much loaded to obscure this fact (omitting betacoronaviruses in the alpha-delta tree, and in the breakout betacoronavirus tree, arbitrarily loading up multiple copies of "basically the same" strains which all present a furin cleavage site to make the pie slice of furin site-presenting sequences bigger).
On the other hand, copy-pasting interesting motifs into a different but related genetic entity to achieve GOF is basically "the first strategy you do" as a synthetic biologist. Hell, even I did it (to gain function in a non-pathogenic system) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24934472/ "we substituted one of four amino acids (Asp, His, Asn, Gln) at each of the 12 ligating positions because these amino acids are alternative coordinating residues in otherwise conserved-cysteine positions found in a broad survey of NiFe hydrogenase sequences."
What sounds more likely, a bat in the fish market of Wuhan or the influenza lab next to it?
There is plenty of circumstantial evidence.
Yeah. It doesn't sit right with me that Peter Daszak, who has close ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was the driving force behind the February 2020 Lancet letter of scientists "strongly condemning conspiracy theories" like the lab-leak theory – all without disclosing that conflict of interest.
Daszak should testify before congress.
China (and everyone else) doesn't get to have their cake an eat it too. They want to be opaque as national policy, that's their prerogative, but they don't get to do so and expect positive inference regarding what is behind the curtain.
In other words, assuming the worst plausible scenario is the only, or at least a, rational interpretation of possibilities against a policy of intentional opacity.
Can you see how a government might be concerned about keeping an adversary do that because of the sovereignty violation it brings up as well as concerns about spies being part of that group (eg how the CIA used a vaccination program as cover to find Bin Laden in Pakistan)?
It’s not the only rational explanation. It’s just the one you choose to prefer (and it might perhaps be the most plausible given how the Chinese government appears to operate, but it’s not beyond reasonable doubt). Heck, this was the theory behind invading Iraq and looks like the US never did find those WMDs.
That biolab specializes in coronaviruses.
That biolab was funded, in part, by the US NIH to conduct gain of function (a rose by any other name...) on coronaviruses.
SARS-CoV-2 is a coronavirus.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus outbreak was first observed in Wuhan.
It's such a logical chain of circumstantial evidence, and They expected everyone to believe that it came from a fucking pangolin?
It seems to me like people are talking about some Boogeyman here. I need specifics on this "they" because otherwise it just comes across as rhetoric