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Comment by srl | Hacker News Reader

From the Nature medicine paper:

> Editors’ note, [30] March 2020: We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.

And from "The Scientist":

> Update (March 11, 2020): On social media and news outlets, a theory has circulated that the coronavirus at the root of the COVID-19 outbreak originated in a research lab. Scientists say there is no evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from a lab.

And an obligatory link to SA's recent post on the phrase "no evidence": https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...

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There is no way that this is a coincidence:

A GRANT PROPOSAL written by the U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance and submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, provides evidence that the group was working — or at least planning to work — on several risky areas of research. Among the scientific tasks the group described in its proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, was the creation of full-length infectious clones of bat SARS-related coronaviruses and the insertion of a tiny part of the virus known as a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses. Of particular interest was a type of cleavage site able to interact with furin, an enzyme expressed in human cells.

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...

There's more evidence that it's lab made.

https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...

https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/ratg13-is-fake.html

The wild speculation that I've read that is somewhat related to the grant proposal, because it was submitted to DARPA. The speculation is following (paraphrasing):

> WIV is a dual research institution. What that means is there's been military research done by PLA at WIV. Ecohealth Alliance is a front for two different things: 1. outsource risky pathogens experiments, which is done by NIH, NIAID and other organizations 2. spying on Chinese military operations at WIV, which is done by US military and intelligence organizations. That's why Daszak is intricately linked to US administration and has been untouchable so far. EHA has been essentially voilating NIH grant terms and denied NIH requests to submit all the experiments data. That explains US govt's reluctance to have a proper investigation.

I am in no way claiming there's any evidence to it, especially EHA is partially funded by US intelligence operation. You be the judge.

"the SARS-CoV-2 spike, similarly to the more distantly related Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus (MERS-CoV), contains a polybasic CS, characterized as being a suboptimal furin CS. This polybasic CS is absent from the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, although similar polybasic CSs are found in more distantly related coronaviruses"

https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/ratg13-is-fake.html

It's not even the most similar virus to sars-cov-2. Even if it's fake it doesn't matter and there's no evidence that it is.

I didn't realize that COVID-19 has a virus more similar to it than ratg13. When did this change?

> Even if it's fake it doesn't matter and there's no evidence that it is.

That's disingenuous. There's evidence, but you're just ignoring it.

It does matter because it means that COVID-19 is likely created in a lab.

>Scientists say there is no evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from a lab.

Unfortunately there's no evidence it didn't escape from a lab either, but there are many strong indications that it did.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-coronavirus-lab-leak-v...

> but there are many strong indications that it did.

Nope, there really aren't. We're now finding more and more naturally-evolved viruses in cave-dwelling bats that share plenty of features with SARS-CoV2, including the 'weird' features everyone was talking about at the beginning of the pandemic. All it really takes is to go and look for them. Occam's razor says this virus too is just one of many.

> All it really takes is to go and look for them

They did, the closest sample is still Ra4991/RaTG13 which was found in a Wuhan mine and transported to the Wuhan virology lab before the outbreak.

Not aware of another confirmed sample found that is closer to SARS-CoV-2:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaTG13

Exactly. Parent poster is spewing a line without evidence. Please cite discoveries of respiratory viruses with “weird features” on par with SARS-cov2.

I think the parent poster was talikng about BANAL virus discovered in Laos, which apparently is closest to SARS-CoV2, but it doesn't have Furin Cleavage Site.

> The Laos study offers insight into the origins of the pandemic, but there are still missing links, say researchers. For example, the Laos viruses don’t contain the so-called furin cleavage site on the spike protein that further aids the entry of SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses into human cells.

From [1]. So yes, the claim made by the parent poster is patently false.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2

Indeed. They've been looking for the intermediate host for 2 years and have not found anything close to SARS-CoV-2.

Contrast that with the fact that they found the intermediate host for the first SARS within just a few months of that outbreak.

> Not aware of another confirmed sample found that is closer to SARS-CoV-2

Paraphrasing from this article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2

> BANAL-52 is 96.8% identical to SARS-CoV-2; one section in BANAL-103 and BANAL-52 could have shared an ancestor with sections of SARS-CoV-2 less than a decade ago.

> RaTG13 is 96.1% identical to SARS-CoV-2 and the two viruses probably shared a common ancestor 40–70 years ago.

> The results, which are not peer reviewed, have been posted on the preprint server Research Square

It's a CCP propaganda piece. I find that "study" pretty fishy, the results would have been easy to verify if true.

Same as the CDC study they tried to use against Israel's study for natural immunity.

Once you let ideology infiltrate your reasoning, you’re no longer doing science. Just because you don’t like the implications of a particular piece of research doesn’t mean you get to dismiss it.

That's not what I said. I said it should be easy to peer review but it hasn't been.

That's a very common ask especially among HN, is it not?

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

From my perspective it looks dubious and the only goal is to shift attention away from the RatG13 sample.

> Wuhan mine

correction: Yunnan mine

It is exceedingly important that you get all facts right. Much depends on this.

Sorry yes, typo. Thank you!

Very important because it was transported across the country to the lab.

If it was natural the outbreak would be in and between Yunnan and Wuhan, not Wuhan as the epicenter.

An independent inquiry into the lab could settle that quickly.

10's of thousands of animals have been tested for a predecessor to human Covid-19 though, for two years now, and nothing has been found, despite looking very hard and in ways that 'should have' found something had it been there. In all other known zoonotic crossovers, where we had the modern capability to test, the virus or a very close relative was quickly found.

Since we have exhaustively eliminated zoonotic origin, whatever is left must be the cause, even if it did not have the preponderance of circumstantial evidence that lab escape does.

In other news:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29927990

Top scientists believed COVID leaked from Wuhan lab but feared going public: Emails

Scientists believe that scientists are not the most likely source of the coronavirus.

Totally unrelated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_ZDQKq2F08

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