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Comment by makmanalp | Hacker News Reader

> Actually, the closest natural viruses to covid were sent to Wuhan for study

Please don't "actually" something with an uncited statement without backing it up with any sort of detail. A news article? Anything, honestly.

> that is what the Wuhan institute of coronaviruses was built to do right?

Really? It's "Wuhan institute of virology". Not "coronaviruses". Right?

I have no specific horse in this race but I feel like I'm losing my mind every time I read any discussion on this subject because there's always folks throwing around random statements as if they're established fact and I feel like at this point, on this specific subject, on this website, we should know better, geez.

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From wikipedia:

> The institute has been an active premier research center for the study of coronaviruses.[6]

> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (HeLa). The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[17][21]

The evidence is pretty damning, and points to way too much to be coincidental. It's not solid evidence, but that would be impossible to get since China blocked anyone from visiting or doing independent investigations.

My major and Msc are related to microbiology (which is highly related to virology), and I'd estimate it's a 95% chance of having originated from the lab.

I've got a PhD in infectious disease epidemiology who got his start in researching respiratory pathogens and whose work on coronaviruses has been cited 387 times.

I'd both put my estimate at much lower than 95%, and I'd be substantially less confident in it, since my expertise kicks in about two weeks after an initial spillover event occurs.

It is fact that a group that funds research in Wuhan (Eco health alliance) submitted a grant request to DARPA to fund research to engineer a coronavirus which could infect human lungs by inserted a specific cleavage site. Covid has that mutation exactly where the grant proposal planned to insert it. And no viruses in teh wild have been found to have that feature. This grant proposal was submitted in 2018.

For covid to be natural it would have had to mutate in the same way as planned in the grant proposal within 2 years of the grant proposal, and then travel hundreds of miles not infecting anyone on the way until it got to the city where this research was planned to be done.

Think about it.

> Think about it

Did you consider that maybe the reason this proposal was written was because this mutation was the most likely way this kind of virus could mutate to infect humans?

I don’t understand why people keep throwing around all kind of unsubstantiated facts like if they suddenly made things clearer.

The facts are not that complicated. Could the pandemic be linked to an accidental leak from a gain-of-function study at the Wuhan lab? Most certainly. Do we have evidence that it did? No, we don’t. Could it come from somewhere else? Sure, it can. Was there a properly done inquiry with full collaboration from the lab and the host country? Absolutely not, China was extremely uncooperative and did all it could to control the narrative surrounding the pandemic.

From that, I conclude that it’s highly unlikely we will ever learn anything definitive. Therefor, discussing this is pretty much pointless.

Discussing this isn't pointless just because we don't have definitive proof. We need to determine what happened based on what we do know. 7+million people are dead. Gain of function is happening in labs all over the world. Humanity can do something here to reduce risk.

Despite rather intense searching the closest strain to C19 in the wild split ca 50 years ago. Please tell how do you introduce this famous mutation not into any of the commonly found covid viruses but create C19 differing from these.

Who in a right mind (just leaving for a moment how) would do that? As: create a separate strain of coronavirus just to introduce one specific mutation.

> We need to determine what happened based on what we do know.

Incorrect. We need to determine what happened based on all the evidence. We can't just make stuff up to fill in the blanks.

i.e. If what we know doesn't contain facts essential to the determination, we can't just "think about it" harder.

> Think about it.

That's the hard-hitting evidence that was missing.

And that's why this topic is so taboo and annoying. People turn coincidence into proof.

Clearly, you have an agenda that encourages people to stop looking at facts and instead to make things up they don't have answers for.

Think about it. (This means I'm right, right? This means if you don't agree with me, you aren't thinking, right?)

It's an appeal to Occam's razor. The most simple explanation of why a novel virus started infecting people in a city with a virology lab is that the written plan to make covid in that lab was executed.

I read this in a non-paywalled source a while ago, but this is all that easily came up in my search now. Maybe you think the title is sufficient to back up my claim, maybe you don't, IDK.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-05/covid-lik...

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