The US select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic, under Biden, concluded that the virus most likely originated from the Wuhan lab
It's a panel of politicians with an obvious political bias, and while some are MDs, none of have the technical background to have any type of informed opinion on virology or molecular biology related issues.
The virus is not closely related to any known wild viruses that have or were being studied by humans. The closest wild virus that has been identified branched off from whatever jumped to humans 40 years earlier[1]. The technology and knowledge to create a working virus like SARS-CoV-2 from known distantly related viruses does not exist- it simply could not be done accidentally or intentionally.
Evidence strongly supports the theory that a wild bat virus jumped through other non-bat species, and then was transmitted to Humans in the Huanan market sometime in November 2019[2].
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35137080/ [2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337
Fair point, you are right, it's irrelevant, I guess I was just trying to preemptively dispel an association to trump. The committee is bi-partisan, but it did have a republican majority at the time the report was released.
The senate report is of course not the only government report on covid origins. Most recently the CIA has commented that the virus is "more likely" to have leaked from a lab.[0]
> The virus is not closely related to any known wild viruses that have or were being studied by humans.
The closest known virus is RaTG13, collected by WIV in 2013[1]. WIV took down it's online database of bat viruses on 12 September 2019[4]. Potentially to conceal it's custody of a closer related virus.
> The technology and knowledge to create a working virus like SARS-CoV-2 from known distantly related viruses does not exist- it simply could not be done accidentally or intentionally.
Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance, applied for funding[2] to insert human proteolytic cleavage sites into SARS-like coronaviruses[3].
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd9qjjj4zy5o
[1]: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declass...
[2]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop...
[3]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363729325_DRASTIC_-...
[4]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349073738_An_invest...
I’m still not happy with the letter that Fauci and Daszak co-signed early on in the pandemic, nor with Fauci’s offices attempts to obstruct the foia process.
It’s disappointing that so little physical evidence was collected early in the pandemic, i don’t think we will ever have conclusive proof of the origin of the virus.
"We find RmYN02 shares a common ancestor with SARS-CoV-2 about 40 years ago and RaTG13—about 50 years ago"
RmYN02 is only 93.3% identical to SARS-CoV-2 - a huge number of differences that could only occur from half a century of divergence in a wild population.
There is also another virus more closely related to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13, but still too distant to have been involved with the pandemic, BANAL-52.