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Comment by yreg | Hacker News Reader

> Luc Montagnier co-discovered HIV in 1983 […]

> During the COVID-19 pandemic, Montagnier promoted the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately created and escaped from a laboratory

My understanding is that quite some researchers think that the lab leak hypothesis is possible, but unprovable at this point. I know Wikipedia treats it as some fringe hoax, but to me it seems almost religious. In the sense that the idea has been marked as a conspiracy theory at the very beginning and nothing can change that stance anymore. When a scientist supports it, it discredits the scientist instead of supporting the theory.

(For transparency, my personal opinion on covid origin is that I find it difficult to believe either side of the debate when it claims it is 100% sure.)

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Lab leak is one thing, "deliberately created and escaped" is a different story.

"deliberately (created and escaped)" is very implausible yes. "(deliberately created) and escaped" not so much though.

Agreed, and I think conflating these two is one of the reasons for the resistance towards the lab leak theory that gp mentioned.

It depends on personal interpretations of "deliberately created". To wit, virology labs will deliberately breed up more virulent strains of viruses in order to study their effects.

I don't know what's Montagnier's position beyond that paragraph on Wikipedia, but a virus undergoing gain of function research could be I suppose described as "deliberately created" (obviously not from scratch and not deliberately released).

The most likely theory of artificial origin is that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately created as a chimera of two natural sarbecoviruses with a human-designed furin cleavage site between them. The WIV proposed to undertake this research in collaboration with Ralph Baric in the DEFUSE proposal, as a step towards his goal of a pan-coronavirus vaccine. DARPA declined to fund the proposal, in part due to safety concerns. Zhengli Shi had the technical knowledge to perform the work alone at the WIV, although no specific evidence has yet emerged that she did so.

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

That said, Montagnier appears to have speculated that SARS-CoV-2 contains genetic information from HIV. That seems almost surely false, since the sequences he cited occur frequently in many organisms.

https://apnews.com/article/conspiracy-theories-iran-only-on-...

Came here to note this as well. I think the lab leak theory is becoming more acceptable.

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