From the Nature medicine paper:<p>> 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.<p>And from "The Scientist":<p>> 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.<p>And an obligatory link to SA's recent post on the phrase "no evidence": <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag" rel="nofollow">https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...</a>
Sigh. As I've said in other posts, if any experiment of this sort were the source of sars-cov-2, it would be -blindingly- obvious. The synthetic metagenomic experiments looking into spike, etc. leave completely obvious traces, number one being the use of known, characterized viral vectors. Using some random isolates as experimental vectors is not only methodologically pointless and counterproductive, it's vastly more difficult to do.
We'll find out in 90+ years what really happened when the documents get unclassified.<p>This line of thinking wasn't yet authorised by the US government so it must be fake news until approved.
This is a very polarizing topic. I'd love to know enough about this field to understand what is going on.<p>I just hope that if this is man made we have learned something to prevent this happening again.<p>How hard would it be for someone to do this on purpose?
The link goes to the Wayback Machine because the original publication tried to memory-hole it by putting it behind a paywall and hiding the first paragraph:<p>> Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week (November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of to one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine.
Check out “Viral” by Chan and Ridley - I highly recommend this book.<p>Edit: Yes, the initial pandemic virus most likely leaked from WIV lab in Wuhan. Whether it was engineered and whether it was intentional are different questions.
Why wouldn't it be? We have all the technology. Why make a dirty bomb, when you can make something invisible and release it at a busy airport, and it gets everywhere in a month and only affects the unvaccinated. It could be very profitable. Why politicians rush to convince us that this is not lab-made?! If not the original SARS-CoV-2, then Omicron for sure was lab-made.