Read this, slowly and carefully. Nicholas Wade was the NYT science writer for 30 years. Wanna tell us where he's wrong?
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-...-box-at-wuhan/
Originally Posted by lustylad
Good article, thanks for posting it. This may be the best out there providing evidence for the theory that COVID 19 is the result of gain of function research and a lab leak in Wuhan. Nobody's tied it all together like Wade. I might be eating crow if I hadn't strategically used words like possibly and probably in past posts. Maybe I'll eat it anyway as more info comes out.
I read Andersen's paper last year providing evidence that the virus was not the result of genetic engineering, and also read a virologist's thoughts, maybe David Robertson's who's quoted in the article, that the furin cleavage site was likely the product of evolution.
I saw Quay and Muller on Sean Hannity the same day they published the WSJ editorial, and discounted what they said and wrote. Quay is promoter and a kind of medical and biotech jack of all trades, and Muller is a physicist. They're not virologists or epidemiologists. I thought that Quay was arguing on Hannity that there was a one in a billion probability that COVID 19 was not created in a lab. I may have been wrong and he was saying the CGG-CGG combination was a one in a billion thing. The thing though is that there are a lot of one in a billion events that occurred in course of evolution. I think Wade said that. And the virus replicates rapidly. So rapidly that some have speculated the RaTG13 virus mentioned in Wade's article or something like it evolved into COVID 19 as a result of mutations that occurred in a single individual. He could be one of two or three miners, likely infected by a bat virus, who died in 2011 or 2012 after cleaning guano from a mine in southern China where the RaTG13 virus and other bat coronaviruses were present.
Anyway people can poke holes in parts of the argument, but looking at the totality of Wade's argument, maybe it makes sense this was the result of gain of function research.
There are a lot of people though who know tons more about this than any of us, with the possible exception of Red Dog, who disagree. I still believe we'd be foolish to accept with close to 100% certainty that this was the result of a lab leak and gain of function research. If it's not, maybe in addition to regulating the virus labs much more closely, the world needs to be looking at limiting human exposure to bats and bat guano, and closing wet markets. There are two bat viruses out there, MERS and SARS, that have high fatality rates, and nobody appears to be arguing that these came from labs. SARS is contagious enough that it could have gotten out of hand and killed a lot of people.
Originally Posted by GastonGlock
