There are at least two more clues that became public knowledge since this article was written: the EcoHealth grant application obtained by The Intercept, which included proposals to modify spike proteins and cleavage sites in coronaviruses; and similar news that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was studying bat coronaviruses from Laos, home of the closest known natural relatives to SARS-CoV-2.
Add that the WIV took a crucial viral database offline in September 2019, and it’s easy to suppose that they had some lab accident that month, involving Laotian bat virus, and that they took the database offline to hide the evidence.
Evidently there is some possibility that the virus was modified in spike protein or cleavage sites or both, but I cannot judge the evidence. E.g. maybe the furin cleavage site was CRISPRed into place, or maybe it was produced by a natural recombination.
One may also ask whether WIV was modifying its viruses only because EcoHealth suggested it, or whether that would have been taking place anyway. Also, the biodefense/biowarfare departments of the Chinese and American militaries would, I think, be silent partners in all such collaborations. Both China and America would want to know what these viruses can do, and America would want to know what experiments China may be conducting.
Or, you know, maybe someone in central China was importing frozen food from Laos that happened to contain infected tissues from an unknown intermediate species, and the virus was just on the threshold of mutating to a human-adapted form but hadn’t done so in Laos, and it’s just a big coincidence that this threshold was finally crossed in the vicinity of the world’s main collection of bat viruses… I’m sure more could be done to steelman the theory of a natural origin, but at this point, it does look more like a product of human action.
There are at least two more clues that became public knowledge since this article was written: the EcoHealth grant application obtained by The Intercept, which included proposals to modify spike proteins and cleavage sites in coronaviruses; and similar news that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was studying bat coronaviruses from Laos, home of the closest known natural relatives to SARS-CoV-2.
Add that the WIV took a crucial viral database offline in September 2019, and it’s easy to suppose that they had some lab accident that month, involving Laotian bat virus, and that they took the database offline to hide the evidence.
Evidently there is some possibility that the virus was modified in spike protein or cleavage sites or both, but I cannot judge the evidence. E.g. maybe the furin cleavage site was CRISPRed into place, or maybe it was produced by a natural recombination.
One may also ask whether WIV was modifying its viruses only because EcoHealth suggested it, or whether that would have been taking place anyway. Also, the biodefense/biowarfare departments of the Chinese and American militaries would, I think, be silent partners in all such collaborations. Both China and America would want to know what these viruses can do, and America would want to know what experiments China may be conducting.
Or, you know, maybe someone in central China was importing frozen food from Laos that happened to contain infected tissues from an unknown intermediate species, and the virus was just on the threshold of mutating to a human-adapted form but hadn’t done so in Laos, and it’s just a big coincidence that this threshold was finally crossed in the vicinity of the world’s main collection of bat viruses… I’m sure more could be done to steelman the theory of a natural origin, but at this point, it does look more like a product of human action.