Thursday, October 14, 2021

The Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier

 https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/lab-leak-pandemic-origins-even-messier/620209/

For anyone looking for the great, final vindication of the lab-leak hypothesis, this document will leave you wanting. Does the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic have an unnatural origin? The answer hasn’t changed: probably not. But we have learned something quite disturbing in the past few days, simply from how and when this information came to light.

 Stephen Goldstein, a postdoctoral researcher in evolutionary virology at the University of Utah and one of the co-authors of the pandemic-origins critical review, considers it “unlikely” that any such work would have gone forward in Wuhan. It would be unusual—even unethical—for a lab in China to pursue experiments that were originally proposed by one of its collaborators in the United States, he told us. Another co-author of the critical review, the Johns Hopkins University microbiology postdoc Alex Crits-Christoph, interprets the proposal as stating that any novel cleavage sites would be inserted into a SARS-CoV-1-like coronavirus. Unless the Wuhan lab had already isolated a SARS-CoV-2-like virus that could carry this insertion—which Crits-Christoph doubts, given that it is not mentioned in the proposal—researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology would not have had enough time between early 2018 and the fall of 2019 to construct (and then mistakenly release) the virus at the root of the pandemic.

2 comments:

  1. See the footnote of the article:

    This article previously implied that, according to the consensus view, the pandemic definitely has a natural origin. It's more accurate to say that, according to this view, a natural origin is the likeliest one. The article also previously misstated Alex Crits-Christoph as saying that the proposal did not specify the viruses into which any novel cleavage sites would be inserted.

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  2. More gaslighting.
    >It would be unusual—even unethical—for a lab in China to pursue experiments that were originally proposed by one of its collaborators in the United States
    A corrupt fascist regime that views Nazi Germany as a "how to guide" for government would be put off because of ethics? Really?

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