https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3
Australia, the European Union and Japan have also called for a robust investigation into SARS-CoV-2’s origins in China. The WHO has yet to reveal the next phase of its investigation. But China has asked that the probe examine other countries. Such reticence, and the fact that China has withheld information in the past, has fuelled suspicions of a ‘lab leak’. For instance,
Chinese government officials suppressed crucial public-health data at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and during the 2002–04 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic, according to high-level reports
1,
2.
Scientists don’t have enough evidence about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 to rule out the lab-leak hypothesis,
or to prove the alternative — that the virus has a natural origin.
One holds that it’s suspicious that, almost a year and a half into the pandemic, SARS-CoV-2’s closest relative still hasn’t been found in an animal. Another suggests it is no coincidence that COVID-19 was first detected in Wuhan, where a top lab studying coronaviruses, the WIV, is located.
Some lab-leak proponents
contend that the virus contains unusual features and genetic sequences signalling that it was engineered by humans. And some say that SARS-CoV-2 spreads among people so readily that it must have been created with that intention. Another argument suggests that SARS-CoV-2 might have derived from coronaviruses found in an unused mine where WIV researchers collected samples from bats between 2012 and 2015.
Another feature of SARS-CoV-2 that has drawn attention is a combination of nucleotides that underlie a segment of the furin cleavage site: CGG (these encode the amino acid arginine). A
Medium article that
speculates on a lab origin for SARS-CoV-2 quotes David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate and professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, as saying that viruses don’t usually have that particular code for arginine, but humans often do — a “smoking gun”, hinting that
researchers might have tampered with SARS-CoV-2’s genome.
https://www.theweek.in/news/sci-tec...ggest-that-covid-19-epidemic-is-man-made.html
After the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, the World Health Organization (WHO) investigation team analysed more than 9,000 hospital samples collected from late 2019—the period before the epidemic started—and found no evidence of pre-pandemic infections. The study of people having Covid-like symptoms in China’s Hubei and Shaanxi provinces proved there were no instances of community infection.
WHO team after testing more than 80,000 animals from 209 species in 2020, found no trace of SARS-CoV-2. So from where did the novel coronavirus suddenly come?
The testing conducted among wild, domesticated, and market animals hinted at the possibility of lab-leak theory.
A coronavirus adapts for the animals before it can spill over to humans and it takes time to optimize itself so that it can infect humans. But the process takes little time in a laboratory-made pathogen using humanised mice.
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This is exactly what I (and some of my colleagues) have been saying from the beginning.
This virus is just too perfect - spread too easily. You have it for a week, and can be asymptomatic - spreading it around before you even know you have it.
It's not just "a flu" - it causes hypercoagulability/blood clots, liver dysfunction, lymphopenia, among other things. No "flu" does that.
The minute we saw Chinese people locked in their homes and people in hazmat suits spraying the streets (you can google those images) - we should've known the catastrophe this was going to cause - and shut down our borders
immediately.
Our government leaders screwed up and created this mess that we are in. Chinese were complicit and withheld vital information, and still do to this day.