It shows that your "the Chinese government is totalitarian" response to my post is irrelevant.
No, although you might rightly suggest that it's irrelevant to the one specific article that you cited. This is however the very same government that actively forbids any discussion at all about Tienanmen square and which routinely forbids the free exchange of information whenever it's inconvenient for them, locks up people indiscriminately, and routinely removes and blocks access to all information that's inconvenient to them. I therefore have *little if any* confidence in anything that the Chinese government has to say about the origin of the virus.
"presumably" huh? On what basis, is it because they disagree with you?
No, because they aren't living in China or living near the epicenter of the virus and they don't necessarily know anything about the city in question, the facilities that it contains, or the biological work that's being done there. The authors of the paper (now banned in China) did understand the facilities in question, the work that's being done there, and the relevance to the virus in question. Did you bother to even read their paper? Yes or no? I would have to guess that the answer is "no" based on the other questions your asked below. That might explain our differences in belief by the way.
At any rate, their decision is based on the results of various biochemical, genetic and epidemiological tests that have been run on the virus. I thought you were a huge fan of "evidence from a lab" . The fact you don't understand the biology or the experiments doesn't make them any less evidential.
As far as I can tell from the letter and papers that I've read, the evidence amounts to "it could originate in the wild, therefore it probably did". That's not direct empirical evidence to support the claim that it *had* to originate in the wild, that's simply an obvious fact. It "could" evolve naturally just like virtually all biological entities could evolve naturally. That's still not evidence that it necessarily *did* evolve naturally.
Because their conclusion, like yours, was based on evidenceless speculation and incredulity.
Be a bit more specific. Which *specific* evidence did you find to be the most compelling evidence that it evolved naturally because you and I clearly didn't seem to read the "evidence" the same way.
Says who? What evidence do you have that Wuhan keeps bats, let alone infected ones? Let me guess...your complete lack of knowledge about how virus research is done has lead you to conclude they must.
I can only assume from that particular question that you never bothered to read the paper by the two Chinese scientists that made the original claim, nor any of links that I've posted to this thread. From the published paper now banned in China:
The bats carrying CoV ZC45 were originally found in Yunnan or Zhejiang province, both of which were more than 900 kilometers away from the seafood market. Bats were normally found to live in caves and trees. But the seafood market is in a densely-populated district of Wuhan, a metropolitan of ~15 million people. The probability was very low for the bats to fly to the market. According to municipal reports and the testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors, the bat was never a food source in the city, and no bat was traded in the market. There was possible natural recombination or intermediate host of the coronavirus, yet little proof has been reported. Was there any other possible pathway? We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus. Within ~280 meters from the market, there was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention (WHCDC) (Figure 1, from Baidu and Google maps). WHCDC hosted animals in laboratories for research purpose, one of which was specialized in pathogens collection and identification 46. In one of their studies, 155 bats including Rhinolophus affinis were captured in Hubei province, and other 450 bats were captured in Zhejiang province 4. The expert in collection was noted in the Author Contributions (JHT). Moreover, he was broadcasted for collecting viruses on nation-wide newspapers and websites in 2017 and 2019 7,8. He described that he was once by attacked by bats and the blood of a bat shot on his skin. He knew the extreme danger of the infection so he quarantined himself for 14 days 7. In another accident, he quarantined himself again because bats peed on him. He was once thrilled for capturing a bat carrying a live tick 8. Surgery was performed on the caged animals and the tissue samples were collected for DNA and RNA extraction and sequencing 4, 5. The tissue samples and contaminated trashes were source of pathogens. They were only ~280 meters from the seafood market. The WHCDC was also adjacent to the Union Hospital (Figure 1, bottom) where the first group of doctors were infected during this epidemic. It is plausible that the virus leaked around and some of them contaminated the initial patients in this epidemic, though solid proofs are needed in future study.
Had you actually read their paper, you'd already know the answer to your question.
What? What does that mean. What is the "right genome"? What evidence do yoiu have that they have it?
Virtually all the papers agree that the virus shares 80-99 percent of the genes with a specific virus from a specific bat. I only know from the paper that such bats were intentionally collected and studied at the laboratory in question.
Your knowledge of bat ecology is as deep as your general biology. Excellent.
FYI, I've never claimed to be a biological weapons expert, but I do understand the basics of genetic science, DNA, and the fact that genes can easily be manipulated. That's all anyone really *needs* to know to understand what is possible and what is not possible with respect to this issue.
I also know from the articles that I cited for you that at least two Chinese scientists that were involved in US genetic manipulation of the coronavirus were also working in the lab near the epicenter of this virus outbreak and their work in the US was directly related to producing a highly contagious
version of the virus via "gain-of-function research".
No, it isn't. You just made that up.
No, I did not. I cited the specific article and the the appropriate paragraph of my source and it even names the individuals.
Given that this outbreak was said to begin in late December
when most bat species in the region are hibernating and the Chinese horseshoe bat’s habitat covers
an enormous swath of the region containing scores of cities and hundreds of millions people to begin with, the fact that this Wuhan Strain of coronavirus, denoted as COVID-19 emerged in close proximity to the only BSL-4 virology lab in China, now notoriously located in Wuhan, which in turn was staffed with at least two Chinese scientists –
Zhengli Shi and Xing-Yi Ge – both virologists who had previously worked at an American lab which already bio-engineered an incredibly virulent strain of bat coronavirus – the accidental release of a bio-engineered virus meant for defensive immunotherapy research from Wuhan’s virology lab cannot be automatically discounted, especially when the Wuhan Strain’s unnatural genomic signals are considered.
Emphasis mine.
Pure fantasy and unevidenced speculation.
Again, I provided you with the relevant sources, and it's neither fantasy nor unevidenced speculation, it's *published fact*. If you won't read the references I cited, that's your fault, not mine.
So what? how does not knowing the original site of infection relate to the mountain of biological experiments that show the virus did not come from a lab?
The evidence you cited (or that I cited) doesn't definitely point to any particular point of origin, and the source listed by the Chinese government has been eliminated as the point of origin for the first three reported cases, as well as for "patient zero".
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30154-9/fulltext
Two complete virus genomes (HKU-SZ-002a and HKU-SZ-005b) were sequenced using Nanopore technology and showed a novel coronavirus that is most closely related to those of the bat SARS-like coronavirus bat-SL-CoVZXC21 (NCBI accession number MG772934) and bat-SL-CoVZC45 (NCBI accession number MG772933).
Now it's still not certain that the specific ACE2 binding changes that are found in this new virus were produced in a lab, or they simply occurred "naturally" (without a leak from a lab), but it's clear that the basic genome is closely related to specific type of bat viruses that are found *hundreds* of miles from the epicenter of the outbreak, and only about 280 yards from a lab that is known to have collected and experimented with such bats.
Again, as I have already explained in this thread, I am not 100 percent certain that the virus was accidentally leaked from a lab, but I certainly cannot rule out that possibility either given the specific circumstances, and the *very* close proximity of biological laboratories within mere yards of the epicenter of the outbreak.
