SARS2 lab origin over 97% likely

"Writing in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Steven Quay and Richard Muller pointed to two key pieces of evidence to support the claim, which has increasingly gained steam after long being derided as little more than speculation.

The first relates to the nature of gain-of-function research, in which microbiologists tweak a virus’ genome to alter its properties, such as making it more transmissible or more lethal.

Of the 36 possible genome pairings that can produce two arginine amino acids in a row — which results in boosting a virus’ lethality — the one most commonly used in gain-of-function research is CGG-CGG, or double CGG, wrote Quay and Muller.

“The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG,” wrote Quay, the founder of Atossa Therapeutics, and Muller, a former top scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who now teaches physics at the University of California’s Berkeley campus.

“That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it,” they wrote. “An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.”

The pair noted that the double CGG sequence has never been found naturally among the entire group of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, which causes COVID-19.

But, in what Quay and Muller called a “damning fact,” it was found in CoV-2."

https://nypost.com/2021/06/06/damning-science-shows-covid-19-likely-engineered-in-lab/

https://nypost.com/2021/08/12/covid-19-lab-leak-theory-probable-hypothesis-who-scientist/

https://nypost.com/2021/10/10/the-lab-leak-theory-is-now-almost-certainly-proved-and-other-commentary/

@Metal-Brain

From the tabloid which ran the headline “Headless body in topless bar.”

Let us know when you have a more credible source.

@metal-brain said
"Writing in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Steven Quay and Richard Muller pointed to two key pieces of evidence to support the claim, which has increasingly gained steam after long being derided as little more than speculation.

The first relates to the nature of gain-of-function research, in which microbiologists tweak a virus’ genome to alter its pr ...[text shortened]... tps://nypost.com/2021/10/10/the-lab-leak-theory-is-now-almost-certainly-proved-and-other-commentary/

🚨🚧Moronity of Gop alert!🚧🚨

@moonbus said
@Metal-Brain

From the tabloid which ran the headline “Headless body in topless bar.”

Let us know when you have a more credible source.

The NY post is not a credible source?
Is the Wall Street Journal a credible source?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-science-suggests-a-wuhan-lab-leak-11622995184?mod=djemalertNEWS

I suppose nothing short of god telling you himself is a credible source. Right?

@moonbus said
@Metal-Brain

From the tabloid which ran the headline “Headless body in topless bar.”

Let us know when you have a more credible source.

That's a pretty ridiculous criticism.

The NY Post runs funny headlines every day, and that was one of their best. The headline writers aren't the same people who write the articles.

The reasons for suspicion of the lab leak theory for SARS-CoV-2 are legion and becoming overwhelming. All the attacking the messengers in the world isn't going to change that.

@sh76 said
That's a pretty ridiculous criticism.

The NY Post runs funny headlines every day, and that was one of their best. The headline writers aren't the same people who write the articles.

The reasons for suspicion of the lab leak theory for SARS-CoV-2 are legion and becoming overwhelming. All the attacking the messengers in the world isn't going to change that.

A balanced piece from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: https://thebulletin.org/2021/10/the-origin-of-covid-19-evidence-piles-up-but-the-jurys-still-out/

The evidence in favor of a natural origin still seems far more convincing:

"On the one hand, the scientists advocating a natural origin for the pandemic can point to the tens of thousands of wild animals that were being sold in Wuhan, including at the Huanan seafood market where many of the initial cases of COVID-19 were reported. A study published over the summer documented that vendors there were illegally selling a variety of wildlife, including mammals such as raccoon dogs, which can carry and transmit the COVID-19 virus. Raccoon dogs are a potential intermediate host for the virus that caused an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in the early 2000s, an event that many see as having been a preview of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study found that animals were frequently “sold alive, caged, stacked and in poor condition.”

During a recent panel discussion hosted by Science magazine, Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, said that those who believe the pandemic may have begun with a lab accident have to grapple with a seeming contradiction: “You face this fundamental issue of, if it started with research, why does it look like it actually started at one of these markets selling these animals that were implicated in the first SARS outbreak”?

In Laos, meanwhile, researchers identified a virus that is 96.8 percent identical to SARS-CoV-2; it is one of three viruses found in caves there that are each more than 95 percent identical to the COVID-19 virus. Their study was released as a preprint last month, meaning it has yet to be peer-reviewed. The previous record was a virus documented by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that is 96.2 percent identical. The Lao viruses are nearly exactly the same as SARS-CoV-2 in one particularly important area of their structure, the receptor binding domain that attaches to human cells. They don’t, however, contain “the so-called furin cleavage site on the spike protein that further aids the entry of SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses into human cells,” a recent article in Nature notes.

The Lao viruses are still not genetically close enough to SARS-CoV-2 to have spawned COVID-19. The so-called progenitor virus should be 99.9 percent the same as the pandemic virus, Linfa Wang, the director of the emerging infectious diseases program at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore told the Science panel. However, “[t]he core, functional part of SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin,” Wang told Science for a piece on the Laos find. “It’s proven.”

@metal-brain said
"Writing in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Steven Quay and Richard Muller pointed to two key pieces of evidence to support the claim, which has increasingly gained steam after long being derided as little more than speculation.

The first relates to the nature of gain-of-function research, in which microbiologists tweak a virus’ genome to alter its pr ...[text shortened]... tps://nypost.com/2021/10/10/the-lab-leak-theory-is-now-almost-certainly-proved-and-other-commentary/

Here's a piece blasting the WSJ article the NY Post relied on: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-10-08/wall-street-journal-lab-leak-propaganda

"Muller and Quay sliced and diced research, some of which has been sitting around on the shelf for more than a year, and reinterpreted to fit their own predilections. This isn’t their first such effort. Back in June, also in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, they tried to validate the lab-leak theory by examining the virus’ genetic fingerprint. They pointed to genetic sequences that they suggested were highly unlikely to be found naturally. As it happens, those sequences do occur naturally, and that particular bit of evidence for the lab-leak theory has long since been debunked."

@metal-brain said
"Writing in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Steven Quay and Richard Muller pointed to two key pieces of evidence to support the claim, which has increasingly gained steam after long being derided as little more than speculation.

The first relates to the nature of gain-of-function research, in which microbiologists tweak a virus’ genome to alter its pr ...[text shortened]... tps://nypost.com/2021/10/10/the-lab-leak-theory-is-now-almost-certainly-proved-and-other-commentary/

You understand DNA about as well as you understand Relativity, which is not at all.

@sh76 said
That's a pretty ridiculous criticism.

The NY Post runs funny headlines every day, and that was one of their best. The headline writers aren't the same people who write the articles.

The reasons for suspicion of the lab leak theory for SARS-CoV-2 are legion and becoming overwhelming. All the attacking the messengers in the world isn't going to change that.

The theory is not legion.
Various people keep citing a common source; a source which is known to be flawed.

The vast majority of experts say it is open, but still lean heavily towards natural causes.

A few US agencies have doubts. That’s about the sum of it. And considering US presidents, wokeness, and the posters on this forum, I think we can safely agree that US intelligence is anything to base reasoning on.

@shavixmir
I heard a discussion by viral experts about that lab theory, the gist of what they said was the chances of getting the tip molecule just right to penetrate human cells was so overwhelmingly difficult to do in a lab, there are just too many ways those molecules can fold and such.

They said the chances of coming up with the penetrator tip was like quintillions to one because of the vast number of possible combinations of those molecules.

Of course that never stopped the rightwingnuts from pushing their BS.

@no1marauder said
A balanced piece from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: https://thebulletin.org/2021/10/the-origin-of-covid-19-evidence-piles-up-but-the-jurys-still-out/

The evidence in favor of a natural origin still seems far more convincing:

"On the one hand, the scientists advocating a natural origin for the pandemic can point to the tens of thousands of wild animals that were ...[text shortened]... SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin,[/b]” Wang told Science for a piece on the Laos find. “It’s proven.”

Is that why Fauci tried to cover it up?

https://nypost.com/2021/06/04/chinese-virologist-says-fauci-emails-verify-her-lab-leak-claims/

https://nypost.com/2021/06/02/fauci-was-warned-that-covid-may-have-been-engineered-emails/

@no1marauder said
Here's a piece blasting the WSJ article the NY Post relied on: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-10-08/wall-street-journal-lab-leak-propaganda

"Muller and Quay sliced and diced research, some of which has been sitting around on the shelf for more than a year, and reinterpreted to fit their own predilections. This isn’t their first such effort. Back in June, a ...[text shortened]... ally, and that particular bit of evidence for the lab-leak theory has long since been debunked.[/b]"

I noticed this on wikipedia.

"In 2006, Hiltzik was suspended without pay from the LA Times for sockpuppeting on his blog "The Golden State". Hiltzik admitted to posting under false names on multiple sites, using the pseudonym "Mikekoshi" to criticize commentators Hugh Hewitt and Patrick Frey.[10][11] In December 2009, the LA Times announced that Hiltzik would be returning to the paper as a business columnist."

Hiltzik's sources of information are often the LA Times. When someone writes an opinion piece on the LA Times he should have sources that are not from that very same source. Hiltzik needs to do better than that, especially since he is a fake name kind of guy. He wouldn't need to hide if he did honest journalism.

@metal-brain said
The NY post is not a credible source?
Is the Wall Street Journal a credible source?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-science-suggests-a-wuhan-lab-leak-11622995184?mod=djemalertNEWS

I suppose nothing short of god telling you himself is a credible source. Right?

I am open to the possibility of lab leak or lab origin (the former far more likely than the latter) but I didn't read anything convincing in the WSJ article. I have done in vitro molecular cloning in the lab but their logic doesn't make sense. In fact, its super easy to make any combination of these sequences and there's no reason a particular combination seems more man-made than any other. They are using a classic logical fallacy in claiming that other sequences are more likely to occur naturally than the one that did. There's lots of weird stuff in viral genomes. This is like arguing that it is more likely that the daily lottery numbers that did show up were actually other numbers.

In the case of the gain-of-function supercharge, other sequences could have been spliced into this same site. Instead of a CGG-CGG (known as double CGG) that tells the protein factory to make two arginine amino acids in a row, you’ll obtain equal lethality by splicing any one of 35 of the other two-word combinations for double arginine. If the insertion takes place naturally, say through recombination, then one of those 35 other sequences is far more likely to appear; CGG is rarely used in the class of coronaviruses that can recombine with CoV-2.

@wildgrass said
I am open to the possibility of lab leak or lab origin (the former far more likely than the latter) but I didn't read anything convincing in the WSJ article. I have done in vitro molecular cloning in the lab but their logic doesn't make sense. In fact, its super easy to make any combination of these sequences and there's no reason a particular combination seems more man-mad ...[text shortened]... y to appear; CGG is rarely used in the class of coronaviruses that can recombine with CoV-2.[/quote]

"In fact, its super easy to make any combination of these sequences and there's no reason a particular combination seems more man-made than any other."

What is your source of information?

@metal-brain said
"In fact, its super easy to make any combination of these sequences and there's no reason a particular combination seems more man-made than any other."

What is your source of information?

I've done it. It's a standard technique in molecular biology.

You can order them from Sigma in any combination you wish. No reason it has to be any specific lotto number.

https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/product/sigma/OLIGO