Jingles wrote: Sat May 31, 2025 6:04 am
mister_coffee wrote: Wed May 28, 2025 8:21 pm
If someone thinks covid was "engineered" there is very little point to educating them.
If developing gain of function isn't a form of engineering what is?
Because whatever research was done at WIV had nothing to do with COVID-19.
We know that closely related viruses were circulating in rural areas near Wuhan (and also as far away as Laos). The closest relatives found in Yunnan province would be consistent with a spillover event from animals to humans sometime in October or November of 2019.
"Genetic engineering" these days usually involves copying and pasting long chunks genetic material (in this case RNA) from other viruses into a new organism. You aren't tweaking one or two sequences here and there. We don't generally have the tools to do that and we certainly can't predict what would happen when we make tiny changes.
It is hard to see how you'd have a modified virus that was so obviously closely related to ones found in nature near where the research was being conducted. You also need to keep in mind that COVID-19 is probably one of the most intensely studied viral genomes, ever. So if there was a large hunk of RNA from a flu virus in there someone would have noticed.
And the "lab leak" theory doesn't at all account for why all of the identified early cases were either from the wet market or very close to it.
If you are ignorant and want to believe a foolish conspiracy theory that's on you. In this case I suppose you could claim that WIV "seeded" their dangerous virus in the surrounding countryside (and apparently as far away as Laos). Then they deliberately released it in the wet market and suppressed evidence of early disease spread in other parts of Wuhan that might be connected to WIV.
Then you'd have to blackmail or bully thousands of researchers all over the world and get them to sign on to the spillover theory. Maybe you could do that but I doubt you could do it without leaving messy and obvious footprints.