The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

>Unless they started commanding to destroy samples, and sharing sequences of captured bats after the pandemic started.

The pandemic started months after first escape, and the WIV shares research findings internationally. By the time the pandemic was detected, it was way too late to destroy samples, months already went by. And that's assuming the escape happened as soon as the samples reached the WIV, which is very generous.

>All experts agree that SARS-COV-2 is extremely adapted to human infection. Like it appeared out of nowhere, not the gradual result of a natural spill-over. To pose: "It could have been even more infectious" as an argument against gain-of-function is not very strong. And if we agree that China did not deliberately release a finished product, it would be weird to see optimal adaptivity.

It is now, but it wasn't at first zoonosis. It took months for the virus to ramp up to an epidemic, whereas clearly the current iteration of the virus can do so much faster especially in dirty environments. Besides, the virus is still, one year in, nowhere near maximum adaptivity, with significantly more infectious variants still appearing. It's not that it could have been more infectious, is that it now is significantly more infections. As far as "deliberately releasing a finished product", there is no reason for it to matter - the last iteration of a given strain will be subject to experimentation for a long time.

Moreso, SARS-CoV-2 clearly has an insanely high potential for zoonosis, as we've seen it infect an incredibly large cross section of animals. This is not what you would expect from a virus that previously was only ever in one species and that was engineered to be specifically adapted to humans only.

>Gain-of-function does not create obvious marker. It is known possible to increase GoF of coronavirus using techniques that produce no markers at all. It is also tying it too closely to engineered bioweapons (vanilla SARS-COV is a bioweapon itself, even if collected from civet cats by terrorists), because the lab leak could also have been from a collected sample and accidental escape. There is no genetic engineering there at all.

You're stretching the definition of bioweapon way beyond any reasonable definition. Both SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 make really poor bioweapons, many naturally occuring viruses are far superior. If the lab leak was from a collected sample that accidentally escaped, you would again expect it to be of known origin - China could point to a specific source and say "Hey, we found it, it comes from here!", and likely collaborators would know about it. Additonally, if it came from GoF, you would expect it to find and expend single-base-pair mutations with a high impact on pathogenicity already, yet we still had many crop up.

Likely, no one would notice anything unusual at all for months.

The WIV simply doesn't hide samples for long enough for this to be a likely scenario.

By the way, it's estimated there's multiple hundred infections by novel coronavirus pathogens in China every year. So why would the much lower number of viral escapes be considered beyond it when we have the additional constrait of the sample not having been shared with anyone, whereas normally this is done?

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Did they immediately publish the details of every gain-of-function coronavirus experiment they ever did, or does it sit in a notebook or a private database for some period of time? A lag time of 4-6 weeks seems reasonable here, not 6 months. There still seems to be room for a natural origin, but to say a lab escape is completely impossible because one of maybe a dozen people (or less) would have been both willing and able to be a whistleblower doesn't seem right.

I'm not an expert in bioscience, I simply spent a while studying it.

There is biosecurity and biowarfare literature on pretty much every single virus you can imagine - generally it's about how it might be modified to be used as a bioweapon. And really, coronaviruses are quite good platforms for making debilitating airborne weapons.

SARS-CoV itself as a bioweapon is simply not infectious enough, it was sucessfully contained dozens of times. It's also not that lethal to military-age men, for 20-29 year olds CFR is around 1% and for 30-39 year olds it's around 3% (taking data from infections in the PRC and in HK as there is the least low-detection bias). But it definitely has a lot of potential if you engineer it. For reference, the average age of a soldier in WW2 was 26.

SARS-CoV-2 is complete trash as a bioweapon, an entire carrier was infected and no one died. Debilitation was minimal. It's infectious enough, but it's very bad at actually killing military aged people.

But certainly, they could be engineered to be suitable. That's not the claim I was replying to - the claim I was replying to was that in it's natural form it was a bioweapon.

>The rest of your posts seems to gather support for other hypothesis, not as much attacking the lab leak theory as highly unlikely.

Likelihoods are relative. Everyone agrees that likelihood for a lab escape is fairly low - those are relatively rare. The argument is that the normal process for viruses to reach humans - which was the case for literally every single other pandemic ever - is unlikely thus making lab escape more likely relatively.

I did, however, add a few points that go against the likelihood of an undetected lab escape - which is that the existence of the sample would almost certaintly be known.