Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2?

Well, if you own the patent on the only approved drug for the condition, it would make financial sense.

NOTE: I am emphatically not asserting that this is the case with SARS-CoV-2. I am only responding to the parent comment's criticism of a possible financial motive for hypothetical biotech companies to purposefully engineer pathogens for profit.

More likely it's academic laboratories doing reckless gain of function research because it keeps the grant money rolling in, and in Wuhan Lab's case, they also half ass the safety precautions.

Of course the lab leak origin is probably accurate, it appeared right in the vicinity of the lab and is the exact thing they were studying. This shouldn't be controversial, it shouldn't have been politicized to the point where the truth matters far less than whose narrative it supports. We should have taken it as an accident, learned lessons, improved processes, and moved on. Instead we tore ourselves apart, and now we're back to playing nuclear Russian roulette, with maybe half the chambers loaded this time. Good job humans.

There are at least a couple of suspicious points in this study:

First and foremost the central claim is that 5 potential restriction binding sites versus 2 means that SARS-CoV2 is non natural. That does not necessarily follow. Just as SARS-CoV2 is unusually infectious and damaging to humans it could just happen to have an additional 3 restriction binding sites. So there is nothing inconsistent with natural selection of viral characteristics, only a comparison between wild and lab viruses.

Second, the evidence for the wet market origin is trivialized. That argument points out that genetic drift is well characterized and the presence of two closely related SARS-CoV2 variants cultured from the wet market is extremely strong evidence that is where the virus initially appeared. Both arguments make use of detailed genetic evidence, but the wet market argument based on genetic drift is quite robust while this alternative theory merely presents similarities while not ruling out natural selection.

Thirdly, this paper emphasizes the strong impact of the COVID pandemic and asserts that understanding the origins of the virus would necessarily aid in preventing future pandemics. This does not clearly follow. Especially if the virus had natural selection origins there is no clear and obvious way of systematically reducing risk. Simply living or traveling where host populations like bats live could be enough to generate exposures and it is not simple to clear people off of rural habitations.

These second and third criticisms are not direct against the evidence and logic presented, but show a dangerous level of sloppiness in the research that makes this paper appear more like slanted analysis from someone with an agenda than a critical thinking scientist genuinely interested in the truth and therefore needing to consider alternatives and potential falsification of the hypothesis.

Is there a wayback machine archive of that conversation?