Quote (NetflixAdaptationWidow @ Jan 11 2022 05:16pm)
If they were intentionally adding a furin cleavage site to coronavirus has it would be insanely apparent on first inspection of the genome. You can't just add things to a genome without leaving any traces. It would be incredibly obvious that it had been intentionally modified and no such evidence exists
Quote (NetflixAdaptationWidow @ Jan 11 2022 05:23pm)
You would use an enzyme that cleaves DNA at certain sequences. And you would be able to identify multiple and the exact site that was cleaved and recombined. These sequences are really well established. So they also would have had to make a whole set of entirely new restriction endonuclease that uses a novel sequence never published before instead of using a cheap well characterized ones off the shelf.
You're arguing like its march 2020. Nobody is talking about the virus being created by genetic editing, or if they are, not by public methods.
Gain of function research doesn't just encompass gene editing. Scientists have been recombining coronaviruses in laboratories by exposure to other viruses for a decade now, and it was the WIV that first managed to introduce chimeric spike proteins in coronaviruses in 2007 in an effort to identify how SARS gained the huACE2-binding molecules in the earlier epidemic. The viruses created by these experiments aren't genetically edited and don't show obvious signs of human tampering. Its like comparing the natural breeding of dogs to a mad scientist grafting the head of a shih tzu onto the body of a bull terrier. Just because a dog doesn't have stitches holding its head onto its shoulders doesn't mean it wasn't intentionally bred by humans.
And that's all besides the possibility that the Chinese actually have other methods of gene editing that aren't as clumsy and recognizable.
Quote (Sioux @ Jan 11 2022 05:38pm)
Furin cleavage has evolved independently multiple times in coronavirus lineages over the years. It's frustrating that science is imperfect and we might never find the viral ancestor between the WT strain this came from and the current covid showing this furin insertion but that doesn't point to a conspiracy.
Covid-19 has a 12 nucleotide insertion at S2 that enables its furin cleavage, without any other changes in S2 from its relatives- a series of mutations that don't have any natural selection guiding them individually, only as a whole. It can't even replicate in most mammal hosts without the full mutation. And there's not a single
related coronavirus sample in the wild that has ever presented this 12 nucleotide insertion at s2. The closest relatives don't a furin cleavage site. There are other furin cleavages in unrelated virus lines like hipposideros, and KHU9 nobecovirus. Viruses that have messy evolutions that have incomplete S2 mutations in related viruses, lose it in some lines, and otherwise generally show all the elements you'd expect from random chance mutations: Only a select few get that mutation, many have near-misses and less easily replicating lines die out, and its easily gained and lost and modified as the virus recombines, which is what Covid-19 has been doing since it became a pandemic.
The only evidence against recombination is the absence of a known donor virus having the exact arginine doublet CGGCGG codons, but that doesn't account for unknown viruses either in the wild or in laboratories and undisclosed to the public.
So either we get an incredibly specific and insanely improbable mutation between 2013 and 2022 without any evidence of all the normal signs of messy mutation, like 12x royal flushes all face-up on the first try, or we've got an unknown virus strain out there it recombined with. And it just so happened to be an outbreak next to a laboratory studying adding these furin cleavage sites to coronaviruses in gain of function research, a laboratory which has covered up any incriminating evidence and doesn't disclose everything publicly. But we're supposed to trust them