I always regret reading WSJ Opinion these days and this is no different.

in covid •  last year 

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Sigh. This is a hack piece by Ridley and Chan. They selectively quote the "proximal origin" paper to act like it was ruling out a lab leak. What the paper ruled out was the intentional bioweapon scenario. The paper itself included a lab leak of a cultured virus as a possible scenario and that is a scenario that some US government agencies consider possible as well.

First some context is helpful here. Ridley and Chan have been aggressively attacking so-called "gain of function" research and have used the coronavirus origins debate often to shoehorn that topic into the discussion. In light of that they have leaned on the coronavirus emerging from gain of function research even though we do not have any evidence for that theory.

The "proximal origin" letter did not rule out a lab leak. It however did consider that laboratory manipulation was improbable. In the letter they argue this based on multiple lines of reasoning. First, the coronavirus has a receptor binding domain configuration for ACE2 that computational analyses predict is not ideal and which is different from optimal sequences in prior SARS research. Second, the coronavirus does not use a previously researched betacoronavirus backbone. These are steps that if researchers were working on the virus would likely take as they would make the process easier and with a higher chance of success.

Likewise as explained in the letter, lab passaging was a possible scenario, but considered less likely. A progenitor virus and passaging were never described in previous work. Features of the virus also suggest interaction with an immune system suggesting an animal intermediate. And contextually, related coronaviruses have similar RBDs that were acquired naturally.

If anything since the letter was published in 2020, this reasoning has only been strengthened. We have even more examples of wild coronaviruses with features that SARS-COV-2 has that were thought to be "unusual". We have new research showing how many of the "unusual" features of the virus like the furin cleavage site can be acquired naturally.

The known viruses that the WIV lab had were also not progenitor viruses of SARS-COV-2. And experiments show that passaging is likely to cause SARS-COV-2 to lose its furin cleavage site, not gain it.

None of this reasoning is enough to rule out a lab leak of course. And the letter explicitly does not do that. That's was so absurd about all this. The paper explicitly says the lab leak is possible and further evidence could change their conclusions. But three and a half years on we aren't any closer on that front.

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