Nicholas Wade

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28649120

People have asserted in this thread that it would take 30-40 years for the closest known natural covid relative to aquire the necessary 1000 mutations and turn into covid. And yet here we are, almost 2 years since the pandemic started, with no identified natural reservoir for covid.

Where is the covid source?

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Consider https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00991-0.pdf, a pro natural origins review of the literature. They tie themselves into knots to explain that the infamous furin cleavage site, while absent in the closest covid relative, could have naturally occurred, even if they admit they have zero actual evidence for that.

> Although the furin cleavage site is absent from the closest
known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 (Andersen et al., 2020), this is
unsurprising because the lineage leading to this virus is poorly
sampled and the closest bat viruses have divergent spike proteins due to recombination (Boni et al., 2020; Lytras et al.,
2021; Zhou et al., 2021). Furin cleavage sites are commonplace
in other coronavirus spike proteins, including some feline alphacoronaviruses, MERS-CoV, most but not all strains of mouse
hepatitis virus, as well as in endemic human betacoronaviruses
such as HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-HKU1 (Gombold et al., 1993; de Haan et al., 2008; Kirchdoerfer et al., 2016). A near identical
nucleotide sequence is found in the spike gene of the bat coronavirus HKU9-1 (Gallaher, 2020), and both SARS-CoV-2…

Here's a 2015 paper on successful gain of function work done at the University of North Carolina under the leadership of Ralph Baric. The work involved characterizing a synthetically constructed chimeric virus comprising a SARS-CoV backbone and a bat SARS virus spike.

It received special permission to continue despite a prohibition on gain-of-function research (Refer to the section: Biosafety and Security).[0]

Quoting:

Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.

And from the footnote describing author contributions:

[SHI Zhengli] provided SHC014 spike sequences and plasmids

As everyone knows by now, Shi is the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[1]

It's pretty clear that Shi subsequently continued that gain-of-function work at Wuhan.

My question is, what is the correlation between the spike sequence Shi supplied
for the 2015 paper and that of the early variants of SARS-CoV-2?

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Zhengli

There is also a 2013 paper, written by Peter Dazak and Shi Zhengli, "Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2…

As I recall this article by Nicholas Wade goes into why the Furin cleavage site is a strong signal of potential active engineering in the GoF vein.

https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038

As addition of a Furin cleavage site is an old hat acknowledged technique for increasing human infectivity of a virus. The issue with a zoonotic origin though, is that the odds of a mutation is incredibly small, and a recombination at that site would require the sequence to exist in another coronavirus, which has not
been discovered to date.

It is also known WIV researchers had recieved instruction from another virologist on "no-see-um" editing techniques that would not leave traces of the mechanism used to splice in an edit.

So not proof, but the network of coincidence is as hard to ignore as a spinal tap amp duct taped to your head, cranked to 11, playing the 1812 Overture.

This has been written about many times, in 2020, very convincingly in 2021 by Nicholas Wade (https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038) and now.

It will always be dismissed by those who have a political interest in seeing things differently.

Authortiarianism and coordinated censorship between govs, big health and big tech made it so that anything countering the mandated narratives was heavily supressed and punished.

That's why the online world and the real one varied, no matter how many names and attacks the "mono narrative" mob used against those of us who dissented.

There will be no acknowledgement of the atrocities and human right abuses in the name of covid. No admission of guilt or bad faith. Just pretende that "we were wrong for the right reasons" and anyone who was right, if it's even admitted, "did so for the wrong reasons"

Some techniques of manipulating the virus would leave "fingerprints". Others would not. My understanding is that the sweeping assertions that COVID-19 would show clear signs of being manipulated have been largely debunked. Many ultimately traced back to a letter written by a group of virologists led by Kristian Andersen and published in Nature, but all that letter did was assert that some techniques (not all!) were unlikely (but even then, not impossible).

I'm unaware of any reputable experts who are willing to assert that manipulation via, eg, serial passaging, can be ruled out. The closest you'll get is assertions that a natural zoonotic origin is, in their estimation, more likely.

See, eg, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html and https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038.

It's not in Nicolas Wade's article, which I now see has been unfairly maligned along with David Baltimore who's been selectively quoted to leave out the technical detail of what made the latter say the SARS-CoV-2 is a smoking gun, see the 4) A Question of Codons:
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038 If correct, that's getting strongly into bioengineering evidence.

You are of course more likely correct about the alignment issue, I can't find my source now, and the above is probably much stronger evidence. For the alignment you'd have to be a virologist, probably one specializing in coronaviruses, to be able to really judge this. Of course a whole bunch of biologists have shifted their focus to coronaviruses in the last year and a half.