Thread by @TheSeeker268

This is an excellent dissection of the faulty reasoning in the 'Proximal Origin' paper, and they lay out the reasons why lab spillover of Covid-19 remains a possibility and should not be excluded.

Too many points to note, so just read the whole thing!
zmescience.com/other/pieces/h…

Some choice quotes: "The authors only prove the receptor-binding domain of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is not ideal for binding to human ACE2 receptors. This doesn’t tell us anything about whether the virus was actually manipulated, or for which purpose."

They don't "take into consideration more recent literature — new techniques to engineer coronaviruses have emerged after 2014 – or even the possibility that unpublished techniques could have been used to engineer SARS-CoV-2."
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

"A proximal origin of the virus does not exclude that humans involuntarily or unwittingly releasing the virus initiated the pandemic..Therefore, we cannot exclude that the first zoonotic transmission occurred because of investigative research conducted on coronaviruses."

"they calculated a temporal distance between SARS-CoV-2 and its closest known virus and determined this is too long for any genetic manipulation to have occurred. This is however true only if they assumed natural evolution occurred – without human intervention."

"In principle, using available SARS-like viral strains, researchers could have selected viruses for their ability to infect human cells. This does not exclude the proximal origin of the virus, as in this case humans could have simply assisted the process"

"As natural evolution in the lab can be pushed to occur at much faster rates than in nature, a temporal analysis of the divergence between two viruses in this specific context is nonsense"

"the authors say that “a hypothetical generation of SARS-CoV-2 by cell culture or animal passage would have required prior isolation of a progenitor virus with very high genetic similarity, which has not been described”"

"In this line, authors are substantially suggesting that if something hasn’t been published, it cannot have happened and cannot be true."

And the most important point, "canceling more or less unlikely theories prior to having proved them wrong is not what a scientist should do."