Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

I did not finish this, and it seems it was a bit too technical to interest anyone, but man, it is in the technical parts that the interest lies, and again, if there's a #virologist out there who can rebut this, I am very eager to hear why this is wrong.

https://twitter.com/ClaireBerlinski/status/1390595530301050880

Wade writes: "of all known SARS-related beta-coronaviruses, only SARS2 possesses a furin cleavage site. All the other viruses have their S2 unit cleaved at a different site and by a different mechanism." True? False?

He then writes, "A string of amino acids like that of the furin cleavage site is much more likely to be acquired all together through a quite different process known as recombination." This seems to me alas very likely to be true.

But SARS-related beta-coronaviruses don't have furin cleavage sites at all. None do, he writes. (True? False?) If true, we're getting into some sinister, sinister territory.
Could it have acquired it from people? I don't know.

He thinks that if it acquired the furin cleavage site from humans, there would be "traces in hospital surveillance records of the people infected by the slowly evolving virus."

I'm not sure that's so. Maybe that's a hole in his argument:

After all, without that site, it may not be so harmful as to send people to the hospital, right?

(Anyone?)

But that's grasping at straws, because of this:

“At least 11 gain-of-function experiments, adding a furin site to make a virus more infective, are published in the open literature, including [by] Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

And it gets worse.

He writes that if you compare the genomes of SARS-CoV-2 with its closest known cousin, RaTG13, you'll see that the former, unlike the latter, has a 12-nucleotide insert right at the S1/S2 junction.

Does anyone know enough to tell me whether this is as bad as it sounds? Because it looks to me as if either someone put it there--or we got astronomically unlucky.
And why would we assume the latter, when the former is quite plausible?

The double CGG codon, he writes, is routinely used in labs.

"Yes, but your wording makes this sound unlikely — viruses are specialists at unusual events,' is the riposte of David L. Robertson, a virologist at the University of Glasgow who regards lab escape as a conspiracy theory," he writes.

By definition, if it's an unusual event, it's unlikely, so I have no idea what he could mean.
Assuming he means, "unusual things do happen, just not that often" then why wouldn't we default to the more plausible explanation?

He concludes by suggesting that readers make up their own minds. I would very much like to hear an informed case to the contrary, because damn, this looks bad.

And yes, it certainly seems as if far too many journalists failed to ask these questions.

We really need those lab records.
The whole world needs them.

@adamctharp -- this thread.