Thread by @Ayjchan

If SARS2 came from a lab, genetic engineering is very much on the table.

This wasn’t my view 1 year ago. However, in light of grant proposals and reports released in the past 2 months, we know novel SARS-like viruses were being synthesized and engineered at unprecedented scale.

What is going to help inform us on this question “was SARS2 genetically engineered?” is getting full access to all of the communications and documents US-based scientists, editors, and funders had relating to any novel SARSrCoV work.

Not machine learning.

State-of-the-art coronavirus genome engineering has been seamless for several years. You don’t need to be nefarious to make your synthetic genomes seamless.

We can’t use the genome sequence alone to infer whether genetic engineering has occurred.

Some top experts are going around telling journalists and #OriginOfCovid investigators that we would expect to see signs of manipulation or that you would expect genetic engineering in 2019 to follow rules from the 2000s.

Your science is out of date.

If you ask the experts who actually are caught up on coronavirus genome engineering and have personally engineered coronaviruses, several of the best have said they don’t know if SARS2 (mainly its furin cleavage site) was genetically engineered.

“Whether that particular study did or didn’t [lead to the pandemic], it certainly could have,” said Nunberg, of Montana Biotechnology Center. “Once you make an unnatural virus, you’re basically setting it up in an unstable evolutionary place.”
theintercept.com/2021/09/23/cor…

“The work describes generating full-length bat SARS-related coronaviruses that are thought to pose a risk of human spillover. And that’s the type of work that people could plausibly postulate could have led to a lab-associated origin of SARS-CoV-2”

“The presence of a furin cleavage motif at the SARS-CoV-2 S1–S2 interface is therefore highly unusual, leading to the smoking gun hypothesis of manipulation that has recently gained considerable attention as a possible origin of SARS-CoV-2.”
thelancet.com/journals/lanmi…

“You can't distinguish between the two origins from just looking at the sequence. So, naturally, you want to know were there people in the virology laboratory in Wuhan who were manipulating viral genetic sequences?”
caltech.edu/about/news/the…

FYI this was my opinion in May 2020: the FCS is an oddity, it could be natural or not, we don't know.

My opinion today is: I want to see all EcoHealth communications relating to their 2018 roadmap for inserting FCSs into novel SARS-like viruses.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1267101961159131137

It is molecularly impossible to derive SARS-CoV-2 from any of the strains described in the EcoHealth documents available to the public so far.

But the question is what other work was being done.
We clearly don't have access to all the SARSrCoV sequences available in 2019.

And this really feeds back into why it is so challenging to know if a novel virus has been genetically engineered.

Without access to the sequences available to each lab, we have no way to tell if a seamlessly constructed genome is from nature, a consensus, or modified.

There is no amount of machine learning that can predict for you what strange and rare sequences will be discovered by each laboratory across the globe.