Thread by @Ayjchan

On whether the unique furin cleavage site, which makes SARS-CoV-2 the pandemic pathogen that it is, was genetically engineered, please see the comments of unassailable virologists.

#OriginOfCovid

No sensible scientist is saying that the furin cleavage site could not possibly have evolved naturally in SARS-CoV-2.

We're saying that it is also reasonable to hypothesize that scientists might've inserted it in a lab. They had a pipeline for this as early as March 2018.

For a deeper dive into why it's so challenging to know whether the furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 arose naturally, please see our peer-reviewed manuscript at @MolBioEvol
academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-ar…

Peter Daszak started a trend of calling completely plausible hypotheses that he didn't like conspiracy theories.

Virologists should stop following his example if you care about preserving the credibility of your field.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1451985368727818240?s=20

For ease of reference, the key parts of the DEFUSE proposal from March 2018 detailing a pipeline for detecting novel cleavage sites and inserting these into novel SARS-like viruses in the lab for infection studies.

Bear in mind that up until SARS2 appeared, no SARS-like virus had ever been reported to have an S1/S2 FCS insertion. Yet these scientists wrote, in detail, they would review their sequencing data for potential furin cleavage sites, introduce these into low risk SARS-like viruses.

In situations where novel SARS-like viruses could not be directly isolated from the animal or human sample, they would synthesize the entire consensus candidate genome commercially and recover the recombinant viruses in the lab.

Do we know what sequences and samples (across China and 7 SE Asian countries) were in the possession of the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

No. Their pathogen sample database built to inform us about emerging threats was not shared when a real pandemic began.

To make things worse, FOIA'ed docs and sleuths showed that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was collecting 10,000s of high risk animal & human samples in search of novel pathogens across 8 countries, including China and Laos where SARS2's closest relatives have been found in bats.

Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance even wrote to NIH in 2016 saying that there wasn't enough wildlife trade left in China to sample so they wanted to start sending 1000s of samples from across 7 SE Asian countries up to Wuhan.

On top of the disturbing revelations about the research ongoing prior to the pandemic, we've seen some scientists - whose work was aimed at informing us of novel pandemic pathogens - withhold key information about their research time and again.

Not forthcoming. Not transparent.