[mugwump]

Virtually every virologist and research scientist I know—not unanimous but a big majority—have a visceral and knee jerk antipathy towards anything other than zoonotic transmission from bat to some mythical mammal intermediate vector (pangolins are a cuddly favorite) to human.

These guys are finally rock stars and anything that besmirches their guild is attacked with vigor. They don’t want to think that their research projects may be contributing to global risk.

They ARE hugely contributing to global risk, and they ARE complicit.

I see this exactly as WD surmised: a sample obtained in the wild, then studied, played with, and accidentally released. I use “played with” because there is scads of enhancement research conducted on a whim.

There are several recent (post 2015) journal articles that report enhancement studies where researchers added the very same glycoprotein spike to viruses that makes COVID-19 so transmissible. There are also studies that report running coronaviruses through serial generations of mammals, usually ferrets, to induce the presence of a furin cleavage site, needed for mammal cell entry.

The scientific community circling the wagons on this issue is not proof. There is no way, none, to either prove or disprove that serial ferret infection studies did or didn’t change this virus.

These people discount the possibility of accidental release of an enhanced virus out of one side of their mouths while lauding researchers who are studding yeast cells with glycoprotein spikes via genetic manipulation to allow rapid manufacture of Covid antiviral antibodies.

I think this pandemic was an accidental release of a naturally occurring but obscure virus originally sourced from bats. I have no idea if it was manipulated prior to release, but until someone rediscovers this exact virus in the wild (expect the Chinese to do that soon, now that they’ve apparently abandoned their “it was caused by the US army” conspiracy theory) we'll never know if it was manipulated.