Could the Chinese have taken a sample of a Coronavirus found in a bat population and manipulated that virus in the Wuhan lab to become the original strain of SARS-Cov-2 that started the pandemic?
A sample of Coronavirus was collected in the wild and then while undergoing study in the lab it was manipulated to become SARS-Cov-2 and you then had accidental exposure to lab worker which then resulted in transmission to the public.
As mentioned, this claim is not supported by evidence or logic.
Put yourself in the shoes of a coronavirus researcher back in 2010, or even 2015. 100's of coronavirus genomes have been identified from bat samples. Which one's are you going to study? No coronavirologist has the capacity to study every single genome, so you have to pick. Which one's? Well, history told us what happened. Virologists studied two bat coronaviruses very closely related to SARS-CoV-1 and I recall one other similar to MERS. Why would anyone choose a virus that is 20% different compared to SARS-CoV-1 and 50% different from MERS? There was zero reason to do that, especially when there's many bat coronaviruses with much higher priority to study. There has been zero grants supporting this type of research of viruses in the CoV-2 clade, so where did the money come from to start this work?
Let's then ignore this logic, and somebody did something that makes zero logical sense and started studying RatG13 or some other mystery virus. You cannot just decide you are going to study this virus and have hundreds of results in a few months. It is a completely novel virus, never characterized, never even grown in laboratory conditions. So guess what? You have to spend months (absolute best case scenario) or a few years just growing and characterizing the virus in cells and in mice. Ok, but how do you manipulate the virus? Well, you don't just magically wave you hands and mutate it, but you have to build a reverse genetics system. This will also take months or years, and most labs in the world would have the genome synthesized using a commercial partner. So there would be an obvious paper trail. But even once the genome is synthesized, there are many problems getting the reverse genetics system working, so there's several more months to years worth of work, assuming you know the best cell line to use.
And then once you have the system working, you have to make all the mutations. If you started with RatG13, you have to carefully make 1,000 mutations, and be careful because each mutation could completely kill the virus. How are you going to do this? This would take many years and tons of luck. In 3 years, CoV-2 has only mutated ~50 times with a few deletions. How are we going to do that with this engineered virus and not take 60 years? Ok, let's say they had a magical virus that was much closer to CoV-2, you're still going to have to mutate it, right? More time.
And then given the claims of others about furin cleavage sites, why would a virologist select a crappy furin cleavage site and insert it into a bat coronavirus that nobody knows if it could infect humans? On top of that, you have to do all this work and be careful your furin cleavage site doesn't get deleted because that's what happens in cell culture. Then this virus needs to be infectable in humans, so you spend even more years enhancing its ability to infect humans. But you have to do this blindly since you have no idea what will be a "good" mutation. Yet, you do this while not introducing the D614G mutation or any other mutation that rapidly appeared in CoV-2 once it entered the pandemic phase. Hmmm.
Oh, and where did the money, researchers and time come from to get all of this work done? Oh, and yet leave no obvious paper trail and purposely keep it hidden from other researchers. And all this work was done... for exactly what reason? To build a super coronavirus, for what purpose? A super coronavirus that no vaccine or treatment exists. Hmmm.
TLDR: Anyone who tries to claim that the Chinese engineered SARS-CoV-2 doesn't think about the actual steps that would be needed to do it. They just handwave and expect people to ignore the immense amount of work, financial support, and non-sensical decisions that would be needed along the way. Oh, and this would have to be done in such a way to leave no evidence and no evidence within the virus itself, and essentially invent new coronavirus biology along the way.
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