But none of the genetic mutations looked like ones a scientific genius would engineer in a lab to tweak a virus for better performance, the researchers wrote. Instead, they have all the hallmarks of the gradual accretion of changes that occur over time as a virus encounters new environments and the immune systems of new organisms.
In other words, SARS-CoV-2 looks like a virus that has evolved, the team wrote.
Still other researchers examined the nearly 30,000 pairs of RNA letters in the virus’ genome and located the juncture where a mutation most probably changed its anatomical features.
The authors of the analysis in Nature Microbiology offered plausible natural circumstances to explain how it would have happened. For instance, they cited research showing that when chickens were repeatedly exposed to a harmless virus from swans, the virus developed mutations that made it capable of killing every chicken it infected.
They cited lab experiments to show how the virus’ changing shape would have allowed the organism to latch onto, infect and hijack human cells.
They detected biological strategies the virus had adopted that enabled it to spread from host to host — but just barely. The mechanism looked a lot more like the kind of hack that would evolve naturally in a coronavirus, not like the optimal solution a genetic engineer would choose.
Harvard microbiologist William Hanage said the facts do not support the idea that either a sloppy scientist or a mad genius tried to turn an existing coronavirus into a bioweapon. “There is no way a person studying this in a lab would be able to identify the properties that have made it a pandemic,” he said. No scientist can peer into a virus’ genes and locate the features that have made it so diabolically successful at crisscrossing the globe, he said.
With a pandemic “beating at our door,” there’s nothing to be gained by talking about the virus’ origins right now, Hanage added. Whatever is said either “inadvertently fuels conspiracy theories” or “gets twisted into a political point, and that is unhelpful,“ he said.
His advice: “Focus on the raging pandemic and leave this for later.”
About the possibility that the virus may have escaped a laboratory in China has not been adequately investigated. Until it has been, your innuendos are fear mongering.
Without evidence your certainty makes no sense. Overwhelmingly the available evidence still says the virus developed naturally, as SARS and MERS did.
In the face of the weight of evidence some are still certain the earth is flat. Your certainty the virus is manmade flies in the face of the evidence as their certainty does.
Do you believe Trump should concede defeat? Do you believe Trump will be back as president in August?