CV and mad panic behaviour

[DJC]

There is a comprehensive article in Nature too, "The COVID lab-leak hypothesis: what scientists do and don’t know".  It dates to June but still provides a good overview of the various hypotheses:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3

Another feature of SARS-CoV-2 that has drawn attention is a combination of nucleotides that underlie a segment of the furin cleavage site: CGG (these encode the amino acid arginine). A Medium article that speculates on a lab origin for SARS-CoV-2 quotes David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate and professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, as saying that viruses don’t usually have that particular code for arginine, but humans often do — a “smoking gun”, hinting that researchers might have tampered with SARS-CoV-2’s genome.

Andersen says that Baltimore was incorrect about that detail, however. In SARS-CoV-2, about 3% of the nucleotides encoding arginine are CGG, he says. And he points out that around 5% of those encoding arginine in the virus that caused the original SARS epidemic are CGG, too. In an e-mail to Nature, Baltimore says Andersen could be correct that evolution produced SARS-CoV-2, but adds that “there are other possibilities and they need careful consideration, which is all I meant to be saying”.

The article concludes:

As Biden's investigation commences and the WHO considers the next phase in its origin study, pandemic experts are bracing themselves for a long road ahead. “We want an answer,” says Jason Kindrachuk, a virologist at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. “But we may have to keep piecing bits of evidence together as weeks and months and years move forward.”