Short version - until we find a candidate progenitor virus in an animal population, which enables us to work out a likely route of transmission to humans, we don't have enough information to know.
Although I think, from skimming the report, there is probably enough information to say that this (1) wasn't intentional and (2) is possibly a lab leak.
That is enough to say that it will probably happen again in our lifetime from an actual lab leak. We have the technology, the world is large, there are a lot of foolish researchers in it. We need to be more prepared to curtail or cease international travel.
If intentional, would China shoot itself in the foot by releasing a deadly virus in its own major cities and infect potentially millions/billions?
Or would the US and its allies release a virus it knowingly funded (for plausible deniability) in a state it constantly calls its 'greatest adversary & threat' during the 2019 war games?
One of these seems more likely than the other to an objective observer since this isn't the first time the US and its allies have engaged in chemical & bio-warfare against the Chinese.
The foreign aircraft carriers and war ships surrounding the Chinese coast are perhaps yet another clue...
Since the next best species that the virus can spread among (apart form humans) is civets then we should probably start huge research on viruses carried by them and we'll probably find the progenitor and most likely learn a lot of interesting things along the way.
> That version of the virus can't be massively different from Cov-19.
Yes it can. Labs specifically study, and propagate, mutations. A lab can do in years what might take nature decades. If it did originate from a lab, we very likely would never find a close enough progenitor in nature to know where things started (what strain the lab started with).
We can trace mutation histories of viruses very extensively, the tools and techniques for this are now pretty sophisticated, so that's not necessarily an insurmountable obstacle.
There is a probabilistic aspect to this though. If we happen to find the exact wild virus population Cov-19 originated from (whether it then mutated naturally or in a lab) then I think we'll nail it. On the other hand if we just find an adjacent population that diverged from the actual Cov-19 source some time ago it could be harder to pin down the route.
They probably meant RNA code of the virus. Since if you know it you can produce it in a lab and introduce it into cells and they will manufacture functional copies of the virus.
It's not a recipe to create virus in a lab. It's a recipe to manufacture copies of the virus in a lab.
Such a premise begins with the assumption the origin is natural.
Just because China refuses to cooperate (as stated by the article), does not mean that trying to find a natural cause is the only way to resolve the issue.
It's a bit misleading as well as the vast majority of the agencies mentioned in the article do not believe in a natural origin.
>The ODNI report said four U.S. spy agencies and a multi-agency body have "low confidence" that COVID-19 originated with an infected animal or a related virus.
>Such a premise begins with the assumption the origin is natural.
Unless the virus was literally constructed using base chemicals from the ground up entirely artificially, something that as far as we know has never been done and the technology for which doesn't yet plausibly exist, the virus must have a natural progenitor from which it either evolved, was bred or was engineered. That does not exclude the possibility that the virus was engineered from a progenitor virus in a lab and is "artificial" in that sense.
So yes you are technically correct (which of course is the best correct), but could you be more clear what you mean by natural, and what alternatives you think are being excluded?
This virus would not have had to be created from the ground up. It's based on a comment model viral system about which we know an amazing amount. Particularly, it's a viral system that's apt to recombine, and whose organization and components thus by design support recombinant exploitation of the evolutionary space. It is very easy to build a novel organization of such parts. You build as many as you can manage (trillions+) and then screen for viable viruses. Then with a little selection pressure in different environments, you can optimize them and see how the novel variants evolve. Doing this at scale helps us understand the way viruses evolve.
And if you think that genome synthesis is not possible, look up "DNA printer". But i don't think that's what you mean.
All known viruses were originally produced by nature. Engineered viruses are natural viruses that were modified artificially, but they still had a natural origin. We don't have the technology to create a virus entirely from scratch, we can only modify existing viruses in fairly limited ways. Surely you know this, right?
If we can find that original natural source strain of virus, we should be able to compare it to Cov-19 and determine the likely path of development. This has been done many times before for other viruses, such as SARS, MERS, Swine Flu, etc.
Nobody is suggesting that the virus was created from scratch.
Of course the viruses have a natural origin, where do you think the original samples come from?
I don't know where you are interpreting your stance from, and I am sorry if I am being unclear, english is not my first language.. but just because viruses are being engineered in a lab does not mean they build them molecule by molecule, but they do transfer genes between existing viruses.
