FROM University of Queensland professor Roy Hall, who researches viral protein structures and was not involved in the study:
“If this was a genetically engineered virus, they [researchers] would be taking a virus that we know infects humans and causes disease and using the same genetic structure. But we haven’t seen [these features] before, so they’ve evolved naturally, separately in nature. No one has seen them before so they wouldn’t be genetically engineered that way,”
I read their preprint and I found it quite convincing.
“If this was a genetically engineered virus, they [researchers] would be taking a virus that we know infects humans and causes disease and using the same genetic structure. But we haven’t seen [these features] before, so they’ve evolved naturally, separately in nature. No one has seen them before so they wouldn’t be genetically engineered that way,”
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Someone needs to explain to me how a portion of the HIV genome got into the virus without engineering. This splice just happens to be the one that incapacitates the hosts immune system, which is a nice lethal enhancement for a bioweapon.