I’m not here to debate the origins of the virus—you’ll want to click through to the MIT article for that discussion—but it’s important to understand the depths of the politicization of the pandemic and the scientific community.
David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University, says a lab leak was never the subject of a “fair and dispassionate discussion of the facts as we know them.” Instead, tempers soon began to flare as those calling for a closer look at possible lab origins were dismissed as conspiracy theorists spouting misinformation. Election-year politics and growing Sinophobic sentiments only added to the tensions. Attacks on Asian-Americans had been escalating since the pandemic began, and with then-president Trump fuming about a “Chinese virus,” many scientists and reporters became “cautious about saying anything that might justify the rhetoric of his administration,” says Jamie Metzl, a senior fellow at the Washington, DC–based Atlantic Council, an international affairs think tank.
[…]
But in late April 2020, as Petrovsky’s group was thinking about where to publish their work, “Trump blurted out” that he had reason to believe the virus came out of a Chinese lab, Petrovsky says. And at that point, he adds, much of “the left-wing media” decided “they were going to paint the whole lab thing as a conspiracy theory to bring down Trump.”
In other words, Trump Derangement Syndrome began to trump science.
Efforts to determine the origins of the virus, according to Relman, “have become mired in politics, poorly supported assumptions and assertions, and incomplete information.” Metzl, meanwhile, fears that going against the narrative could result in “career suicide.”
Petrovsky, commenting on that politicization of science, said his researchers were “dealing with global forces that are way more powerful than a scientist trying to tell a science-based story.”
January 29, 2020 - reply 27 - post to FR:
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3811895/posts?page=27#27
2019-nCoV did not arise from a simple mutation in an existing corona virus.
Almost half of the RNA in 2019-nCoV has NO genetic linkage to any other corona virus. This includes the middle region where half of the genomic spike encoding a multifunction protein responsible for virus entry into host cells has no linkage to any other corona virus.
Unlike other corona viruses that infect the mucosal membranes of the nasal passages, 2019-nCoV infects the simple squamous epithelium in the lungs.
The data suggest that 2019-nCoV is a manmade combination of a corona virus from bats (which causes cold and flu symptoms) with a blood borne pneumonia virus from a mammal other than humans (which causes the bloody pneumonia that kills the host). The corona virus provides the pathway for the lethal pneumonia virus to enter a human host.
Sources:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.26.920249v1
Full-genome evolutionary analysis of the novel corona virus (2019-nCoV) rejects the hypothesis of emergence as a result of a recent recombination event
Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding Twitter Account
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1221997385146040321?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw