Former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade makes a pretty damn compelling case that Covid-19 (accidentally) slipped out of a lab in Wuhan. I think I'm (mostly) convinced. Regardless, gain-of-function research is insane. As Wade notes, "It’s documented that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were doing gain-of-function experiments designed to make coronaviruses infect human cells and humanized mice. This is exactly the kind of experiment from which a SARS2-like virus could have emerged. The researchers were not vaccinated against the viruses under study, and they were working in the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 laboratory. So escape of a virus would not be at all surprising. In all of China, the pandemic broke out on the doorstep of the Wuhan institute. The virus was already well adapted to humans, as expected for a virus grown in humanized mice. It possessed an unusual enhancement, a furin cleavage site, which is not possessed by any other known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, and this site included a double arginine codon also unknown among beta-coronaviruses. What more evidence could you want, aside from the presently unobtainable lab records documenting SARS2’s creation? Hopefully we can learn a few things from this mess. For starters, lockdowns don't work (other than in making big business bigger). And regardless of where the virus came from, we should ban both gain-of-function research and wet markets.
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