To: TobagoJack who wrote (174816 ) 7/14/2021 10:45:17 AM From: Trader77 Read Replies (1) | Respond to I agree it's beyond frustrating that we have little to no answers or long term strategy. For example, regarding the origin story, Dr. Quay (in the WSJ article The Science Suggest a Lab Leak) makes this strong argument for it being a lab leak when he discusses something called the CGG-CGG genetic sequence:Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab's gain-of-function researchers would have made? Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact -- that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers -- implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape. But then Dr. Kristian Andersen says this: Specifically, people are pointing to two "CGG" sequences that code for the amino acid arginine in the furin cleavage site as strong evidence that the virus was made in the lab. Such statements are factually incorrect. While it's true that CGG is less common than other patterns that code for arginine, the CGG codon is found elsewhere in the SARS-CoV-2 genome and the genetic sequence[s] that include the CGG codon found in SARS-CoV-2 are also found in other coronaviruses. These findings, together with many other technical features of the site, strongly suggest that it evolved naturally and there is very little chance somebody engineered it.
