Wuhan lab phone records show 'possible shutdown' in October

[dalton99a]

11. "We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."

Here’s how a team of biologists, infectious disease researchers and biosecurity experts put it in a report published in the journal Nature Medicine: “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

To reach that conclusion, the authors drew on research that compared the genetic signatures of three sets of viral samples. The first were drawn from Chinese patients who became sick late last year with unexplained pneumonia; the second came from bats living near Wuhan, China, and which were sometimes brought to an open-air market for sale; and the third was from pangolins, mongoose-like animals from Malaysia that were known to have been illegally imported into China. ...

Meanwhile, other researchers who sifted through the genetic sequences of dozens of preserved viral samples found that the new coronavirus is a distant cousin of the coronavirus that caused the SARS outbreak of 2002 and 2003, and the coronavirus that gave rise to MERS in 2009. The virus responsible for COVID-19 has distinctive features that separate it from its predecessors by many, many generations, according to their report in the Journal of Virology.

But none of the genetic mutations looked like ones a scientific genius would engineer in a lab to tweak a virus for better performance, the researchers wrote. Instead, they have all the hallmarks of the gradual accretion of changes that occur over time as a virus encounters new environments and the immune systems of new organisms.

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-05-09/was-the-coronavirus-made-in-a-wuhan-lab-heres-what-the-genetic-evidence-shows