SA – “I take it you fully agree with what Dr Edd has written and which is the consensus amongst many scientists that this is a natural virus because this has been proven beyond doubt.”
No, I lack sufficient technical knowledge to either agree or disagree with Dr Edd’s May 28, 20:02 argument. I already expressed this as accurately as I could:
– “[…] the debate about the possible origins of SARS-CoV-2 seems to be ongoing in the scientific community and the scientific literature. […] Dr Edd, your May 28, 20:02 argument seems convincing, but there are elements of it which, as a non-specialist, I would have to take on trust.”
Regarding my first sentence above, “the debate about the possible origins of SARS-CoV-2 seems to be ongoing in the scientific community and the scientific literature”,
(1) I have yet to watch Coronavirus may have been a ‘cell-culture experiment’ gone wrong, another video from Sky News featuring Flinders University Professor Nikolai Petrovsky, which follows on from the one Michael Norton posted a link to before;
(2) I have seen a US scientist also refusing to rule out lab origin; I doubt I will be able to find the link again, but I think he was from a relevant field, though since I don’t remember the name it may have been Bret Weinstein;
(3) I have listened to a podcast by Prof. Bret Weinstein, biologist and evolutionary theorist, in which he claims that there is fairly compelling evolutionary evidence of lab manipulation of SARS-CoV-2’s genome, but that more “establishment” academics in relevant fields are pressuring less established scientists to avoid saying so, and
(4) a friend of mine who has been following this tells me that there are frequently papers either way appearing on the preprint servers of appropriate fields.
These are my reasons for regarding the question as open and ongoing within the relevant fields. My own take is that a lab escape cannot be ruled out, since bio laboratories keep libraries of natural viruses. Indeed I have heard it said that one of the Wuhan laboratories held the largest library of bat viruses in the world.
I don’t even care about the outcome particularly. SARS-CoV-2 is in the global human population now, and we need to deal with it however it got there, and I’m content to wait until more definitive evidence emerges, it it ever does. But I do find it curious that there is such strong pressure upon me from yourself and Dr Edd to conform to the “entirely natural” proposition, and I note that this question is far from neutral politically.