Daszak’s comments say that much of the work could be done at WIV which could include the FCS. The comment is genuine AFAIK but you’ll have to chase it up yourself.
The work on BsmBI is somewhat compelling because the people who suspected it published before DEFUSE was unearthed, and then DEFUSE was found to contain an order for BsmBI. So, they sort of predicted this. And there are reasons to make the virus out of relatively uniformly long segments—it’s convenient, the tools and techniques have maximum lengths they can handle, and you want to minimize the total amount of work. So you use roughly equal length segments. However this is a fairly complicated series of claims and I don’t see it as being the big win for lab-leak—the big win is DEFUSE itself.
But zoom out a bit: we can just notice that all of this stuff only collects around Wuhan, WIV and associated facilities like State Key Laboratory of Virology at Wuhan University.
There’s no equivalent of this in all the other cities in China and I am pretty sure that if you look through the top 20 cities by population you won’t find something like DEFUSE. I tried this a bit with chatGPT, Google Scholar, Google Search etc. There simply are not 50 other Daszaks out there doing GoF bat coronavirus research in every other city in China. Wuhan is THE PLACE where this happens.
Daszak’s comments say that much of the work could be done at WIV which could include the FCS. The comment is genuine AFAIK but you’ll have to chase it up yourself.
The work on BsmBI is somewhat compelling because the people who suspected it published before DEFUSE was unearthed, and then DEFUSE was found to contain an order for BsmBI. So, they sort of predicted this. And there are reasons to make the virus out of relatively uniformly long segments—it’s convenient, the tools and techniques have maximum lengths they can handle, and you want to minimize the total amount of work. So you use roughly equal length segments. However this is a fairly complicated series of claims and I don’t see it as being the big win for lab-leak—the big win is DEFUSE itself.
But zoom out a bit: we can just notice that all of this stuff only collects around Wuhan, WIV and associated facilities like State Key Laboratory of Virology at Wuhan University.
There’s no equivalent of this in all the other cities in China and I am pretty sure that if you look through the top 20 cities by population you won’t find something like DEFUSE. I tried this a bit with chatGPT, Google Scholar, Google Search etc. There simply are not 50 other Daszaks out there doing GoF bat coronavirus research in every other city in China. Wuhan is THE PLACE where this happens.