I’m not remotely qualified to comment on this, but fwiw in the Mojiang Mine Theory (which says it was a lab leak, but did not involve GOF), six miners caught the virus from bats (and/or each other), and then the virus spent four months replicating within the body of one of these poor guys as he lay sick in a hospital (and then of course samples were sent to WIV and put in storage).
This would explain (2) because four months in this guy’s body (especially lungs) allows tons of opportunity for the virus to evolve and mutate and recombine in order to adapt to the human body, and maybe it also explains (1) either randomly or via recombination between viral and human DNA (if that makes sense?), again during those four months in this poor guy’s body.
It seems like an interesting hypothesis but I don’t think it’s particularly likely. I’ve never heard of other viruses becoming well adapted to humans within a single host. Though, I do think that’s the explanation for how several variants evolved (since some of them emerged with a bunch of functional mutations rather than just one or two). I’d be interest to see more research into the evolution of viruses within human hosts, and what degree of change is possible & how this relates to spillover events.
I’m not remotely qualified to comment on this, but fwiw in the Mojiang Mine Theory (which says it was a lab leak, but did not involve GOF), six miners caught the virus from bats (and/or each other), and then the virus spent four months replicating within the body of one of these poor guys as he lay sick in a hospital (and then of course samples were sent to WIV and put in storage).
This would explain (2) because four months in this guy’s body (especially lungs) allows tons of opportunity for the virus to evolve and mutate and recombine in order to adapt to the human body, and maybe it also explains (1) either randomly or via recombination between viral and human DNA (if that makes sense?), again during those four months in this poor guy’s body.
It seems like an interesting hypothesis but I don’t think it’s particularly likely. I’ve never heard of other viruses becoming well adapted to humans within a single host. Though, I do think that’s the explanation for how several variants evolved (since some of them emerged with a bunch of functional mutations rather than just one or two). I’d be interest to see more research into the evolution of viruses within human hosts, and what degree of change is possible & how this relates to spillover events.