I wouldn't take a three year old Italian TV segment as a particularly
authoritative source. Rather more substantial studies acknowledge
that while it is possible to that a Virus escapes a lab, the genetic
make-up of this particular virus makes it very unlikely to be
fabricated in a lab.
OK, this is science, so they speak of "unlikely" rather then
"impossible" but latching on to this difference in terminological
conventions is the cheapest trick in the book. Felix
-
No, the coronavirus wasn’t made in a lab. A genetic analysis shows
it’s from nature
Scientists took conspiracy theories about SARS-CoV-2’s origins
seriously, and debunked them
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid-19-not-human-made-lab-genetic-analysis-nature
By Tina Hesman Saey
MARCH 26, 2020 AT 6:00 AM
The coronavirus pandemic circling the globe is caused by a natural
virus, not one made in a lab, a new study says.
The virus’s genetic makeup reveals that SARS-CoV-2 isn’t a
mishmash of known viruses, as might be expected if it were human-made.
And it has unusual features that have only recently been identified in
scaly anteaters called pangolins, evidence that the virus came from
nature, Kristian Andersen and his colleagues report March 17 in Nature
Medicine.
When Andersen, an infectious disease researcher at the Scripps
Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., first heard about the
coronavirus causing an outbreak in China, he wondered where the virus
came from. Initially, researchers thought the virus was being spread
by repeated infections jumping from animals in a seafood market in
Wuhan, China, into humans and then being passed person to person.
Analysis from other researchers has since suggested that the virus
probably jumped only once from an animal into a person and has been
spread human to human since about mid-November (SN: 3/4/20).
But shortly after the virus’s genetic makeup was revealed in early
January, rumors began bubbling up that maybe the virus was engineered
in a lab and either intentionally or accidentally released.
An unfortunate coincidence fueled conspiracy theorists, says Robert
Garry, a virologist at Tulane University in New Orleans. The Wuhan
Institute of Virology is “in very close proximity to” the
seafood market, and has conducted research on viruses, including
coronaviruses, found in bats that have potential to cause disease in
people. “That led people to think that, oh, it escaped and went down
the sewers, or somebody walked out of their lab and went over to the
market or something,” Garry says.
Accidental releases of viruses, including SARS, have happened from
other labs in the past. So “this is not something you can just
dismiss out of hand,” Andersen says. “That would be foolish.”
__Looking for clues
Andersen assembled a team of evolutionary biologists and virologists,
including Garry, from several countries to analyze the virus for clues
that it could have been human-made, or grown in and accidentally
released from a lab.
“We said, ‘Let’s take this theory — of which there are
multiple different versions — that the virus has a non-natural
origin … as a serious potential hypothesis,’ ” Andersen says.
Meeting via Slack and other virtual portals, the researchers analyzed
the virus’s genetic makeup, or RNA sequence, for clues about its
origin.
It was clear “almost overnight” that the virus wasn’t
human-made, Andersen says. Anyone hoping to create a virus would need
to work with already known viruses and engineer them to have desired
properties.
But the SARS-CoV-2 virus has components that differ from those of
previously known viruses, so they had to come from an unknown virus or
viruses in nature. “Genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is
not derived from any previously used virus backbone,” Andersen and
colleagues write in the study.
“This is not a virus somebody would have conceived of and cobbled
together. It has too many distinct features, some of which are
counterintuitive,” Garry says. “You wouldn’t do this if you were
trying to make a more deadly virus.”
See all our coverage of the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak Other
scientists agree. “We see absolutely no evidence that the virus
has been engineered or purposely released,” says Emma Hodcroft, a
molecular epidemiologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland.
She was not part of Andersen’s group, but is a member of a team of
scientists with Nextstrain.org that is tracking small genetic changes
in the coronavirus to learn more about how it is spreading around the
world.
That finding debunks a widely disputed analysis, posted at bioRxiv.org
before peer review, that claimed to find bits of HIV in the
coronavirus, Hodcroft says. Other scientists quickly pointed out flaws
in the study and the authors retracted the report, but not before it
fueled the notion that the virus was engineered.
Some stretches of the virus’s genetic material are similar to HIV,
but that’s something that stems
