A lot of this is tough to evaluate as a lay person. For example:
>From the 75-page proposal, a striking detail stood out: a plan to examine SARS-like bat coronaviruses for furin cleavage sites and possibly insert new ones that would enable them to infect human cells.
>A furin cleavage site is a spot in the surface protein of a virus that can boost its entry into human cells. SARS-CoV-2, which emerged more than a year after the DARPA grant was submitted, is notable among SARS-like coronaviruses for having a unique furin cleavage site. This anomaly has led some scientists to consider whether the virus could have emerged from laboratory work gone awry.
Should I interpret it as a would-be unbelievable coincidence that they would be working on the very same furin cleavage site that is unique in CoV-2? Or should I interpret it as obvious - maybe the furin cleavage site is the most important part for infectiousness, and so we should expect any new human-infecting virus to have changes there, and should also expect that to be the area scientists focus on.
Without expert knowledge, I have no way to tell, but it feels like the sort of thing I could very easily interpret incorrectly one way or the other.
Quite a few experts said originally that the furin cleavage site (FCS) is the "smoking gun" evidence that the virus is lab modified.
But then other experts said that it's just a coincidence that could arise naturally.
Now we learn that EcoHealth had these plans to insert FCS's in viruses, yet they stayed quiet during the whole FCS debate and didn't mentioned it until it was found out from FOIA'd emails.
And not only that they didn't mention it, they kept saying it's just a coincidence and to say otherwise is a conspiracy theory.
part of the claim of the furan cleavage "smoking gun" is that the sequence matches a sequence that was patented by Moderna 3 years before the Covid-19 outbreak
(Hoping somebody here can shed further light. I don't want to spread misinformation, and I'm not able to corroborate this myself, so be skeptical; however we have seen a lot information manipulation or suppression in every direction the past few years, so be skeptical in the other direction too)
most people in that discussion want to debunk the salience of the Moderna patent sequence on the grounds that there are other examples of the same sequence in earth's biome, so it could have entered the covid-19 virus some other way. While that is worth knowing/noting, to me it doesn't debunk because Moderna still took a recent interest in it, enough to patent it and it was of interest for the same reason that it would be suggested to test it on a coronavirus.
And even outside the biological details, without cooperation from the Chinese government and the lab in question it seems any investigation into alternate explanations will be nearly unfalsifiable. From the article:
>But as COVID-19 rampaged across the globe, the Chinese government’s commitment to transparency turned out to be limited. It has refused to share raw data from early patient cases, or participate in any further international efforts to investigate the virus’s origin...And in September 2019, three months before the officially recognized start of the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology took down its database of some 22,000 virus samples and sequences, refusing to restore it despite international requests.
> I could very easily interpret incorrectly one way or the other.
lets make it a bit harder for you :) - the approved EcoHealth NIH grant for the coronavirus GoF work in Wuhan had the "Human Subjects Included" checked.
I will guess this is because the number of enzymes that we can use is small, and each enzyme only work on specific site. So, check the specific site of each enzyme are first step.
>From the 75-page proposal, a striking detail stood out: a plan to examine SARS-like bat coronaviruses for furin cleavage sites and possibly insert new ones that would enable them to infect human cells.
>A furin cleavage site is a spot in the surface protein of a virus that can boost its entry into human cells. SARS-CoV-2, which emerged more than a year after the DARPA grant was submitted, is notable among SARS-like coronaviruses for having a unique furin cleavage site. This anomaly has led some scientists to consider whether the virus could have emerged from laboratory work gone awry.
Should I interpret it as a would-be unbelievable coincidence that they would be working on the very same furin cleavage site that is unique in CoV-2? Or should I interpret it as obvious - maybe the furin cleavage site is the most important part for infectiousness, and so we should expect any new human-infecting virus to have changes there, and should also expect that to be the area scientists focus on.
Without expert knowledge, I have no way to tell, but it feels like the sort of thing I could very easily interpret incorrectly one way or the other.