> biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere.

A laboratory (and nearby university) that was carrying out risky gain of function experiments with US funding, as finally admitted to in recent congressional hearings.

Isn't this not a coincidence at all? The research lab was put there because it was known hot spot for wild coronavirus strains.

> A 12-nt insertion at S1/S2 in the spike coding sequence yields a furin cleavage site, which raised controversy views on origin of the virus. Here we analyzed the phylogenetic relationships of coronavirus spike proteins and mapped furin recognition motif on the tree. Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2.

"Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7836551/

Just one paper among many, not sure it's as strong evidence as you seem to think.

Overall, current evidence seems to be mostly be pointing to a natural origin, maybe linked to wildlife sold in Wuhan.

Wonder when we'll reach any sort of conclusion to this.

Furin cleavage sites are common among coronaviruses, but rare among sarbecoviruses (SARS-like viruses). The presence of the FCS is not determinative, but it's notable, especially since the EHA had proposed in DEFUSE to engineer sarbecoviruses with a human-designed FCS.

In that proposal, the WIV would have worked only on collection of novel viruses from nature, with genetic engineering at Baric's lab at UNC. DARPA also declined to fund that proposal, on safety grounds. The Times reported an intelligence leak stating the work continued with other funders at the WIV only, though I haven't seen confirmation beyond that one article.

> The investigators spoke to two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak. They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/inside-wuhan-lab-covid-p...

> SARS-CoV-2 has continued to evolve as it moves through the population, and we have learned more about its pathogenicity and transmission determinants. As previously commented in The Lancet Microbe, one of these determinants is the unusual furin cleavage site (FCS) on its spike protein.1 While it has been proposed that the FCS might have been engineered, it is becoming clearer that natural selection is, in fact, the driving factor in its acquisition and functionality, through recombination and epistasis. [1]

I’m hardly qualified to evaluate the evidence for either argument but it seems that it’s hardly a clear cut case of engineering.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...

Peter Miller addressed this in the Rootclaim debate[1] so I'll quote from there:

> Even if WIV did try to create COVID, they couldn’t have. As Yuri said, COVID looks like BANAL-52 plus a furin cleavage site. But WIV didn’t have BANAL-52. It wasn’t discovered until after the COVID pandemic started, when scientists scoured the area for potential COVID relatives. WIV had a more distant COVID relative, RATG-13. But you can’t create COVID from RATG-13; they’re too different. You would need BANAL-52, or some as-yet-undiscovered extremely close relative. WIV had neither.

> Are we sure they had neither? Yes. Remember, WIV’s whole job was looking for new coronaviruses. They published lists of which ones they had found pretty regularly. They published their last list in mid-2019, just a few months before the pandemic. Although lab leak proponents claimed these lists showed weird discrepancies, this was just their inability to keep names consistent, and all the lists showed basically the same viruses (plus a few extra on the later ones, as they kept discovering more). The lists didn’t include BANAL-52 or any other suitable COVID relatives - only RATG-13, which isn’t close enough to work.

> Could they have been keeping their discovery of BANAL-52 secret? No. Pre-pandemic, there was nothing interesting about it; our understanding of virology wasn’t good enough to point this out as a potential pandemic candidate. WIV did its gain-of-function research openly and proudly (before the pandemic, gain-of-function wasn’t as unpopular as it is now) so it’s not like they wanted to keep it secret because they might gain-of-function it later. Their lists very clearly showed they had no virus they could create COVID from, and they had no reason to hide it if they did.

> COVID’s furin cleavage site is admittedly unusual. But it’s unusual in a way that looks natural rather than man-made. Labs don’t usually add furin cleavage sites through nucleotide insertions (they usually mutate what’s already there). On the other hand, viruses get weird insertions of 12+ nucleotides in nature. For example, HKU1 is another emergent Chinese coronavirus that caused a small outbreak of pneumonia in 2004. It had a 15 nucleotide insertion right next to its furin cleavage site. Later strains of COVID got further 12 - 15 nucleotide insertions. Plenty of flus have 12 to 15 nucleotide insertions compared to other earlier flu strains.

Peter goes further into it in the link. Those interested can dig in further.

[1]=https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r...

Anecdotal as it may be, an investor in a company I used to work for was from Wuhan. He paid $80k USD to get out of the country in December 2019. They knew it was bad then and anyone who could was fleeing.

Not just taking into account the furin cleavage site issue, but there is every incentive for the scientific community and those in power to blame this on the wet market over the lab leak.

Matt Ridley is a journalist with hardly any qualification to conduct an analysis.