The paper by Yuri Deigin at Medium explains the same facts that Chris does, mostly towards the beginning of the paper, in a section entitled “A Killer Intro”. About the PRRA insert, Deignin says:
"So the virologists are puzzled. Where did this 12 nucleotide insert come from? Could it be lab-made? Well, virologists have studied furin sites in coronaviruses for decades, and have introduced many artificial ones in a lab."
Isn't that the smoking gun right there? Why isn't the paper over already? Instead, Deignin goes on to discuss many other topics. A significant moment passes with no fanfare at all. Deignin quotes a discussion of "temperature sensitivity" as "a trait that limits virus replication in pulmonary tissues." The conclusion to this section:
It seems that the creation of temperature-sensitive viral mutants to develop potentially attenuated vaccines was widespread at the end of the twentieth century. If you remember, in 1990, Ralph Baric himself also experimentedwith the creation of temperature-sensitive coronavirus strains.
Could something like this have caused the Covid-19 pandemic? Several options are possible — from a leak during development of a potential vaccine to fundamental research on laboratory recombination of the bat and pangolin viruses. Some particularly ambitious researcher could even decide to combine the two “fashionable research themes” — adding a furin site and transplanting RBM from a strain of one species (pangolin) to another (bats), so that later, confirming the increased virulence of the new chimeric virus, they can wax poetic about the dangers of the same recombination happening in Yunnan caves or wet markets. And if such a researcher could even pre-emptively develop a vaccine against this and other potential chimeras, all sorts of accolades could await.
Am I then saying this is what happened? Of course not, I do not claim to know what happened. Today, there is no evidence of this.
And then the next section:
Let us now turn our attention back to the virus itself. Does it have any obvious signs of lab manipulation? First, a few words about what “obvious” means. Any mutation can arise naturally, and even if the amino acid insert that had created the furin site in CoV2 was not “PRRA” but “MADEINWVHANPRRA”, there would still be a non-zero chance that it arose by accident. But for us, and for any court, I think this would be enough to prove lab origin beyond a reasonable doubt.
Then Deignin resumes more analysis about "restriction enzymes" and "codon usage bias", and goes into some speculation about whether perhaps the RaTG13 virus is some sort of fake virus that's part of the cover-up.
The conclusion takes this bizarre twist:
If you made it here by reading rather than scrolling, mad props to you. Hey, even if you scrolled, that’s cool too, and I apologize for the verbosity. I just didn’t anticipate that the rabbit hole would turn out to be a whole underground cave system. I hope that you found this deep dive into the world of virology interesting and enjoyed the exploration of the lab-made CoV2 hypothesis. In my opinion, the data I have presented, taken together, do not allow us to reject this possibility.
Let me be clear: this does NOT prove that CoV2 was synthesized in the laboratory. Yes, as we have seen above, from a technical standpoint, it would not be difficult for a modern virologist to create such a strain. But there is no direct evidence that anyone did this, and strange coincidences cannot pass for circumstantial evidence. On balance, the current chances against this are still higher than for the natural origins of CoV2.
Is Deignin shooting himself in the foot here, or what? And why? And then some inscrutable joke about the virus originating in a "lab" (meaning, the dog breed) and a homily about Deignin's desire that his post would not be "used to assign blame or propagate one-sided theories", while lamenting that "if there is even a 0.1% chance GOF research caused the whole thing, that chance is too high."
In terms of meandering around a conclusion, this is the strangest, most elusive paper I can remember.
But that isn't what perplexes me most about this hypothesis.
If SARS-CoV2 is a man-made supervirus, then why is there so much evidence surfacing that the fatality rate is only 0.3% or so? Why so many asymptomatic carriers?
Is this a "temperature sensitive virus" that was designed as part of vaccine research?
