Chinese lab conspiracy origin for coronavirus crosses the pond

[C C]

Who knows one way or the other? The paper may have had two different motivated reasoning filters working it on: The political agenda of Trump government possibly subliminally influencing the researchers, or it being required to be censored and edited afterwards by peer reviewers conforming to social agenda sensibility in its international context, or both combined. Welcome to the age of science openly manipulated by ideology, industry, and marketplace values.

Coronavirus: Former MI6 head claims pandemic ‘started as accident’ in Chinese laboratory
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world...47851.html

EXCERPTS: A former head of MI6 has said he believes the coronavirus pandemic may have “started as an accident”, with the virus escaping from a Chinese laboratory. Sir Richard Dearlove cited a study by researchers claiming to have found ‘inserted’ elements in virus. The researchers claim to have discovered clues suggesting key elements were “inserted” into the virus’s genetic sequence and may not have evolved naturally, The Telegraph reports —​ but the published study does not appear to indicate that the inserts are man-made.

The study had been rejected by various journals and rewritten several times to remove accusatory claims about China before it was published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, according to The Telegraph. Initial co-author John Fredrik Moxnes, a chief scientific adviser to the Norwegian military, reportedly asked for his name to be removed, but his assistance is acknowledged in the study.

The researchers are still seeking a publisher for a new paper, which The Telegraph reports says Covid-19 is a “remarkably well-adapted virus for human co-existence”, and claims it is likely to be the result of a laboratory experiment to produce “chimeric viruses of high potency”.

[...] In the UK, health secretary Matt Hancock said the government has seen “no evidence” to suggest the virus originated in a laboratory. The scientific consensus has been that the virus originated in bats, with the genetic makeup of the virus indicating it most likely jumped naturally to an intermediate animal before making the leap to humans. ... While recent analysis of the first 41 known coronavirus patients by The Lancet found 27 of them had a connection to [...a Wuhan wet market....] but the first patient did not, many scientists still maintain the market is by far the most likely source... (MORE - details)

[stryder]

My Personal unproven theories:

The virus was from a lab (The hypothesis that variants of the original SARS strain were likely developed to create further treatments etc) and that it getting out of such a lab wasn't likely an accident nor down to the Chinese government.  (Currently to assume their government was responsible would be like saying the Japanese government was responsible for the 1995 Serin Attack. (wikipedia.org))

There is a further option of someone who's a "Viromaniac" causing it (A bit like a pyromaniac but instead of setting a fire uses viruses in the wild) it has been known that a number of biohack groups have generated a scene over the last 10-15 yrs as hobbiest biologist/biochemists.  If one of those had someone with the right (namely wrong) temperament, then it would be possible for a complete unknown to have created something outside of an official lab.

[Yazata]

I'm currently undecided about whether it originated naturally, jumping from bats to humans in some unhygenic "wet market". Or whether it escaped from one of the Wuhan virology laboratories.

We know that researchers in Wuhan were working on genetically engineering changes in the viruses' protein shells to see whether those changes increased the viruses' ability to jump from one species to another. Their motivation was trying to better understand why some viruses jump species easily and others can't. We know they were working on this because some American researchers were involved in the work and because they published about it. 

At this point, I'm inclined to doubt that its escape from a lab (if that happened, we don't know) was intentional. I'm more inclined to think that it was likely the result of poor lab protocols and sloppy technique.  Recall that there were warnings about poor procedure at these labs before any of this happened.

I'm inclined to give Dearlove some credence, both because of his intelligence connections and because the trouble the authors had getting published illustrates the stranglehold that China has gotten over the Western academic world. Lots of things can get suppressed here, just like in China itself.

So many US and UK universities have invested heavily in opening Chinese branch campuses, and make so much of their revenue from Chinese students studying at the home campuses, that the last thing they want is to kill the golden-egg laying goose by angering China. So there's no doubt lots of institutional pressure on academics to dance to the right tune. Most of Western business is in the same situation, after 20 years in which the drum-beat was always that China was the world's get-rich-quick zone, the world's engine of growth. So countless large corporations invested heavily in China and off-shored much of their manufacturing there, so that now they find themselves dependent on China's good will and reduced to doing China's bidding, to keep the revenues flowing.