VetusLignum wrote:Adrien (ex-nico239) wrote:Here it will please Vetus
"The question of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 arises seriously"Almost a year after the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was identified, researchers still have not determined how it may have been transmitted to humans. Virologist Étienne Decroly takes stock of the various hypotheses, including that of the accidental escape of a laboratory.
Yes, you got me a few minutes ahead of me.
It's good to see that the lines are finally moving.
On the other hand, I do not agree with the criticism that this article makes of Montagnier / Perez's thesis. The article says:
Their results show that three of the four insertions observed in SARS-CoV-2 are each found in older strains of coronavirus. [...] The 4th insertion remains which reveals a furin proteolysis site in SARS-CoV-2 absent in the rest of the SARS-CoV family. It cannot therefore be ruled out that this insertion results from experiments aimed at allowing an animal virus to pass the species barrier to humans, since it is well known that this type of insertion plays a key role in the spread of many viruses in humans.
Now, it seems to me that Montagnier / Perez say roughly the same thing:
it appears that 14 of the 18 HIV / SIV EIE existed - already - from the first human SARS genomes that appeared in China around 2003. However,
a novel long region of around 225 nucleotides, less than 1% of the genome, appears to us to have been inserted: This region
is completely absent in all SARS genomes, whereas it is present and 100% homologous for all COVID-19 genomes listed in NCBI
https://zenodo.org/record/3975578#.X5i5mu3LfIU
Basically, and even though there is an inconsistency in the numbers, Montagnier / Perez do not deny that some of these insertions were already present on older strains of coronavirus. In fact, I think his criticism of Montagnier / Perez is not about their thesis, but about the popularizations / simplifications that have been made of them.