Nobel-Winning Virologist Eats Wuhan Crow
Not quite, but David Baltimore backs off claims of Wuhan smoking gun….
Smoking guns everywhere…
A few weeks ago a former journalist Nicholas Wade penned a long conspiracy “theory” pointing fingers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for a possible lab leak causing the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wade quoted the Nobel-prize-winning virologist Baltimore in his piece:
“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said.
Let’s reholster that smoking gun…
Kristian Andersen is a Ph.D. virologist who early in 2020 wrote an important Nature Letters paper showing that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was most likely a naturally derived virus and not engineered in a lab. Andersen responded to Baltimore’s smoking gun comment with some very specific tweets firmly debunking the smoke from any guns:
The furin cleavage site (FCS) / polybasic cleavage site is present in SARS-CoV-2 at the S1/S2…
