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View submission: Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
The paper you cite specifically says these bat viruses lack the furin cleavage site found in SARS-CoV-2– a type of cleavage site that allows a virus to enter human cells more easily.
Comment by Independent-Rip-4373 at 19/01/2025 at 16:29 UTC*
6 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I didn’t cite the paper; you did. Lots of work has been done since 2022 when it was published. Conspiracy theories aside, there isn’t much reason to assume the furin adaptation wasn’t a natural evolution of a bat virus that entered humans. There’s also this (not yet peer-reviewed) preprint [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.24.24319568v1] on wastewater COVID that hints at an initial human gastrointestinal entry (the wild bat virus is gastrointestinal in bats too; not respiratory) and then evolved into a respiratory virus in humans.
Again, there will likely never be a smoking gun, but the right has a conspiracy theory in search of facts, while virology scientists are still very focused on the “how” of zoonotic transmission.