I found this recent interview with Christian Drosten [1] very interesting, he explains very good scientifically why it is much more probable that the origin is not from a laboratory.
(1) The area where the Nyctereutes spec. (german: Marderhund, I have no idea how it is called in english) where kept, there where a lot of DNA of Nyctereutes and a lot of nucleinacid of SARS II.
(2) From the beginning there a two lines of the corona viruses laboratory-confirmed. From the evolutionary speed of virus mutation it is nearly certain that the separation had to be taken place months before. About 8 times a corona-variation had been aquired by man. From this infection chains 2 virus-types had survived to be confirmed in Wuhan. A person who works in the laboratory would have been working with a clonal virus that is not mutated in that way.
(3) The market is the center of all infections even if you take out everybody that is known to be at the market, not the laboratory.
(4) For the animals at the market a analysis showed that they had been ill/infected (not specifically corona)
These are all separate published aspects that points to the same thing.
The part starts at 2 hours 23 minutes 30 seconds - you have to use auto-translated subtitles which are unfortunately not very good (german language)
there's a 23? bp sequence that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent (which preceded covid-19 by a decade).
now an exact match of that length isn't impossible, but which is more likely? that this managed to be exactly correct on accident? or some grad student was told to just copypasta every furin cleavage site in the database into a GOF library and surprise surprise the most virulent form that became a pandemic came from the sequence that is engineered to be efficient.
any scientist that has any molecular biology wet experience will tell you this is exactly what they would have done (though us researchers would probably not have pulled from the patented BLAST sequences, since that selector is turned off by default by the NCBI)
I wanted to learn more about where this claim comes from and found this article [0].
The linked commentary [1] raises several interesting points.
"Unfortunately, the authors did not provide details of their BLAST research. The patent database that they used contained 24,712 sequences. Yet, by querying BLAST, we obtained a database of 46,121,617 patent sequences with an average length of 560 nucleotides. The authors should give more details and justification for their query, especially if they queried the full database but a posteriori restricted their computation. Of note, with such a large database, and despite the fact that the average sequence length decreased, the probability of finding at least one sequence containing one of the 16 patterns previously mentioned may rise to 68% under assumption 2."
The absence of CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG from any mammalian or viral genome in the BLAST database makes recombination in an intermediate host an unlikely explanation for its presence in SARS-CoV-2. You can verify for yourself that there are no other sequences with an exact match.
The subsequent comment about statistics of blast searching is irrelevant.
So the conclusion of the comment-article cited in the parent of your comment is false?
"According to the current phylogeny, FCS appeared independently six times in the Betacoronavirus lineages, demonstrating that FCS insertion is compatible with natural evolution (2, 7, 8).
[...]
7. Wu Y, Zhao S. Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses. Stem Cell Res (2021) 50:102115. doi: 10.1016/j.scr.2020.102115"
"Unfortunately, the authors did not provide details of their BLAST research. The patent database that they used contained 24,712 sequences. Yet, by querying BLAST, we obtained a database of 46,121,617 patent sequences with an average length of 560 nucleotides."
just do the BLAST yourself and see. it's a publically available database. you will find zero other exact matches. note that today in 2025 there are a shit tonne of sequences that are resequencing of covid variants so you'll have to filter those out
rough estimate worse than 1 in 3^7 (based on # of wobble codons) but its even lower likelihood if you also allow AA variation in the universe of all furin cleavage sites
> there's a 23? bp sequence that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent (which preceded covid-19 by a decade).
could you cite this? not because i'm questioning the statement's credibility, but because i'm curious (and you could save me a lot of time from even knowing where to begin to look for credible information for myself—full disclosure, lol).
A quick summary of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av2Hax3Bg1U
(1) The area where the Nyctereutes spec. (german: Marderhund, I have no idea how it is called in english) where kept, there where a lot of DNA of Nyctereutes and a lot of nucleinacid of SARS II.
(2) From the beginning there a two lines of the corona viruses laboratory-confirmed. From the evolutionary speed of virus mutation it is nearly certain that the separation had to be taken place months before. About 8 times a corona-variation had been aquired by man. From this infection chains 2 virus-types had survived to be confirmed in Wuhan. A person who works in the laboratory would have been working with a clonal virus that is not mutated in that way.
(3) The market is the center of all infections even if you take out everybody that is known to be at the market, not the laboratory.
(4) For the animals at the market a analysis showed that they had been ill/infected (not specifically corona)
These are all separate published aspects that points to the same thing.
The part starts at 2 hours 23 minutes 30 seconds - you have to use auto-translated subtitles which are unfortunately not very good (german language)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Drosten
edit: grammar