Originally Posted by rickair7777

Yeah, gain-of-function research is the biology equivalent of enriching uranium... if you're going to do it at all, it needs to be VERY tightly controlled. Probably best not to do it at all.

Everything I've seen has indicated that there was NO genetic engineering evident on covid. If it was engineered, there would be obvious signs, we don't have the technology to do that kind of "surgery" without leaving obvious genetic scars and loose ends.

Now it could have been selectively bred in a lab without leaving any structural signs of manipulation... the only way you'd know would be to examine it and make a judgement call as to the likely-hood that it *could* have evolved in nature due to natural evolutionary pressure. If somebody selectively bred a wolf to have a slightly different fur color, you couldn't really say that it couldn't have happened in nature... but if somebody bred a wolf to look like a poodle, then you know just by examining it that it had some help along the way. If covid is pretty similar to a wolf (it appears to be), then it's hard to know for sure that it was bred to be something different.