It’s been sequenced in dozens, if not hundreds, of labs. That’s why they are able to say that New York was probably infected from Europe, not directly from China.
And according to articles i read very early in the pandemic (and no longer remember where I read them) none of the sequenced viruses had the “tells” that man-made generic sequences have with it current gene-editing tools.
So i think it’s extremely unlikely that it’s man-made. And there are lots of bats out there. I don’t think it’s at all surprising that they haven’t found this precise virus in a wild animal.
Well, I read her (first) paper just now. Guess I’ll wait for others to tell me what I think about it. I don’t expect to be particularly compelled, but I’m certainly keeping my ears open.
If it was completely man-made, there are cloning sequences for designing the genome that you can look for. So, unless they took the time to “cover their tracks”, those sequences would be there.
Alternatively, they could have been studying the evolution of real coronaviruses in the lab. If someone from the lab got infected, they could spread it outside. In that case, I assume it would look like a natural coronavirus. The lab director in Wuhan said none of the current strains match the strains they were working on. I suppose she’s lying but China has now traced the origin outside of Wuhan. I suppose they’re lying. For all we know, the lady in the video is Falun Gong or some other dissident with an understandable axe to grind. Doesn’t mean it’s true. So again, if China’s hiding something, this lady needs to pony up and give an independent lab the virus.
Actually, that’s a good point. Even if this was a virus that was slightly different than the ones we have now, how can she prove it came from a lab and not a person? Nope, she’s got nothin’.
I’m curious how many people there are in the world who know how to identify those cloning sequences. This seems like quite a niche field. I can’t say that I have my mind fully wrapped around what it is they do at those gain-of-function labs, though, or exactly why they do it.
Building genomes or parts of genomes is extremely common. So much so that you can buy kits to do it.
If you really wanted to hide your tracks you could do these nested polymerase chain reactions to create sequences whole cloth. I haven’t been doing research in a long time, so I don’t know what people can currently do. However, you’d have to make it look like a virus that evolved naturally.
You could also take a current virus and speed up natural selection in the lab. That’s what I’m calling a natural virus that’s being studied in the lab. Again, this is not unusual for microbial research since you can easily put pressure on your microbes to mutate. The hard part is getting what you want on purpose : human to human transmission. That you’d have to test and even on animals requires a research program. I suspect that this is what they’re studying in the Wuhan lab they say none of their strains escaped.
“A new study purporting to show that the novel coronavirus was manufactured in a Chinese lab was published by a pair of nonprofit groups linked to Steve Bannon, the former top Trump strategist now facing felony fraud charges.”
… Data from initial outbreaks in China, New York City, and Washington state suggested that 20 to 30 percent of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 showed signs of cardiac injury.
That these patients tended to get sicker and died more often than patients without cardiac complications didn’t set off immediate alarm bells. These were, after all, people with serious cases of Covid-19—serious enough to wind up in the hospital. Most people who contract the virus experience a spectrum of less-severe symptoms. As many as one in three never feel sick. But now, evidence is emerging that the virus can cause heart damage even in people who’ve had mild symptoms or none at all, especially if those people exercise while they’re infected.
…
And these problems don’t just affect athletes. A larger observational study conducted in Germany earlier this summer followed 100 non-athlete Covid-19 patients and found lingering heart inflammation and other cardiac abnormalities in 78 of them. According to Eric Topol, a US-based cardiologist who corresponded with the study’s authors, 12 of those people had no symptoms of Covid-19 at all. And while the study was later corrected for statistical errors, its authors confirmed that the main conclusions still stood: Even a mild course of Covid-19 could harm the heart.
…
My bold.
This is way scary news. What if you keep exercising, but you don’t know you have COVID? Right.
Ah I see, interesting, thanks. Not that I’m the slightest bit surprised at this, given the story was, at first, sourced only from youtube and an Indian newspaper, and nowhere else, hence more ‘sniffing out’ certainly coming to eventual light.
[quote] from link:
The study is the work of the Rule of Law Society and the Rule of Law Foundation, sister nonprofit organizations that Bannon was instrumental in creating. According to documents posted on the Society’s website last year, he served as that group’s chair. The Bannon connection was first spotted by Kevin Bird, a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University, and shared by Carl Bergstrom, a biology professor at the University of Washington, who called the study “bizarre and unfounded.” [/quote]
ETA: scratching my head as to how that quote didn’t come out boxed.