Honestly it makes sense to me. We’ve seen other sicknesses come from pigs (Swine Flu) and chickens (Bird Flu) and SARS was suspected to come from civets and/or bats. There’s a trend there, where once those switch species they are really hard for humans to deal with.
Even HIV started in chimpanzees.
This is like saying that it isn’t the bullet through your chest that causes a sucking chest wound, it is the hole it leaves that allows blood to flow out and air to enter in.
Not only that, but it is directly contradicted by data from genetic analysis. SARS-CoV-2 does undergo antigenic drift in human hosts; we know this by the same methods we know that it the original “wild-type” virus underwent a zoonotic spillover from bats to humans.
Stranger
You got it! COVID is actually infectious dark matter. It’s why astronomers never detected COVID before the pandemic–their telescopes can’t see dark matter! The Wuhan lab is a cover story. The real infections started at the local observatory, which is so secret it’s not on the maps.
See, everyone is talking about the Wuhan lab.
Nobody is talking about the Wuhan observatory. You are totally correct here.
Why not? Why not, huh?! The cover-up goes DEEP. The space origin for this virus is being totally obfuscated.
I expect both you and I to soon vanish. I don’t think I will get the shielding on my trailer done fast enough before they are able to find me.
I hope y’all bought a ticket to the circus, because you are about to see a monkey backpedal furiously.
My background in molecular bio consist of a batchelors degree in said degree and then a job as a lab manager of a veterinary research lab. Nucleic acid vaccines for dogs. Parvo. DNA based. Didn’t work.
THAT said I did what I always too frequently do is go too far out on a limb here. I get pissed off about something or other and then I post. In this case, I’m just annoyed with how humans in general, not necessarily scientists, always assume that things have an outside source. There is very good evidence that COVID came from bats, but where did the bats get it from?
That’s really what I want people to think about. There are near eight billion mammals on the planet described as humans. Why do we always, excuse me, why do we ususally assume we are not the resevoir?
Turtles.
Where did the turtles get it from?
It’s turtles all the way down.
I don’t think that’s true. I think we assume we’re not the reservoir when there is evidence that we aren’t.
New theory: Cohen the Barbarian bit a big, big turtle and we all suffer because of it.
If humans had been carrying around a sars-cov-2 precursor it seems likely it would already have been sequenced and known, so that when the pandemic started and comparisons were made the researchers would have gone “hey this looks like coronaviruses we’ve seen in humans before” instead of “hey this looks the most like coronaviruses we’ve sequenced in bats and pangolins”.
And if I’m wrong, and current virus research just isn’t up to noticing non-disease causing viruses endemic in human populations, surely the research happening since the pandemic started would have turned up a virus that appeared to be the ancestor of all of the pandemic strains, but only sat around in people waiting for a chance to be murderous?
I assume it’s possible that a human gave a bat a disease, it mutated between the bats, and came back to humans but it would still be the bat portion of the history that was more important.
If the key changes started with a human then you’d have to ask how it mutated so distantly from other human coronaviruses and how that human managed to only give it to bats? We’d be looking at a scenario where we’re talking about a lone person who catches a cold, moves to a deeply radioactive island full of bats, has his cold mutate rapidly before he’s able to recover from the sickness, the bats bite him, and then someone comes to the island, grabs the bats, freezes them, and brings them to Wuhan.
Maybe that’s possible but it’s just terribly outlandish. A lot of very unlikely things have to happen all within about a two week period.
Stranger on a train said “This is like saying that it isn’t the bullet through your chest that causes a sucking chest wound, it is the hole it leaves that allows blood to flow out and air to enter in.”
Yes, you’re an idiot because you don’t get this, but that’s not a bad analogy.
Oh, we’re doing personal insults now. Okay, well, the thickness of your wit is exceeded only by the impenetrability of your intellect to fact or reason. If your stool is loose, check the drainage of your cranium. It is fortunate that you were dropped upon your head at birth because it saved your most valuable cognitive asset for seating cushion. You are as plentiful in credulity as you are poor in cognition, and are as able a delusional sophist as a bear is in timberland defecation. It has been said that some “have not so much brain as ear-wax”, but you intellect would be manifestly improved with a lack of aural hygiene.
I would engage in more banter with you at a coin per exchange but I fear you are already bankrupt.
Stranger
Stranger, seriously. no lie, that was funny.
You are close. Remember 'Oumuamua? It entered our solar system in 2017, shredded particles like a dog shaking off water, changed course and left. Then COVID happened. Coincidence? I think not!
Not offering this as a hypothesis, merely more pulled-from-ass speculation: could it be that we don’t generally pay any goddamned attention to which bats have the sniffles?
Diseases in the human reservoir get names. Not only do we deeply study the differences between influenza and rhinovirus, we know all sorts of different subcategories of each one and hihgly technical tests and ongoing research programs into treating them and tracking their spread.
But we only notice bat diseases when the bats all die off.
(Of course there are wildlife epidemiologists out there, don’t get me wrong. It’s just they’re not exactly as well funded as human epidemiologists).
So when a new disease strikes, it’s way likelier that it’s been spreading, unnoticed, in a wild population than in a human population–not because of the size of the population, but because of that word “unnoticed.”
I wrote this years ago, and I’ve learned much since. But you know, I wasn’t wrong. You can not look me in the eye and tell me, truthfully, that the Delta variant of COVID came from anything other than humans.
You were wrong. I am looking you in the eye and telling you truthfully that SARS-CoV-2 did not originate in humans, which was your prior claim. Your claim was analogous to asserting without evidence that a banana in your hand came from an apple tree.
What happened after it crossed into humans is that it subsequently mutated in humans into different strains - that much is certainly true. The Delta variant evolved from a prior form of SARS-CoV-2 in humans, yes.
But you seem to be working from a flawed assumption that things can puff into existence without us having any clear idea where they came from. Molecular phylogenetic involves sequencing the DNA of organisms to deduce their evolutionary past. It does not have infinite precision, but it is extremely accurate. We don’t have complete certainty about the reservoir, but we have a bat coronavirus with 97% sequence similarity. Even though it’s not the direct ancestor, it shares a recent common ancestor.
I mean, it wasn’t completely wrong. There are a lot of coronaviruses out there, some of which have been in humans for quite a while, and in fact some non-negligible percentage of “common colds” are caused by some of those coronaviruses. And the covid-19 virus is more closely related to those human coronaviruses than it is to, say, influenza or rhinovirus.
It’s just that it’s even closer yet to coronaviruses found in bats and pangolins. And sure, if you trace back the ancestry of those viruses, maybe at some point you get to some other virus that was in humans. Certainly, if you trace the bat, pangolin, and human coronaviruses back, eventually you get to some common ancestor or another (though who knows what that virus’s preferred host was).
But its unlikely in the extreme that SARS-CoV2-2019’s ancestors of 2018 were found in humans.
Why bump a zombie thread after more than a year to brag about how you were still almost entirely wrong?
If it was left at that, kudos for admitting it. But then to try to say you were somewhat validated in hindsight (narrator: you weren’t) as a sort of defense?
This goes back to that old saying - better to stay silent and be thought a fool than open your mouth and confirm it.
Why bump a zombie thread? Because I’m back from the dead. Zoonoses are a real thing, but… I was never really happy with the “let’s blame bats!” thing. There are BILLIONS of viruses out there. I once worked with a woman from South Africa that gave a talk about a virus that killed big cats. Bad for Lions. That thing was also found in pretty much all mammals, even the fucking blue whale! That’s kinda my point, here.
COVID is a human virus. We are its’ reservoir. If you think about it, you KNOW that. It may have started out as something else, as all biological things do, but the damn thing is a human virus. This thing doesn’t kill dogs, cats, cattle, bats, lizards, frogs, etc. (well, at least not much). Humans are the reservoir! You KNOW that! Humans are the carriers of this thing.