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Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

sciencemag.org

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Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#221

Post by NicoJuicy »

throw876545 wrote: post #147
mustachionut wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From a fake account? No. From a new, anonymous account where I intend to post my opinions without them being tied to my identity. At least until I post enough for stylometric analysis to work...

Unfortunately, saying rational things about China—instead of demonizing it—can be seen as defending the Chinese government and bring a lot of grief in this current “Yellow Peril” environment.

A new account is the same as a fake account. I didn't see any reason for not tieing it to a identity. I express my opinions also, only if it is really sensitive I would use a throw away. I think being pro/contra China is not that sensitive, except if you are in China and contra.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#222

Post by throwaway41968 »

aguyfromnb wrote: post #214
throwaway41968 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing a bunch of point mutations that "look" like a normal evolutionary process seems awfully expensive just to engineer a virus that's less threatening than, you know, the flu.

> a virus that's less threatening than, you know, the flu. How can you say this as fact when we don't even know the morbidity rate of the coronavirus? The story isn't over yet, but it looks like it could be twice as deadly as influenza.

Bet you $500 it won't.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#223

Post by manicdee »

joshbaptiste wrote: post #208
_-___________-_ wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one would engineer a virus, surely one would make it more dangerous than this?

I thought of that too, than my tinfoil hat went further on thinking that maybe this is just a QA test, a mild version of the pathogen released to see how far it spreads to fine tune the "production" version.

Or to stress test various nations’ biological controls with a “safe” virus that shouldn’t backfire and destroy the creator.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#225

Post by Accujack »

aguyfromnb wrote: post #195
svara wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of days ago I posted a link to the BLASTN sequence alignment between the 2003 SARS virus and the Wuhan virus in a comment on one of the other discussions here. You can see they are closely related, at about 88% sequence identity. There are point mutations spread more or less evenly over the entire genome. This is how evolution works on genomes, and basically rules out genetic engineering, since researchers w…

> This is how evolution works on genomes, and basically rules out genetic engineering, since researchers would perform specific localized changes to specific proteins, or contiguous insertions of genetic material from evolutionarily distant sources. Honest question: if this is common knowledge of people in the field, why wouldn't people genetically engineering a virus (and trying to hide it) do so in a fashion to mak…

Given that modifying an RNA virus to obtain specific results from an infection is very hard to begin with, also working with the limitation that your changes to the virus have to look "natural" makes it essentially impossible by being impractical.

On top of that, there's no reason to do it for a military weapon. For military use you don't infect a few people and hope it spreads, you infect a whole bunch and hope the whole thing spreads quickly enough that the virus can't be stopped, and it overwhelms an entire population by incapacitating or killing them.

Dispersing virus over a significant fraction of a population isn't easy or quiet, so whether it's a natural disease or GMO doesn't matter, because they'll know who did it.

The only scenario in which it makes sense to evolve a genetically engineered weapon in a way that hides its origins is for bioterrorism... and bioterrorism is very rare because it's a lot harder technically than terrorism that consists of shooting up a military base or running an exploding motorboat into a ship.

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