The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

Post by iskander » Sun, Jul 19, 2020, 12:58 AM UTC

mleonhard wrote: post #238

iskander wrote: post #229

This is the immunology equivalent of "jet fuel can't melt steel beams". It's embarrassing to see it here, especially in a community with pretensions of bringing "disruption" to biotech. It would take a long time to catalog all the nonsense here but I'll just say that short subsequence (6aa) BLAST is meaningless and this subsequent claim is just word salad: "Such high human similarity also implies a high risk for the…

Would you please explain more clearly?

Post by sudosysgen » Sun, Jul 19, 2020, 2:08 AM UTC

nkurz wrote: post #457

snowwrestler wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a lab in China had been working with this virus at all, they would have had at minimum working cultures of it, and potentially multiple strains and experience modifying them. Cultures alone would have put them ahead of western pharma companies in developing a vaccine—even in the case of an unplanned release. The fact that they’re not ahead is compelling proof that this virus was as new to Chinese medicine as it wa…

> The fact that they’re not ahead is compelling proof that this virus was as new to Chinese medicine as it was to everyone else. I appreciate your argument, but are you sure that they are not ahead? I don't have personal knowledge, but (for example) there was a Reuters article last week with a headline that included that claim "China leads COVID-19 vaccine race": https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-…

Post by heidegger » Sun, Jul 19, 2020, 4:59 AM UTC

Post by bananaface » Sun, Jul 19, 2020, 7:27 AM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #434

bananaface wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not completely true. Some of those pressures still apply to artificial viruses once they're released. Highly dangerous viruses get quarantined, and viruses that produce symptoms quickly (and don't transmit asymptomatically, or have a shorter window) are more obvious. Both of those properties reduce real-world transmissability, which is all that actually matters.

I'd argue that SARS-CoV-2 is very far from the Pareto optimal trade-off in infectivity and virulence. There are viruses that are both more virulent and more infectious.

Post by akvadrako » Sun, Jul 19, 2020, 8:47 AM UTC

salawat wrote: post #191

roenxi wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The scientific community widely agrees that the virus was not artificially engineered. Artificially engineered isn't really the question; the questions are 'is this a lab escape?' and 'if this is a lab escape, did the virus work so well on mammals pre-experiment?'. The scientists have a massive incentive not to believe that the virus is a lab escape until the evidence is overwhelming. This is a global disaster, if…

Thank you. Finally someone else has realized that the scientific community may, in fact, be composed of human beings, an animal that comes baked in with an aversion to making their own life more difficult or jeopardizing the attitude of those around them to their work! You can't look at the set of circumstances that lead up to this, factor in that a lab escape is likely, and make an honest attempt at projecting what…