61–70 of 578 posts
But then, we should probably also apply Hanlon's razor [2] "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The China aspect is probably a red herring. Gain-of-function research was internationally funded, including by the US. The perils had been pointed out for years by virologists [1], some of whom managed to get an editorial in the New York Times against it [2]. If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if ), the nation or lab it happened in is just the proximate cause. Deeper responsibility would lie with t…
> If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if), It seems like we don't have evidence, but the natural evolutionary experiment that's occurred provides a staggering amount. We can see from the virus phylogeny that: 1. The virus entered the human population in October 2019. All known SARS2 sequences are related in a single clade that, under very soft assumptions about mutation rate, would coalesce in late…
This is untrue. I'd point to this quote:
“It’s pretty apparent that there’s this evolutionary arms race between the receptor binding domain and ACE2 that’s happening within the bats themselves,” says Tyler Starr, a postdoc in the lab of genome scientist Jesse Bloom at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “Whatever it’s doing is ratcheting up this evolution and sometimes spitting out things that can bind potentially to many different ACE2s, including ours.”[1]
The unique thing about COVID is the transmission and the long incubation time.
There are plenty of naturally occurring mutations that have occurred that are more contagious than COVID (AIDS R0=~4.5, Ebola=~2.5 are two major ones that spring to mind). And SARS1 had a very similar binding behaviour, and the jumping behavior via civets is very similar to COVID.
[1] https://cen.acs.org/biological-chemistry/infectious-disease/...
Something which hasn't been able to be answered for me on this yet: Where are all the bats infected with this virus? It it came from a bat, it would have had to be circulating in the bat population a LOT to mutate enough to jump to humans, right? So...why not go find a bad, identify the parent virus, and close this whole thing out?
The bats , horseshoe bats, located in caves approximately a thousand kilometers away have often carried these viruses. [0] And at least 6 times since the year 2000 the collection of these bats have led to humans getting sick. It just takes some fecal matter dust. So a very likely explanation is some low level employees grabbed some bats, got their suits and vehicles contaminated didn't clean things properly, drove do…
Also, my understanding (quite possibly wrong) is that while humans can get sick from bats, as cave workers did in Southern China, those viruses aren't contagious in the sense that the sick humans go on to infect others. "Since no case of an epidemic caused by direct bat-to-human transmission has yet been demonstrated, it is thought that the transfer to humans more probably took place via an intermediate host species in which the virus could evolve and move towards forms likely to infect human cells." [1] If that's right then your explanation of spilled bat samples is incomplete: it doesn't explain what caused the bat samples to adapt into a form that could spread among humans. That sort of puts us back at square 1. Another way of saying this is that if your explanation is likely, then we'd have expected the pandemic to have started where the bats are - through sick cave workers or something similar. But in fact it started far away.
[1] https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-is-be...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a bit confusing because the OP makes an opposite point: "The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months."
In 2003 it was merely suspected that covers were the intermediate. It wasn't confirmed until 2006. Read further down: "In late 2006, scientists from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention of Hong Kong University and the Guangzhou Centre for Disease Control and Prevention established a genetic link between the SARS coronavirus appearing in civets and humans, bearing out claims that the disease had jumpe…
Something which hasn't been able to be answered for me on this yet: Where are all the bats infected with this virus? It it came from a bat, it would have had to be circulating in the bat population a LOT to mutate enough to jump to humans, right? So...why not go find a bad, identify the parent virus, and close this whole thing out?
The bats , horseshoe bats, located in caves approximately a thousand kilometers away have often carried these viruses. [0] And at least 6 times since the year 2000 the collection of these bats have led to humans getting sick. It just takes some fecal matter dust. So a very likely explanation is some low level employees grabbed some bats, got their suits and vehicles contaminated didn't clean things properly, drove do…
The leader of the Wuhan team went there with a team to collect samples and animals. In the early days of Covid, those samples were re-examined and it turned out that the genome of the Covid strain was very similar to the Covid 19 virus. So the conclusion was taken that those bats must have been the origin where Corona somehow started. Somehow nobody at that time thought much about the fact that those samples were kept in Wuhan, exactly where the outbreak started.
More than a year after the initial documented cases in Wuhan, the source of SARS-CoV-2 has yet to be identified, and the search for a direct or intermediate host in nature has been so far unsuccessful.
The low binding affinity of SARS-CoV-2 to bat ACE2 studied to date does not support Chiroptera as a direct zoonotic agent. Furthermore, the reliance on pangolin coronavirus receptor binding domain (RBD) similarity to SARS-CoV-2 as evidence for natural zoonotic spillover is flawed, as pangolins are unlikely to play a role in SARS-CoV-2′s origin and recombination is not supported by recent analysis.
At the same time, genomic analyses pointed out that SARS-CoV-2 exhibits multiple peculiar characteristics not found in other Sarbecoviruses.
A novel multibasic furin cleavage site (FCS) confers numerous pathogenetically advantageous capabilities, the existence of which is difficult to explain though natural evolution...
source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01211-0
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, it's directly relevant: the man regurgitates tired, bad science to justify a racist worldview. His trustworthiness in this domain is compromised.
I only care about one thing whether that virus came out as the result of aforementioned research. I could not care less about author's worldview and whether he eats babies for breakfast.
Then you should read what scientists write, not science journalists. If you can't actually understand the science, which is perfectly reasonable given that most of us are laymen, you can read scientific journalists, but then you need to acknowledge that you operate on trust, which would mean you need to take the authors biases into account, and don't pretend you 'only care about the science'.
Wade has been widely criticized on mistakes in scientific accuracy have been pointed out concerning his last books on genetics and race, and he appeared to have some sort of ideological axe to grind. The same may very well be the case here.
It's trivial to misrepresent science in subtle ways to tilt a discussion one way or the other on controversial issues such as this, so author credibility matters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if), It seems like we don't have evidence, but the natural evolutionary experiment that's occurred provides a staggering amount. We can see from the virus phylogeny that: 1. The virus entered the human population in October 2019. All known SARS2 sequences are related in a single clade that, under very soft assumptions about mutation rate, would coalesce in late…
> What is the probability of this pattern occuring in the case of a natural spillover? It's 1:atoms-in-the universe level. This is untrue. I'd point to this quote: “It’s pretty apparent that there’s this evolutionary arms race between the receptor binding domain and ACE2 that’s happening within the bats themselves,” says Tyler Starr, a postdoc in the lab of genome scientist Jesse Bloom at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Resea…
https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-is-be...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's important to know and it's important not to know. Both paths have mostly negative outcomes. The best path is for it to have been natural, second best is accidental. Intentional is unfathomable and has unlimited downside. We should all hope that's not the case here.
+1, the truth is not important at all. The most scary path would be intentional. I can't think of any other aftermath except for WWIII.
More likely result is that most of the world would stop trading with them. Nobody would want to see a Made in China tag on anything. Which would in turn be very bad for the economy in China and lead to unrest.
So the more likely outcome would be civil war in China.