Without wanting to or being able to contradict the article, some of it sounds like the creationists.
Because we cannot fully explain evolution, we do not know all the ancestors and the result is so complex, there must be a creator.
I hear exactly the same argumentation from creationists when it comes to the development of the human eye, for example.
Lab Leak 2.0?
81–90 of 319 posts
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#82None of these Substack-based lab-leak hysteria pieces ever address "so what?" I see nothing here to convince me that Omicron is a lab leak as opposed to an animal reservoir, where the author includes "seems to have come from mice" as evidence for the former and not the latter, which is confused. Regardless, there is nothing actionable about any origin theory aside from "be mad at some unnamed scientist" or, as some o…
>stop researching gain of function entirely? Yes
Seriously. The incentive for these researchers is awful. Their goal is to take a virus that maybe isn’t a threat and find a way to manipulate it to see how it could be a threat if it somehow naturally mutated into some specific otherwise engineered form. It’s the only way to justify their job. No one will subsidize researchers who come up with “nothing to see here”.
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#83[deleted]
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#84Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#85If any of this is true, and I don't have enough brain power to decipher if it is or is not, would it be at least in the realm of possibility that Omicron was not an accidental leak; perhaps, rather, a deliberate one, to counteract the original (and Delta variant's) virulence and impact?
We know that the virus is likely to continue to mutate in the wild, on its own - and that the virus in the wild has upended our way of life with great economic costs. Is this a viable path way to introduce widespread natural immunity? Omicron introduces mutations with extremely high contagious properties but very mild virulence. In one swoop, you expose vaccine-hesitant and developing nations to a virus they're likely to survive, help inoculate them against future mutations and outcompete the dominate strains such that the human race is somewhat protected against future infections.
In effect, you kind of "undo" the original mistake.
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#86This is Alina Chan, one of the co-authors of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. In defense of a natural origin of Omicron, this study describes the remarkable evolution of SARS-CoV-2 during convalescent plasma treatment of an immunosuppressed patient for 3-4 months; the mutations also reduced sensitivity to neutralizing antibodies: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03291-y We know that there is a…
Can you also comment on her claim that Delta was a lab leak?
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
A blog post full of wild speculation, whose main sources appear to be a bunch of Twitter threads. Have we not learned anything in the past two years?
Seems like a cheap shot to me. Does twitter as a communication medium somehow invalidate what was being said? One quoted thread was from "Tony VanDongen, an associate professor of pharmacology and cancer biology at Duke" Seems like a reasonably valid opinion from someone with a clue. He's addressing specifically why Omicron is weird, and doesn't look like a normal evolution of COVID-19. Another is from "Scott Ferguso…
> Does twitter as a communication medium somehow invalidate what was being said?
Pretty much. Serious people discussing serious things don’t use Twitter as their communication medium.
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#88I'm open minded, but my bullshit detectors started going off around the point where it was casually implied that we all know and it is widely accepted that delta was leaked from a lab. I tried googling it but could find nothing. Then I looked at the two sources the author links: > https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4371212 > https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4382708 Neither of these have nearly enough evidence…
I had never heard that before either. I remember multiple sources saying the discovery originated in India. I think an essay that represents surprising information as obvious is usually a good indicator of bias.
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#89What if it was engineered in the lab to be LESS lethal and severe, so it could finally end COVID 19?
That's a dangerous gamble which cannot be put back in the box in the event that it fails to be less dangerous. Like throwing a enormous amounts of sulfur in the atmosphere to take out CO2. It's the sort of decision that would have to be taken by isolated group or nation on behalf of the rest of humanity despite potentially catastrophic unintended consequences. Maybe the result will be that it's a "less dangerous than Delta collective immunizer", but I wouldn't be thrilled if it's an intended variant (even if a lab leak isn't much more reassuring).
I'm also unclear how such researchers could come to the conclusion that it is less dangerous and more contagious with humanized mice considering it is the result (AFAIU) of it contaminating and replicating in the airways rather than the lungs. I'd be curious for someone more informed than me (an ecologist with very superficial understanding of viruses and studies in mice), but if I'm correct that lung vs. airway contamination isn't quite replicable in humanized mice vs. humans, intentional "alter and release" seems dubious.
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#90This is Alina Chan, one of the co-authors of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. In defense of a natural origin of Omicron, this study describes the remarkable evolution of SARS-CoV-2 during convalescent plasma treatment of an immunosuppressed patient for 3-4 months; the mutations also reduced sensitivity to neutralizing antibodies: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03291-y We know that there is a…
Another thing that the blog post appears to be unaware of is that the absence of samples showing the step-by-step evolution towards omicron doesn't mean that this didn't happen. A lot of places in the world don't have the resources to do covid testing and genomic surveillance.
And even if they did do genomic analysis - it's entirely plausible the results are sitting in a hospital database somewhere instead of uploaded to the international gene surveillance repository.