stockmule, Your certainty as regards a conspiratorial vein of thought is confusing. What you and Wade say could be true, HOWEVER, at this point in time the great preponderance of evidence says it is most likely not the case. So i ask you WHY do you take a position of certainty in the face of the evidence at hand??
"How about we stop creating and doing gain of function ourselves."
Why do you take that position in contradiction of the weight of evidence??? Is it that you see all experts as Fauci and Shi Zhengli and most all others as all part of the conspiracy. See:
A US researcher who worked with a Wuhan virology lab gives 4 reasons why a coronavirus leak would be extremely unlikely "Trump Officials Are Said to Press Spies to Link Virus and Wuhan Labs [...] Reason 1: The lab’s samples don’t match the new coronavirus [...] Reason 2: The lab implements rigorous safety protocols [...] Reason 3: The coronavirus is the latest in a long line of zoonotic disease outbreaks [...] Reason 4: Everyday people are more likely to get infected than researchers who wear protection [...] Eroding confidence between US and Chinese researchers P - Yuan Zhiming, director of the WIV’s biosafety laboratory, told Reuters .. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-lab/china-lab-rejects-covid-19-conspiracy-claims-but-virus-origins-still-a-mystery-idUSKCN22A0MM .. that “malicious” claims about the lab had been “pulled out of thin air” and contradicted all available evidence. P - The persistent circulation of the lab-leak theory could impact future scientific cooperation and information sharing between the US and China, according to Mazet. P - “What’s happening sociologically right now is our biggest risk -who’s going to want to work on this if they’re the ones put under a microscope?” Mazet said. “I think the real danger of what’s going on now is that experts like Shi and myself may not be able to keep collaborating to identify these viruses because of government pressures.” Mazet said. P - [Read because of pressure arising out of Trump's grasping what is now an evidence-free conspiracy theory in an effort to win reelection.] https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=155411495
conix, This "There’s no conclusive evidence that any of the changes were made for sinister reasons." says almost it all. "What is China covering up about the coronavirus?" After pushing an unfounded anti-China conspiracy theory, and smearing a renowned scientist the most-not-divine, but dishonest Miranda Devine says the above. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=155503529
stockmule, Lab leak conspiracy theory rears its ugly head again: this time it's Nicholas Wade of the New York TImes.
"How about we stop creating..." Good idea.
Laurence A. Moran Larry Moran is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. You can contact him by looking up his email address on the University of Toronto website.
Nicholas Wade claims that the virologists at the WIV, led by Dr. Shi, created the SARS-CoV-2 virus by genetic engineering. Their goal, according to Wade, was to make a virus that was as deadly to humans as possible in order to study its effects in the lab. Unfortunately, the virus escaped from the lab, according to Wade, and started the pandemic.
Shi Zhengli responded to those silly accusations in July 2020 [Wuhan coronavirus hunter Shi Zhengli speaks out https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6503/487 ]. -- On 15 July, Shi emailed Science answers to a series of questions about the virus' origin and her research. In them, she hit back at speculation that the virus leaked from WIV. She and her colleagues discovered the virus in late 2019, she says, in samples from patients who had a pneumonia of unknown origin. “Before that, we had never been in contact with or studied this virus, nor did we know of its existence,” Shi wrote.
“U.S. President Trump's claim that SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from our institute totally contradicts the facts,” she added. “It jeopardizes and affects our academic work and personal life. He owes us an apology.” -- Why is this a conspriacy theory? Because the speculation has been investigated by WHO scientists who found no evidence to support it. They saw that the lab protocols at the Institute were very good, as you would expect for a world class lab that was studying dangerous viruses that were known to cause pandemics. Futhermore, none of the workers at the lab tested postive for COVID-19 and none of them were studying any virus that resembled SARS-CoV-19. So, in order for the lab leak hypothesis to be true there has to have been a massive coverup by a very large number of people. That's what makes it a conspriacy theory.
Nicholas Wade gets a lot of his information from Richard Ebright who has been promoting the lab leak conspiracy theory for the past year. Ebright thinks the WHO investigators "... were willing—and in at least one case, enthusiastic—participants in disinformation" [An Interview with Richard Ebright: The WHO Investigation Members Were “participants in disinformation” .. https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/an-interview-with-richard-ebright-anthony-fauci-francis-collins-systematically-thwarted/ ]. This is classic conspiracy theory stuff: everyone who disagrees with you is part of the conspiracy.
If you still think the lab leak conspiracy theory is true then I urge you to watch this video of a talk by Professor Edward ("Eddy") Holmes, the 2020 New South Wales (Australia) scientist of the year and an expert on human viruses, especially the coronoviruses [The Discovery and Origins of SARS-CoV-2 .. https://attend.mediahouse.com.au/breakfast-series/view/Professor-Edward-Holmes?fbclid=IwAR2efILgF9hD3jCQRR48VqtvvYt4mmj7sVmHqS9bEaqicbYI94RPm4Hx5aA ]. He explains why the viruses are likely to orginate in bats and explains why this particular virus started off in bats but probably passed though an intermediate host before reaching humans. (His preferred intermediate host is racoon dogs and he explains why he thinks this is likely.) He explains why the sequence of the virus is entrely consistent with a natural origin. He describes his field work in China and Southeast Asia and his collaborations with the expert scientists in China, including those at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Holmes, addreses the conspiracy theory at 41:45 minutes into the talk so you can skip rght to there if you like—although I don't recommend it because there's lots of useful information in the first 40 minutes. Here's why he rejects that cosnspiracy theory and why you should too. These are the facts, according to Holmes. I agree with him.
* There's "no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is engineered (and no reason to bioengineer a random bat virus)." Holmes calls this idea is "absolute nonsense." I'm guessing he won't be a fan of Nicholas Wade's article.
* "Bat virus RaTG13 is not the direct ancestor of SAR-CoV-2—all the components of the virus exist in nature."
* "No evidence of a secret SARS-CoV-2-like virus kept at the WIV (and no reason to keep it a secret before the pandemic)." The scientists at WIV say that they were not studying such a viruse and Holmes says, "Frankly, I believe them." Nicholas Wade thinks they are lying but offers no proof and no reason to justify the lie.
* The SARS-CoV-2 virus is probably not directly from bats and WIV was only studying bat viruses. Furthermore, the virus is probably not from Yunnan province where the Wuhan Institute of Virology is located.
* "SARS-CoV-2 was not perfectly adapted to humans on first emergence and appears to be a "generalist" virus." Nicholas Wade is wrong about this as well.
* "Cases near WIV only appeared later in the outbreak." The first cases in Wuhan appear in the market, specifically in the area where live animals are sold. This strongly suggests that the virus came from animals in the market and that it originated in those animals somewhere else. There were cases in December 2019 that were not linked to the market but they were nowhere near the WIV.
* "No evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection at WIH—staff were PCR/antibody negative." Holmes says that if this is true then that rules out the lab leak hypothesis automatically. He's says that either this is the biggest coverup in history and they're all lying or there's no evidence at all that the virus was ever in the lab. He concludes that the virus did not come from the lab but he's sure that the conspiracy theory is not going to go away anytime soon.
Holmes is right. The conspiracy theory is not going away because its proponents think that all Chinese are evil and can't be trusted. Those conspiracy believers are wrong. Please don't spread this ridiculous idea; it makes you no better than QAnon cultists.
If you're really interested in the facts then there are several articles on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 that you should read before falling for the lab leak conspiracy thoery. Here's one.
------ MacLean, O.A., Lytras, S., Weaver, S., Singer, J.B., Boni, M.F., Lemey, P., Pond, S.L.K. and Robertson, D.L. (2021) Natural selection in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in bats created a generalist virus and highly capable human pathogen. PLoS Biology 19:e3001115. [doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001115 .. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001115 ]
Virus host shifts are generally associated with novel adaptations to exploit the cells of the new host species optimally. Surprisingly, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has apparently required little to no significant adaptation to humans since the start of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and to October 2020. Here we assess the types of natural selection taking place in Sarbecoviruses in horseshoe bats versus the early SARS-CoV-2 evolution in humans. While there is moderate evidence of diversifying positive selection in SARS-CoV-2 in humans, it is limited to the early phase of the pandemic, and purifying selection is much weaker in SARS-CoV-2 than in related bat Sarbecoviruses. In contrast, our analysis detects evidence for significant positive episodic diversifying selection acting at the base of the bat virus lineage SARS-CoV-2 emerged from, accompanied by an adaptive depletion in CpG composition presumed to be linked to the action of antiviral mechanisms in these ancestral bat hosts. The closest bat virus to SARS-CoV-2, RmYN02 (sharing an ancestor about 1976), is a recombinant with a structure that includes differential CpG content in Spike; clear evidence of coinfection and evolution in bats without involvement of other species. While an undiscovered “facilitating” intermediate species cannot be discounted, collectively, our results support the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 being capable of efficient human–human transmission as a consequence of its adaptive evolutionary history in bats, not humans, which created a relatively generalist virus. ------
Posted by Larry Moran at Wednesday, May 05, 2021 Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Pinterest
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