all 10 comments

[–]zyxzevn[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (8 children)

It may be propaganda to keep the fear high.
Personally I think it is a leaked sample, but not any good bioweapon, because it only affects weak people.
And because due all the bad testing, we do not even know how much has spread and if it survived this year.

[–]Zapped 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (7 children)

Several U.S. government agencies were saying they had evidence it came from the Wuhan lab.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/majority-of-us-spy-agencies-believe-coronavirus-escaped-from-wuhan-lab

This talk lasted a week. And then they all stopped talking about its origin. It sounds like a deal was reached with China.

[–]Comatoast 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-micro-020518-115759#_i41

Paragraphs 3-5 under Introduction, then check the dates at the bottom for the approval of the article.

[–]Zapped 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

I don't understand why you are referencing the dates. I only saw the publish review date of June 21, 2019 and the citation note dates. I did read enough to learn they were infecting volunteers to study HCoV's and this paper talked about the use of genome editing.

[–]Comatoast 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Here's this at the bottom. I should have been more specific.

acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by Guangdong Natural Science Foundation grant 2018A030313472, and Guangdong Province Key Laboratory of Microbial Signals and Disease Control grants MSDC-2017-05 and MSDC-2017-06, Guangdong, People's Republic of China.

While no cases of SARS have been reported since 2004, a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses was discovered in a cave in Yunnan, China, highlighting the necessity to prepare for future reemergence (50).

Importantly, a majority of alphacoronaviruses and betacoronaviruses were identified only in bats, and many coronaviruses phylogenetically related to SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV were discovered in diverse bat species (22). Therefore, emerging zoonotic HCoVs such as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV likely originated in bats through sequential mutation and recombination of bat coronaviruses, underwent further mutations during the spillover to intermediate hosts, and finally acquired the ability to infect human hosts (22).

[–]Zapped 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

So, do you think this was one of those newly found strains that the lab was studying and manipulating, or do you follow this paper at face value in that it warned of future outbreaks?

[–]Comatoast 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

They saw it as the possibility for a potential outbreak, so as scientists it would be beneficial to research those specimens further under various conditions. There's no way for me to determine for sure, so I could only speculate that they already had the virus on hand. As far as whether or not it was purposely released as a bioweapon to further political agendas, or whether or not it was something released by accident, or even if it was simply a strain that rose naturally, I can't say for sure. I lean towards feeling there were more nefarious intentions, simply because of the entities attempting to pose as "helpful" being involved.

[–]Zapped 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Thanks for your view. I agree except I lean towards it being accidentally released. It seems as though the U.S. and Canada both had people over there and sent money there for years, so I lean towards vaccine research that got loose instead of biological warfare origins.

[–]Comatoast 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

It's hard (I'm being lazy) to format it on the phone.

[–]zyxzevn[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Why it was artificial:

From peer-reviewed articles before 2020, we already know that similar virus samples were created via gain-of-function and RNA-printing. A whistleblower has come forward and has explained exactly how it was made.

According to the labs, the virus is a chimera (artificial combination of at least 2 maybe 3 viruses). It has an unatural RxxR cleavage site that make it 100x more viral. It was fully adapted to humans and not to animals (incl bats).
And before the mutations (which happen daily), the virus codes were identical to those known in the labs.

The counter arguments are absent, use the appeal to nature fallacy. And from leaked e-mails we know that scientists in the field were pushed to claim it was natural before any research was done. Often these scientists have done gain-of-function research.