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Thanks for clarifying what you meant. That's not how you phrased it though. You phrased it as fact. Its one of the possibilities, but not the most likely one.
I have traded in the stock market since I was 18. Not just stocks but futures and options where you need to study technical and fundamental factors. Technical is just looking at the data. Fundamental is looking at world events,etc.
If you apply that to the pandemic. Technically most scientists publicly say its of natural origins. But there are lots of credible scientists who don't agree with that assessment. And not just conspiracy nutjobs.
Fundamentally you have China. You have the outbreak starting next to a lab that could possibly have the virus. Also a wet market near by. But with China you have a country that tried to hide the outbreak. If they had contained it we may never have had the details of it. If it was from a lab China would have likely known early on. Good reason to not let the world know about it. Liability as well as them looking incompetent in their research safety. Its also a fact that China likes to control the message.
Looking at the above I don't see how anyone can say for sure what happened. We may never know. But I have little confidence in WHO and China and their motives on this.
And we have a world now where everyone is afraid to say anything negative about China. Look at the NBA. Look at the movie industry. They want the Chinese dollars so they avoid telling it like it is. How much of this exists in science and research? You are not working in China if you say they caused the pandemic by releasing it from their lab.
There have been other studies show that it is somewhat effective. Either way, they (Pfizer and Moderna) are creating booster shots that I will be getting regardless of how effective studies show it to be.
That is good. But they are creating boosters for variants that have been circulating for months. They say they may be ready in 6 months. What is to say that more variants are discovered by then that the booster will not be effective against? We will just keep being one step slower than the virus itself.
It is ironic that there were accusations that China was experimenting with a vaccine when it leaked and their vaccine is not very effective. The problem with the conspiracy theory is that they use an inactivated virus which is of no threat to humans.
They previously worked on an mRNA vaccine for SARS in 2004 but it caused liver failure in monkeys.
The US was receiving briefings from the CIA two months before the outbreak. They also disbanded the US CDC pandemic early detection technical team at the same time that would've helped identify the virus. It does look suspicious that assistance was pulled just as the first cases were appearing. A comprehensive list of possibilities would have to include a lab leak and sabotage by a foreign government if the lab were to be considered as the origin. As it turned out, the NIH and Moderna were already working on a vaccine in December having completed the gene sequencing of the virus before it was announced by the Chinese.
The problem is a lot of the China conspiracy material is funded by the State Department and the Trump PACs. Steve Bannon and Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui are funding Li-Meng Yan, Steven Quay, and others. Bannon is the Trump advisor who wanted the administration to pivot toward China since China threatened to eclipse the US economically and militarily by 2030. The China virus conspiracy articles are almost as prevalent now as when the now-discredited Russia collusion and Russia hack stories were constantly bombarded at the public and at the president.
It's important to check who is writing the articles or op-ed pieces as well trace back the funding and history for the organizations. One often finds that the more hawkish articles are written by think tanks that are getting funding from DoD, State, etc.
If you're on drug therapy for autoimmune disorder, the level of antibodies from the vaccine are sharply reduced and antibodies ineffective against Brazil variant.
I think part of the reason for a lax response from the US was that SARS seemingly disappeared within a year last time. The Chinese applied the same harsh lockdown as they did against SARS.
And you can't understand fact-based reality when you create an alternative one in your head based on belief
Most of the time we don't have to reinvent the wheel with regards to epidemiological principles. A highly infectious agent with a labile genome will mutate over time. What makes it highly infectious is the benign nature of most infections which are asymptomatic. You have people who are not sick but are transferring the virus all over the place. Any mutations that increase virulence like a SARS or MERS are more highly virulent and more deadly and because of that there is less asymptomatic individuals spreading the virus and less sick people walking around spreading it. It is easier to contain. It did not create a pandemic.
What made this COVID 19 different from other pandemics is that this is the first virus that was transmitted probably through air airborne transmission and a high proportion of asymptomatic transmission. Mutations in general would be expected and the agent becoming a better parasite in killing less people like the common cold. The more infectious the more prevalent it would become. The more lethal variants becoming less common. Any more virulent mutations would kill off the host which in turn limit the spread like with Ebola where there is less asymptomatic spread and most symptomatic spread. We also have partial immunity of cross over between the more infectious agent out there to other less common variants. A less virulent highly infectious virus will always have an edge over other strains of the same virus. That is what a host parasite relationship is all about.
It would be unusual to have a new mutation come about from a pandemic that was more lethal than the original virus with regards to virulence factors. There has been some mutations that are more infectious and in turn has killed more people because of it but not from intrinsic virulent factors. Most new emerging viruses come from the wild, jungles from animals to man.
I have traded in the stock market since I was 18. Not just stocks but futures and options where you need to study technical and fundamental factors. Technical is just looking at the data. Fundamental is looking at world events,etc.
If you apply that to the pandemic. Technically most scientists publicly say its of natural origins. But there are lots of credible scientists who don't agree with that assessment. And not just conspiracy nutjobs.
Fundamentally you have China. You have the outbreak starting next to a lab that could possibly have the virus. Also a wet market near by. But with China you have a country that tried to hide the outbreak. If they had contained it we may never have had the details of it. If it was from a lab China would have likely known early on. Good reason to not let the world know about it. Liability as well as them looking incompetent in their research safety. Its also a fact that China likes to control the message.
Looking at the above I don't see how anyone can say for sure what happened. We may never know. But I have little confidence in WHO and China and their motives on this.
And we have a world now where everyone is afraid to say anything negative about China. Look at the NBA. Look at the movie industry. They want the Chinese dollars so they avoid telling it like it is. How much of this exists in science and research? You are not working in China if you say they caused the pandemic by releasing it from their lab.
There have been incidents before where viruses "escaped" from labs, usually by infecting someone working in the lab. Those were acknowledged.
It is ironic that there were accusations that China was experimenting with a vaccine when it leaked and their vaccine is not very effective. The problem with the conspiracy theory is that they use an inactivated virus which is of no threat to humans.
I don't understand what you mean. The conspiracy theory narrative was that an inactivated virus was used? Where is that noted?
This is actual Quay. Doesn't sound like there is anything inactive about this virus (bolding mine):
Quote:
The virus in a true zoonosis also contains the signature record of the gradual changes and adaptions it made in the protein key, the Spike Protein, it uses to unlock human cells and cause infection.
With SARS-CoV-1 the Spike Protein had fewer than one-third of all the changes it would later develop by the time it became an epidemic. With CoV-2 the Spike Protein was almost perfectly adapted to the human lock, using 99.5% of the best amino acids possible.
Since with CoV-2 we have no evidence from stored blood that it was quietly practicing on humans in the community of Wuhan, it is surprising that when it finds its first patient, it has perfected to 99.5% the spike protein amino acid sequence, its ability to attack and infect humans. If this adaption couldn’t have happened in the community, the only place it could have happened is in a laboratory, by what is called serial passage, a common laboratory process that repeatedly gives the virus a chance to practice on humanized mice or VERO monkey cells.
Not only was sars-cov2 active; it was PRACTICED. And since it didn't practice in humans; it had to have practiced in a lab. https://zenodo.org/record/4477081#
The Furin is the give-a-way as to where it came from:
Quote:
The spike protein that gives the coronavirus its name, corona or crown, is the key to match with the lock found in host cells. But before it can inject its genetic material in the host cell, the spike protein needs to be cut, to loosen it in preparation for infection.
The host cell has the scissors or enzymes that do the cutting. The singular, unique feature of CoV-2 is that it requires a host enzyme called furin to activate it at a spot called the S1/S2 junction. No other coronavirus in the same subgenera has a furin cleavage site, as it is called. The other coronaviruses are cleaved at a site downstream from the S1/S2 site, called the S’ site.
And then:
Quote:
Since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction in the laboratory. At least eleven gain-of-function experiments, adding a furin site to make a virus more infective, are published in the open literature, including Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
And worse:
Quote:
But it gets worse still for the zoonosis theory. The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that are rarely used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site.
When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair. For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV-2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair.
So the CGG that is used in labs but not found in nature; is what sars-cov2 has. And what of Dr. Shi from the WVI?
Quote:
It is telling that when Dr. Shi introduced the world to CoV-2 for the first time in January 2020 she showed hundreds of gene sequences of this novel virus but stopped just short of showing the furin site, the one she is purported to have introduced, seemingly not wanting to call attention to her handywork.
All excerpts above can be found on pages 1-11 on my above link.
The conspiracy theories take the form of accusations.
Quay is working for Bannon who was advisor behind Trump's anti-China pivot. He is being funded by a PAC. He has now done two 'studies' which have been debunked.
He is trying to get the reader to make an assumption because his chain of reasoning requires it in order to succeed. Suppositions and hypotheticals are a way of misleading readers in an argument.
Quote:
The virus in a true zoonosis also contains the signature record of the gradual changes and adaptions it made in the protein key, the Spike Protein, it uses to unlock human cells and cause infection.
His first paper outlines the many changes (>>1000) that would have to be made to the genome sequence in order to get a match. He arbitrarily assigned extremely high probabilities to each of these events. That is the same as making an assumption which you can't do without a proof or evidence to back it up.
Most researchers agree that it's extremely unlikely it was done in a lab. There are too many changes required in the genome sequence and the lack of opportunity to mutate in a lab makes it impossible without an exact match escaping from the lab. That's why Quay is jumping through hoops on making assumptions because his argument fails due to the extremely low probabilities.
None of us know what that poster ever means, except that he/she is an apologist for the CCP.
Quote:
It is ironic that there were accusations that China was experimenting with a vaccine when it leaked and their vaccine is not very effective
Those point to the same thing -- their ineptitude. They bungled safety protocols, causing a lab leak, so it's no surprise they can't make an effective vaccine either.
Most researchers agree that it's extremely unlikely it was done in a lab.
And that is a simple reflection of self-interest.
Once it becomes proven that this was a lab leak, 2 things will happen very quickly, both of which will make life more difficult for researchers:
1. safety protocols will be made much more stringent, and enforcement of same will be severe.
2. funding for Gain Of Function research will dry up.
There are 3 possible origins of SARS-CoV2, all involve a lab leak.
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