They don’t say that at all, seriously wtf are you smoking.
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Yeah idk on reread you’re probably right. I read the baric lab, source unknown part and thought it was listing labs for each but it seems like sources.
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30 March 2020 Editors’ note, March 2020: We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus
Chef’s kiss.
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As near as I can tell this is a study done in North Carolina showing a bat virus can very easily infect mice with receptors made to mimic human receptors. There’s no “gain of function” to make it more infectious and no suggestion they were breaking any rules. If anything, this work adds a whole lot of credence to the theory that these viruses can jump to humans without Chinese biolabs making secret weapons.
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Serious question.
In the rare instance that this was a lab leak couldn’t gain of function research still be really important and we should continue to do it?
I don’t know enough about it but it seems gain of function is kind of being thrown around as a buzz word.
The risks from gain-of-function mutations, at least on whole viruses, are pretty large compared with the benefits, at least in the short term. Let’s say you find a bat virus, induce a mutation, and then find that the mutation makes it highly infectious to humans. What’s the plan, then? Vaccinate everyone against that? Well, that’s pretty damn expensive, and unless you’re going to share with literally everyone on the planet, and not just, say, your own country, you’re going to get accusations of designing a bioweapon. Are you going to do that for every functional mutation you find? That’s going to add up quickly, and you can pump out new mutations faster than we can verify the safety and efficacy of a new vaccine and then pump out 7 billion doses. Essentially anything you’d design, whether vaccine or small molecule drug, would take considerable expense to produce and would be largely worthless unless it actually did turn into a pandemic, and if you actually start a pandemic with a new mutation, then the prior vaccines and drugs may be ineffective and again a waste of effort.
There’s potentially some good work that can be done on gain-of-function mutants of isolated proteins from the virus, but you don’t need to have viruses that can infect cells in order to do that. You can have bacteria or yeast produce those proteins en masse for you from templates that contain only the code for just those proteins on plasmids. For example, you could do random mutagenesis on just the spike protein and find sequences that don’t bind human antibodies generated by the immune response to one or more of the vaccines and crosscheck those for the continued ability to bind ACE2. That could potentially alert you to some sequences that would be cause for extra alarm should they pop up in viral surveillance sequencing, and there’s no risk of starting a pandemic with it (outside of someone literally and maliciously manipulating whole viruses according to your data to (re-)start a pandemic, I suppose).
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Thanks for taking the time to write this. It gives me a better understanding.
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Sounds awfully familiar
I hear the US and EU (sans UK) will shortly announce a joint investigation into the origins of covid - announcement to be made at G7, not like the China will allow access over and above that they afforded the WHO but maybe @anon10396289 will start posting again
I’m actually a bit surprised that the Trump administration didn’t tie the origin to Iranian terrorists and justify a bombing run. I’m sure he floated it.
Probably a good thing Bolton was gone in the fall of 2019, or he might have given it a shot.
Yeah, this. As bad as Trump was, and as bad as Bolton is, and as bad as bringing in Bolton was, not acting on Bolton things was, for lack of a better term, “good,” or at least we (and more importantly, a lot of middle Eastern civilians) dodged a massive bullet.
was bolton still around when covid hit?
ETA: ah, just needed to read one more post lol
Only in Barcelona at that point.
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I refuse to link them, and I’ll explicitly say that I do not think this somehow impugns anyone here, but redstate is making big waves in conservative media circles about a ‘confirmed leak’ from a defector in the Chinese government that ‘proves’ covid-19 was not only leaked by WIV, but also designed by China.
So, yeah, can’t wait!
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