On the Origins of Covid

Makes sense. Some people likely do use it that way. The article posted doesn’t, and I don’t think anyone here has made that claim.

Sounds like it, yeah, although a lot of the modifying seems to be just having lots of generations of virus infecting cultures of human cells to naturally select for infectious strains and seeing what nature comes up with on its own.

FWIW I think Fauci was pretty brazenly lying in that exchange. NIH didn’t give money directly to the Wuhan institute, but it gave money to a NY nonprofit whose grant proposal stated it would be then given to the Wuhan institute to do gain of function research on bat coronavirus.

Oh ffs

1 Like

Can we ship Wuhan more funding? Cause they seem to be way ahead of the curve.

1 Like

? Which part of the rest of that paragraph do you disagree with?

How about you support your assertion just a little bit before I do all the work to prove you wrong.

It’s all in the article you refuse to read, ikes

1 Like

oh the article written by the guy who states that Chinese people have ‘typical’ Chinese characteristics because of genetics? Good, I can safely ignore that bullshit.

https://www.axios.com/fauci-rand-paul-wuhan-lab-coronavirus-eff1bb08-f6c7-4d63-b170-c49e87c2e3dd.html

Context: China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), located just miles from the market where the first COVID-19 outbreak was detected, previously received funding from Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases via the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.

And here’s something from the NIH website talking about stopping that funding that Fauci says never happened.

Great, so you aren’t “debunking” anything, because you don’t actually know what anyone is talking about. Why would anyone care what you think when you’re not willing to do the barest minimum to inform yourself?

Your links do not support your claim. Fauci is talking about a specific type of research termed ‘gain of function’, which is when you add something to the virus. Your link does not support that happening.

Do you want to try again?

I’m sorry for being a dick here, but FFS y’all are pushing conspiratorial nonsense from noted morons like Rand Paul and this racist piece of shit to counter Fauci and mainstream science. Do better.

1 Like

Shockingly, I don’t need to read stormfront’s take on molecular bio to know that they’re wrong.

Also remember when Keeed was totally not talking about how this was lab created, turns out all he needed to jump back in was a racist piece of shit to write an article on medium.

Lol, the Unstuck Politics Overton Window on racism continues it’s long slide to the right. We now unironically cite race science proponents for the proposition that Covid was created in a Chinese Lab, and the majority ITT are fine with it. In another thread today, the National Review was unironically cited for a proposition on an unrelated matter. We’ve come a long way UP!

1 Like

lol, the guy worked for Nature, Science, and The New York Times. You’re just desperate to dismiss his viewpoint without actually understanding what he’s saying. It’s what you do.

And of course I always thought that it was possible that gain of function research lead to a lab accident. I just said that a lab accident didn’t necessitate that the leak arose from gain of function research, which is obviously true.

Sure these are the grant proposal abstracts:

https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/project-details/9491676

https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/project-details/9819304

Here’s the explanation from the racist article that you won’t read. I’m not a scientist so I can easily be duped by this - is his characterization wrong? If so, how?

The grants were assigned to the prime contractor, Dr. Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, who subcontracted them to Dr. Shi. Here are extracts from the grants for fiscal years 2018 and 2019. “CoV” stands for coronavirus and “S protein” refers to the virus’s spike protein.

“Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.

“We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential.”

What this means, in non-technical language, is that Dr. Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes (“reverse genetics” and “infectious clone technology”), creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures (“in vitro”) and humanized mice (“in vivo”). And this information would help predict the likelihood of “spillover,” the jump of a coronavirus from bats to people.

1 Like

Hahaha great fucking job, everyone.

Then, in an April 17 White House coronavirus briefing, a reporter, whom Politico identifies as being from Newsmax , falsely stated in a question that “US intelligence is saying this week that the coronavirus likely came from a level 4 lab in Wuhan,” and that the NIH had awarded a $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan lab. “Why would the US give a grant like that to China?” she asked. “We will end that grant very quickly,” Trump said in his answer.

An NIH official then wrote to EcoHealth Alliance to inquire about money sent to “China-based participants in this work,” Politico reports, and the organization’s head, Peter Daszak, responded that a complete response would take time, but that “I can categorically state that no fund from [the grant] have been sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, nor has any contract been signed.” Days later, NIH notified EcoHealth Alliance that future funding for the project was canceled, and that it must immediately “stop spending the $369,819 remaining from its 2020 grant”—an unusual move generally reserved for cases of scientific misconduct or financial improprieties, according to Politico .

notably, it’s the same group!

I just find it so damned ironic that the group contains some of our most allegedly “progressive” members. The kind that use words like “centrist” as a pejorative. Meanwhile, they’re embracing Rand Paul, race science, and Q’anon talking points.

1 Like

Ok but like, have you read any news sources besides the president of the nonprofit? Seems like everyone agrees they did receive funds. I guess CN could be right that they weren’t funds for gain of function research, I look forward to reading his response.

Yeah, there was nothing specifically connecting funding to “gain of research” stuff. What there was was research getting cancelled because of dumbfuck Newsmax reporters spreading conspiracy theories. That would be the real scandal in a world where we weren’t plagued by conspiriderps who want to burn sorcerers at the stake.