Re: OT: A lot better than a Covid death shot!

On 8/03/2024 10:05 pm, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 08/03/2024 10:55, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 8/03/2024 8:05 pm, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 08/03/2024 07:09, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 8/03/2024 4:48 am, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 07/03/2024 15:15, GB wrote:

On 07/03/2024 15:11, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 07/03/2024 15:05, Bill Sloman wrote:

<snip>

There's no information there. There are a few American senators who know what they want to believe, but no facts at all.
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Here is a fact or two that I posted earlier.
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 https://news.yahoo.com/nih-admits-funding-gain-function-125103852.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAACPGaZ5dUJFM3q5AfcrA5yai45fdGG3fYRStdwAE3MyFcIuuVbjhdODrC9uQ1A6LkPTUjWl_y8le4SgMvvACZ5x16IR1_pOPgESFBYUgzj4cwPwtZk-heYt6_aG9uwn6DGb2nG0XNAx5OppmF3ArrFkja-d9TWqB8_U1lS1BLWYu
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That wasn't "gain of function" research. The question examined was whether "“spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”
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The naturally occurring bat coronaviruses weren't modified in any way. The question was whether they were potentially dangerous to humans, and it got the right answer, though nobody seems to have acted on the information obtained - not that they could have done much.
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"More than three years have passed since the first case of a new coronavirus infection (SARS-CoV-2) in the city of Wuhan (Hubei, China). The Wuhan Institute of Virology was founded in that city in 1956 and the country’s first biosafety level 4 laboratory opened within that center in 2015. The coincidence that the first cases of infection emerged in the city where the virology institute’s headquarters is located, the failure to 100% identify the virus’ RNA in any of the coronaviruses isolated in bats, and the lack of evidence on a possible intermediate animal host in the contagion’s transmission make it so that at present, there are doubts about the real origin of SARS-CoV-2. This article will review two theories: SARS-CoV-2 as a virus of zoonotic origin or as a leak from the high-level biosafety laboratory in Wuhan."
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"Do these findings close the discussion on the origins of SARS-CoV-2?
 No. As can be seen, there are two theories that could coexist or the debate could be closed by choosing one or the other. Defining chains of infection and seeking the origin of them is a fundamental aspect of public health. Therefore, on the one hand, it seems evident that the transmission originated in the Huanan market. But, on the other hand, three fundamental questions remain that have not been definitively answered. First, where did the virus come from? Second, what was the intermediate animal host? And third, why has the virus genome not been reproduced 100% in any of the coronaviruses found in bats?"
 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10019034/
 In short whilst there is no *conclusive* evidence one way or another the balance of probability is that it was made in a lab but not as a bioweapon. It was an accident.

A lab source is decidedly improbable.Labs don't hold a lot of viruses and they keep them confined. A wet market offers a lot more opportunities for an variants to be generated, and a lot more humans exposed to a human-infectious variant.
The reason that Covid-19 virus has not been found in bats is that it's spike protein doesn't latch onto the bat ACE-receptor,
There was a variants of the bat virus found in pangolin's that did have a have a modified spike protein that would have latched onto a human ACE-receptor, but it clearly wasn't related to Covid-19.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7926496/
talks about minks and badgers as intermediate hosts of Covid-19.
Badgers were bush-meat items at the Wuhan wet market. It got cleaned out without anybody bothering to test whether any of the illegal bush meat was infected.
The absence of evidence of an intermediate host isn't all that surprising - a variant evolved that did do well in humans, but its ancestor didn't have to do all that well in it's intermediate host.
The lab origin theory is an implausible theory ,The balance of probablity doesn't remotely favour an accidental lab origin - labs have many fewer animals, and they don't want them infecting one another or the lab workers.
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Bill Sloman, Sydney