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Originally Posted by DiracSpike
They didn't change a bunch of things, this virus is something like 96% similar to a bat virus from nature. The assertion is that the spike protein was manipulated, which seems consistent with what you're saying here. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say.
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That 4% difference is 1200 base pairs different (Coronavirus genome is ~30,000 base pairs). Genetic engineering didn't happen here as no technology exists to make 1200 manipulations. Which comes to the "evolution from a cell line" as Wade suggests. This particular virus has unique sugar fixing sites which gives it an ability to evade some immune attack. Cell lines don't have an immune system, which suggests this was gained through natural selection. There's more in this link
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539923/
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You keep saying this and I don't think you're correct. In May 2003, months after SARS began, they found the virus in civets sold in the market thought to have been the outbreak center. No such evidence for this virus exists, despite a heavy incentive for the Chinese to find it. How could it take 14 years to find the reservoir animals they'd all be long gone by then. Unless you mean something else, but the point is this evidence was found early on for SARS and it's nonexistent for COVID.
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Yes they got extremely lucky and found a few civets that had the virus (think about how lucky that was considering a virus doesn't stay around long in a host after the host recovers). However, scientists knew the civets were not the source as the genome was unlike any other civet viruses and very similar to coronaviruses in bats. The civet was the vessel that brought the virus to humans as humans don't interact with bats much. The cave containing the likely bats that the virus originated from was found in 2017 - 14 years after 2003.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9
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The range might be more than 50km but it's certainly not the 1000km to Wuhan, so this is a moot point. It's possible that this somehow got into a bunch of animals and then into a seafood market 1000km away but again, there's no evidence of that. None. This is again divergent from SARS where the market was in the home territory of these bats in the south of China.
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The 50km range is only important to point out because it's actually 1000's of kms. You're right it's moot, but not for the reasons you think. The market was not in the home territory of the bats that caused SARS. Yunnan is literally 1000km from Guangdong. You see why Wade is being misleading here? He knows the bats that caused SARS were found 1000km from the outbreak. And he knows the range of that bat isn't 50km.
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How's it harmful and counterproductive? Or a narrative? That speaks to bias on your part that you don't want this to be true, for some reason. The point is that Daszak has a vested interest in what comes of this investigation. He's heavily involved in gain of function research and had links to the Wuhan lab. His funding could get massively cut if they world cracks down on this. There's a video on YouTube of him talking in December 2019 of how easy it is to manipulate coronaviruses...he's no neutral party in this episode.
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It's harmful because a) anti-asian sentiment is already on the rise, b) we're in a super heated political environment and all the "evidence" is basically mudslinging, and c) we need the Chinese to work with us more, not less. It's estimated an average of one person is infected with a novel bat coronavirus EVERY DAY. The next pandemic could be coming any time. Shouldn't we be working more together? How does an accusation without any data behind it help?
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I really don't see how anything falls apart here, the evidence keeps piling up. The Fauci emails released today show an exchange he had with Kristian Anderson, a US virus researcher
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What did the rest of the email say?
https://www.politifact.com/factcheck...ment-virus-wa/
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So more smoke to this virus, and despite the group that Daszak (biased) was able to string together it is absolutely not true that the virology community believes there's no evidence this was engineered, to say nothing of the mountain of circumstantial evidence linking to this to the Wuhan lab and nonexistent evidence linking it to the seafood market.
What do you feel is the strongest point of evidence that it was natural? I'd be really curious to know, because I haven't seen anything besides the inertia of it being what we originally thought and how diseases have arisen in the past, before people thought it would be a good idea to manipulate viruses to make them more infectious. You can poke slight holes in the lab leak but that's not proving natural origin. It seems to be just a status quo theory that people are clinging to, unless you can give what you feel is the strongest evidence point FOR natural origin, I'd honestly be really curious what it is.
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No. That's not how this works. You can't prove the absence of something. How do I prove that? I'll let the above do the talking. You keep referring to this mountain but not one piece of the theory has held water.
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