Meursault posted:chickeon posted:Meursault posted:The virus definitely came from a lab though right? Like the US's handling of it was criminal and everyone in the Trump admin should go to jail forever and they're just trying to deflect from how guilty they are, and the US definitely shouldn't do sanctions or war or otherwise 'punish' China, but it seems silly to believe that it sprung up randomly like 10 minutes away from the lab doing tests on the same viruses in the same way that we know scientists have mutated them in that past. Or am I missing something
amerikkka was doing at the very least the same research on them and was predicting the outbreak back in like september. china has in the past been victim of brutal genocidal biological attacks, the perpetrators of which were recruited by the US for their own biological weapons programs. The US is also of course founded on biological warfare and has repeatedly introduced infectious diseases to even its own population, events always revealed long after the fact.
Haha I didn't say anything about China doing biological warfare, I don't know why you all think getting weirdly defensive about China and replying to stuff you made up in your head is a convincing posting strategy
The US was testing on H1N1 probably as a biological weapon when that leaked out in the 70s, they turned H5N1 airborne in a lab in the Netherlands in 2012, obviously viruses can do zoonotic leaps spontaneously but it happens a lot faster if you're doing it on purpose. https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/01/31/logistical-and-technical-analysis-of-the-origins-of-the-wuhan-coronavirus-2019-ncov/ This is the blog post I read about this stuff on, there's a lot of stuff I don't know anything about either way, but the 'wet market' narrative the media was pushing, the weak Nature/Scientific American articles where they say for certain that it's not man-made, that stuff seemed like bullshit and this lays out an alternative for how it could have been done. It's from January so maybe it;s all out of date, or maybe it's just the ramblings of a crank. They don't ever suggest it's a weapon or that China is doing biological warfare, just that everyone is developing these viruses and they leak out and we should probably stop
And one more time: America is bad, I do not think America is good, you don't have to respond to me like I'm saying America is good and China is bad, unless you just like doing it for the practice
there's an assumption in the article and the article it cites as a "smoking gun" that the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 was from bats -> humans, when, if the examples of MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-1 are looked at (i.e. the two previous know examples of coronaviruses moving from bats to humans) the transmission went bats -> intermediate -> humans. For SARS-CoV-1 It was civets, for MERS-CoV it was camels. For the other four known human present coronaviruses (like HCoV-HKU1) they are much less deadly so far less research has been done into their origins (though it is known that they are present in bats)
so imo the argument that the bat species were no where near the market so bioweapon release loses its weight.
this is dismissed in the "smoking gun" paper as:
There was possible natural recombination or intermediate host of the coronavirus, yet little proof has been reported
imo the examples of the species jumping of the two previous human coronavirus outbreaks presents a model for the movement of coronaviruses from bats to humans via an intermediary species which humans are deliberately breeding (civets/camels), and the burden of proof is currently on someone suggesting a bat -> human model for SARS-CoV-2 rather than on the bats -> intermediate -> humans model. This is dismissed in the "smoking gun" paper
but mostly i liked this bit:
https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/01/31/logistical-and-technical-analysis-of-the-origins-of-the-wuhan-coronavirus-2019-ncov/ posted:Raising the odds of an accidental release, researchers from China’s only BSL-4 lab in Wuhan were reported to have particularly sloppy field research methods, being both bled and peed on by local bats that host coronaviruses remarkably similar to the Wuhan Strain COVID-19. And they’ve also been reported to smuggle used research animals out of their labs, selling them for cash on the street.
---
Really what im not understanding with the bioweapon talk is the mechanism were talking about here
bats -> wuhan lab -> market
seems plausible on the face of it but doesn't seem to take any sort of understanding of viral evolution or species-jumping of viruses into account. The only way this is plausible is if the Wuhan Institute of Virology is a covert bioweapons laboratory engaged in selectively breeding viruses specifically for use against humans. It does not make sense if the Wuhan Institute of Virology is simply looking at coronaviruses present in bats
the reasoning for this goes like this, either
1) the virus in bats is already able to jump across to humans quite easily, and so it would be expected that it would happen naturally through the interface between bats and humans. If this virus was collected in a lab and let loose accidentally then that would be unfortunate, but unless it was already primed to jump to humans it would do nothing, and if it was already ready to jump to humans then it would do so regardless of any research institute - people come into contact with bats.
Viruses are everywhere, our bodies are constantly being bombarded with virions from each other and from animals and for a virus to move from an animal to a human requires trillions and trillions of failed attempts due to either viral unsuitability for a human host or the effectiveness of the immune system - the process is mind boggling and very little understood.
2) The virus was not in any way able to jump to humans. scientists in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in their covert PRC bioweapon facility engaged in the extremely dangerous procedure of selecting a virus similar to SARS-CoV-1, replicating it in a host species through many many generations to make something that could then be used as viral weapon. This then got out because they were selling the host species to the local market/dumping the samples in the trash rather than the incinerator. I don't understand why any sort of bioweapons virologist would do this when they could just do it in like a virus that already spreads effectively in humans
i dont see a third option for the lab narative - either it was already on the cusp of moving into humans in bats, or it was selectively modified to do so by a highly advanced bioweapons division operating with a level of virology understanding bordering on science fiction
final note - the examples cited of coronaviruses escaping "chinese labs" goes through a couple of links but ends up here: https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/threatened-pandemics-and-laboratory-escapes-self-fulfilling-prophecies/#
it is important to note that these are escapes of SARS-CoV-1 after it had naturally made the jump from bats -> civets -> humans, i.e. it has already evolved naturally to spread in humans at this point.
Edited by tears ()
and another one here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1727299
the good thing about these "genetic similarity" claims is that since the genome of SARS-CoV-2 and HIV-1 (and HIV-2) are both sequenced you can quite easily check for these similarities using BLAST, the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool. theres a whole article on how to do that here: https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/big-data/no-sars-cov-2-does-not-contain-hiv-genetic-code/
you can check its similarity to the genome of anything you want really, it cool, basically there is no room for obsfucation since anyone can check your work very easily so long as the sequences are in the database
thirdplace posted:drwhat posted:cancelling every treasury bond China owns somehow, in revenge for coronavirus, definitely seems to be high on the pipe dream list
(armchair economist viewpoint: you can't actually do that & also it would be war, but they're still gonna talk about it)
no one was reading my sick blog* but i was talking about this like 15 years ago, of fucking course China is just going to buy all the remaining factories (and/or open new ones), how else can this go!! as I hopped up and down pointing out they will just literally buy them with dollars
* I did not put any posts in the blog (but I definitely thought them very hard)
drwhat posted:I did not put any posts in the blog (but I definitely thought them very hard)
catchphrase
dizastar posted:i dont know nothing about virology so im gonna keep it short but one thing that is overlooked when the lab hypothesis is brought up is that the first Chinese pathogen level 4 laboratory, located in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was created in an agreement between fRANC€ and China after the SARS outbreak in 2003, with the entire project being monitored by fRANC€ from its genesis. Its totally bankrolled by euro-amerikan funds, and its safe to assume it serves the purpose of studying viruses that are too dangerous to be studied in labs located on imperialist soil.
a counter-point would be to say that after the "near miss" that was the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak 2002-2004, almost entirely confined to the prc, it was probably decided by science people in the prc that they needed somewhere to study highly dangerous viruses in relative safety, considering the likelihood of further coronaviruses moving into humans in the region
tears posted:after the "near miss" that was the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak 2002-2004, almost entirely confined to the prc, it was probably decided by science people in the prc that they needed somewhere to study highly dangerous viruses in relative safety, considering the likelihood of further coronaviruses moving into humans in the region
and science people around the world agreed, thus all the funding from and joint training programs with imperialist countries
i mean, the crux of the "it came from the lab" theory is that this lab was studying bat coronaviruses so close to the outbreak, what are the chances? to which i say, indeed, what are the chances they would study that in an area where these outbreaks are known to occur. what are the fucking chances, of that. indeed.
There used to be a French concession in Wuhan (imperial outpost) so Wuhan still has a bunch of French cultural influence and there's cultural exchange between the two countries. And France still has economic power there because there are like a hundred French companies in the city. The genesis of the lab is back in the early 2000s. Jiang Zemin had this friend, Dr. Chen Zhu, who was from Shanghai and a francophile. He was educated in the Hospital Saint-Louis, under the tutelage of this guy called Professor Degos, who was close to Jacques Chirac, the President of France. Bing bang boom when Chirac visited in 2004 these connections resulted in the idea of building a lab, especially since SARS had just been the year before.
This all happened under the government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who was Chirac's Prime Minister.
The Chinese were eager to build a P4 lab, and in fact many in the Raffarin administration were reticent to go forward with building the lab (the piece sort of elides the reasons why they did end up going forward with it then, I imagine some combination of Chirac's sometimes weird foreign policy and personal motivations and obligations he had to a friend, as well as the mistaken idea that they'd then have an outpost in Wuhan and end up being the ones really in charge).
In 2004 Michel Barnier, Chirac's Foreign Minister, signed an accord with the Chinese and so they agree to help them build the lab. When I say help here I'm not pretending that the French have some magical expertise in building high security labs, the reality is that China needed them to sign onto the project so it could get approval - their influence was much less then than it is now and P4 certified labs are few and far between, there's only something like 30 of them worldwide and this was to become China's first lab.
They decided that Shanghai was too populated to build the lab at and settled on Wuhan. In 2008 a pilot committee was formed with Dr. Chen Zhu leading for the Chinese and this guy Alain Mérieux from Lyon for the French. Mérieux is this French billionaire who runs a massive pharmaceutical holding company called Institut Mérieux, founded by his grandfather Marcel. He's enormously powerful in France of course but also in Lyon, where they have a P4 laboratory too.
In 2010, under the Sarkozy government, construction finally started. 15 French small/medium sized companies consulted on the construction but there was consternation among some of them because most of the actual construction, again, was by Chinese businesses. One of them even tried to not sign off on the certification of the building, presumably mad that they didn't get to overcharge to gift white knowledge on the inscrutable orientals.
The project was finished by 2015, and that same year Mérieux quit the co-presidency of the joint committee that was supposed to oversee the project, complaining that the P4 was "a very Chinese tool...even though it was built with French technical assistance."
Mérieux told Radio France that "we can say without revealing a state secret that since 2016 there hasn't been a meeting of the French-Chinese committee on infectious diseases."
In 2017 France tried to send 50 researchers to the lab to give their "technical expertise" but the deal fell through, presumably because France was being too pushy and pretending like the child-like Chinese couldn't handle a laboratory of such a nature themselves.
This is now under Hollande, and one of his Health Minister's, Marisol Touraine, complained at the time that "it's a shame because...we launched the project with the hope that it would bring shared knowledge."
Basically at this point France was completely boxed out from the project now that China had gotten the certification it needed from the WHO. Macron visited Beijing in 2018 but at this point there really wasn't much cooperation. I have no doubt that there's some link there with the U.S. cables that were leaked to the Washington Post complaining that Americans weren't getting enough access to the lab. France this whole time thought if they played nice China was just going to give it a beachhead into their research. Wouldn't be surprised if the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was raising these same complaints with their American allies.
And that's sort of where I think the reason for this elite circulation of the idea it came from WIV comes from. France is still bitter that China didn't give them carte blanche with their P4 lab, so they see this as an opportunity to reduce Chinese leadership in the field. The French Foreign Ministry has officially denied the idea that the virus comes from a lab, but not in a very high register. The loutish Americans can always do the dirty work. I have no idea how they'd force it but if they can get WHO to decertify WIV (where vaccine trials are going on, by the way) that'd be a big blow to China. Now they could never actually shut down the lab but if they deny cooperation with it globally that could make it difficult for them to function at their peak capacity.
At the end of the day I dunno', but the idea that America and France both had big roles to play at WIV is just wrong, though not for lack of trying. The Chinese boxed them out and didn't want them sticking their noses in, and they're still mad about this.
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:is that what dizastar was saying? i couldnt pay attention to their post properly because of the way they wrote france
how does franKKKe grab you
shriekingviolet posted:Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:is that what dizastar was saying? i couldnt pay attention to their post properly because of the way they wrote france
how does franKKKe grab you
it was the capitalisation that bugged me, that's all! everybody please stop downvoting me!!
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:a "15 page dossier" from the "five eyes network" reported in murdoch's sydney rag the daily telegraphby notorious right wing politics journo sharri markson. this report claimed 'most' intel agencies believe the virus came from the wuhan lab and that china covered up all kinds of information about it early on.
update on this leak in particular because it was a weird one - so delicate is the situation that the strayan govt has all but confirmed publicly that this 'dossier' is a load of shit, and someone Very Carefully leaked to one of the government's favoured news outlets that it was in fact the US embassy that passed the document to the aforementioned dodgy journo. she must have felt so proud to be selected to do god's work on this one, poor thing.
and then there's also the fact that even in the article the nobel prize winning homepath cites, the similarities with the HIV sequence in the spike protein are with parts of the HIV genome (gp160 and tat i think??), that have nothing to do with binding to ACE2.
drwhat posted:how do you tell a tampered virus sequence from a naturally occuring one? what are those fingerprints? genuine question
well, you might be able to tell if a sequence that was identical to one from a different virus occurs in the covid genome and the two viruses aren't otherwise closely related.
Guy had no contact with China, his kid had some influenza like symptoms before the onset of his own.
drwhat posted:how do you tell a tampered virus sequence from a naturally occuring one? what are those fingerprints? genuine question
yes what lo said, basically you can measure the genetic distance between strains by the amount of mutations and in case there was some random hiv full protein encoding sequence inserted it would be the virus equivalent of humans suddenly appearing with a scorpion tail, where you would also suspect something shady is going on that cant be explained by ordinary and gradual evolution. also, the synthetic biology toolkit basically has a few commonly used methods to "cut & paste" dna or rna, which means that the sequences those enzymes recognize can also be scanned for (which is what i was talking about with my takl of fingerprint or markers or whatever).
one thing that would not easily tested for in this way is if some type of directed evolution was done in a gain of function context, i.e. infecting some mammals (such as mice with human ACE2 for example) with bat coronaviruses with random mutations and basically letting nature do its work, but much faster, until you have a ferret-to-ferret, mouse-to-mouse, whatever transmission strain. its by no means easy to both select for virulence, deadliness, delayed onset of symptoms etc all at the same time with a random unknown coronavirus, the only way to really check it would be to infect a bunch of people and see how bad it is, which means that for intentional pathogen engineering this is not the best tactic especially as you can achieve the same thing by engineering a 1918 flu strain type pathogen (which has been done a few years ago and lead to various debates on GoF research) etc. the sequence there would basically look like normal evolution though, which is probably why the u$ state department is going for the "lab accident, intentional or not" line, as it is still not impossbile. These GoF studies are actually very useful because they give us insight into how these dormant pathogens suddenly turn dangerous, and what is their potential of doing that etc, this is a very informative paper discussing the merits and pitfalls of this https://mbio.asm.org/content/5/4/e01730-14
i woudl say the chance the virus was made like that (directed evolution) is very low, but not zero, it';s unlikely mostly on practical grounds: if the amerikkkans did it, i think by now the prc gov would have done everything to prove and communicate that by now. if it was a chinese accident and u$ had proof (as they claim) they would definitely have "an unnamed official familiar with the matter" leak those documents. also, these type of experiments require collaborations between quite a large amount of scientists so quite a few people would know what's up, making it unlikely that a lab accident could remain secret for long, it's been too long for that imo.
As for the coincidence of Wuhan having the first P4 lab in the region, remember that level 4 is for pathogens like ebola,anthrax etc and classic coronaviruses are studied in P2 labs, and "most GOF research is conducted in the United States in laboratories operating at biosafety level 3 (BSL-3)". " As of December 31st 2013, 53 BSLs, including 42 BSL-3s, had been fully accredited in China". i always assumed they actually built that virology institute in wuhan because it is conveniently close the bat coronavirus reservoirs, but i dont know where i read that so it was maybe just some speculating, but it makes sense to build a virology institute in a city with 10+ million people and close to a unique source of the stuff you'd be wanting to study.
lenochodek posted:i woudl say the chance the virus was made like that (directed evolution) is very low, but not zero, it';s unlikely mostly on practical grounds: if the amerikkkans did it, i think by now the prc gov would have done everything to prove and communicate that by now. if it was a chinese accident and u$ had proof (as they claim) they would definitely have "an unnamed official familiar with the matter" leak those documents. also, these type of experiments require collaborations between quite a large amount of scientists so quite a few people would know what's up, making it unlikely that a lab accident could remain secret for long, it's been too long for that imo.
yeah, the requirements in large numbers of highly specialised staff, research time, and lots and lots of money, combined with the researchers not being able to publish except internally for years, and then how do you test it for effectiveness..., always seemed like a big barrier to the sorts of clandestine development of novel bioweapons that tom clancy book readers imagine
lenochodek posted:
thank you, that's exactly what i was wondering.
i know labs use synthesized dna for various things sometimes, do you know if it's possible to synthesize something like a coronavirus rna completely de novo and just pop it into some kind of prepared environment and see how it functions? seems theoretically possible with my half assed knowledge, and that wouldn't show any kind of tampering. but of course you would have to know what to actually synthesize, and so i guess you would just be doing the directed evolution thing, but more expensively
drwhat posted:lenochodek posted:thank you, that's exactly what i was wondering.
i know labs use synthesized dna for various things sometimes, do you know if it's possible to synthesize something like a coronavirus rna completely de novo and just pop it into some kind of prepared environment and see how it functions? seems theoretically possible with my half assed knowledge, and that wouldn't show any kind of tampering. but of course you would have to know what to actually synthesize, and so i guess you would just be doing the directed evolution thing, but more expensively
that's currently technically challenging to the extent of being impossible to do "traceless". oligonucleotide lab sytnhesis is very tedious because basically for every added base you need to go through a selective deprotection and couple cycle, where after dozens of couplings the problems start to really add up even if you have a nice 99% selective per step procedure. i believe the maximum practiacl length is something like 100-200 bases and in oligo synthesis lingo those are already called "ultramers", while the total sars cov 2 sequence is 20000 bases. its in principle possible to synthesize a bunch of 100 mers and just couple those to each other using chemical ligation but this again requires special tricks that leave traces and cause complications
but as you say the random mutation approach really wins over this, in part because to design a virus to be dangerous is not so easy, especially if your designed virus is not of the "we made a chimera of two known pathogens" variety, so it's much easier to just use the "statistical" approach of mutating and seeing what sticks.
Parenti posted:Guy had no contact with China, his kid had some influenza like symptoms before the onset of his own.
So they came into contact with someone recently returned from China? The first case in Hubei was back in November according to subsequent testing, plenty of time for it to spread undetected. Just goes to show how much it can and has spread via asymptomatic carriers. It'll be interesting once we get to the point of widespread adoption of reliable antibody tests, to see how pervasive this thing really is.
On a related note, the severity of covid illness and complications seems to correlate to viral load, or however you put it - when there is a lot of virus about in the community, people tend to get sicker, including younger people with no known underlying conditions - the kids getting mysterious kawasaki/toxic shock symptoms for instance, seems to be a lot more of that in the US and UK where the virus was allowed to run rampant for a long time.
"Reopen" protesters having a totally normal day ordering sandwiches at a Subway Sandwich in Raleigh, N.C. pic.twitter.com/bOOJYoR4d4
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) May 10, 2020
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:a "15 page dossier" from the "five eyes network" reported in murdoch's sydney rag the daily telegraphby notorious right wing politics journo sharri markson
update: markson was on steve bannon's podcast to talk about this. lol
pretty wild that sharri markson went on Bannon's podcast to talk about The Wuhan Virus and it passed by pretty much unnoticed
— ed (@macaulaybalkan) May 14, 2020
https://monthlyreview.org/2020/05/01/covid-19-and-circuits-of-capital/
88888 posted:HAIRY BIKERS 4-page recipe pullout
Britain is a deeply sick society.