Dr. Fauci “not convinced” coronavirus developed naturally

[Silvanus]

I mean the people who think its a naturally evolved virus are kinda the conspiracy theory ones, not the ones who think its from a lab.

Uhrm... who would be "conspiring" if it was naturally evolved? A conspiracy needs to be involved if it's a conspiracy theory.

Are you suggesting the virus conspired with the bats?

 

[Trunkage]

None of what you says necessarily involves a man-made virus. A natural virus with which experiments are conducted can also escape from a lab.
And I don't think anyone here says it must have come from a bat (or other animal). There are only two sides in this topic: those who say there are multiple possibilities and more research is required and than those who claim it must be man-made.

But in the end it doesn't truly matter. Whatever the option is the real one, the conclusion will always be the same: we still got fucked by the Chinese government which through lies and deceit tried to hide and subsequently minimise the problem. Ultimately this lead to more than 3 million dead and trillions worth of economic damage. China should be forced to pay compensations to all the countries badly hit by Covid 19. (but we know that won't ever happen)

Just so we're all aware... this stuff is dangerous. So it might be prudent to make sure the lab is safe and the procedures are done properly by a third party.........

Which is exactly what was done. Guess who was overseeing the Chinese reseach to make sure it was all above board? Americans. It's why this lab was so well know

Which means, if it came from this lab, they probably knew not long after the Chinese. Also, looking at how some countries handled their outbreak, you can't put all that on China.

Yep, China is partially (or maybe largely) to blame. Doesn't excuse other countries behavior

 

[Trunkage]

Uhrm... who would be "conspiring" if it was naturally evolved? A conspiracy needs to be involved if it's a conspiracy theory.

Are you suggesting the virus conspired with the bats?

Im pretty sure they meant they were trying to cure the virus but it got out. Thus its not man made.

The conspiarcy would be hiding the testing and accidental release

 

[Generals]

Just so we're all aware... this stuff is dangerous. So it might be prudent to make sure the lab is safe and the procedures are done properly by a third party.........

Which is exactly what was done. Guess who was overseeing the Chinese reseach to make sure it was all above board? Americans. It's why this lab was so well know

Which means, if it came from this lab, they probably knew not long after the Chinese. Also, looking at how some countries handled their outbreak, you can't put all that on China.

Yep, China is partially (or maybe largely) to blame. Doesn't excuse other countries behavior

I am not excusing any other country, however when you are at the source of an outbreak of a dangerous virus the last thing you are expected to do is lie and pretend nothing is happening. China made a lot of efforts to ensure no one would be alarmed, they jailed journalists, intimidated doctors and so on. And even when they started to take drastic measures they tried to minimize the issue. Not only does this encourage foreign governments not to take the necessary measures but it also gives them an excuse if they don't want to.
And to make this worse to this day they still try to lie and hide information. They are even going as far as funding bogus studies to try and find potential sources of this pandemic outside of China.
This makes China 100% responsible of the 3 million dead. We can still blame our governments for not doing enough to limit the damage caused by Covid-19 but China is still the source of the problem. It's like a war, you can blame your government for failing to defend your country but the culprit is still the invading force.

 

[SilentPony]

None of what you says necessarily involves a man-made virus. A natural virus with which experiments are conducted can also escape from a lab.
And I don't think anyone here says it must have come from a bat (or other animal). There are only two sides in this topic: those who say there are multiple possibilities and more research is required and than those who claim it must be man-made.

Okay maybe this is a distinction I don't understand/never thought to consider. What is the difference between a man-made virus, and a virus man purposefully edits to be more virulent?
Like I don't think its some bioweapon, I think they were experimenting with Covid to find a vaccine for people who kept getting bit by bats and in the processes needed it to be easier to transmit to humans so they can come up with a human vaccine, and just through general laziness it got out. But if man wasn't experimenting with it, it wouldn't have gotten out. And just internationally the optics of lax safety leading to a once in a hundred years outbreak, devastating economies, killing millions, probably swaying the US presidential election away from Trump, the financial and emotional cost of all this, all of this being if not mostly but largely China's fault? It would change international relationships forever.
Not to excuse how the US and other nations fucked up their handling, but you can't fuck up what doesn't happen.

 

[Agema]

February 2020 Kusamu Center of Biological Sciences finds HIV proteins in amino acids of now known Covid-19. Proteins that specifically infect human HeLa immune cells.

1) There are no HIV proteins expressed by SARS-CoV-2. This is categorically untrue.

2) Proteins are macromolecules made up of one or more chains of linked amino acids; amino acids are if you like the "building blocks" of proteins just as nucleotides are the building blocks of DNA. If anything, you would argue that there are amino acid sequences in SARS-CoV-2 proteins that are similar to sequences of HIV proteins. However, this is not as interesting as it seems. There are short amino acid sequences of lots of coronaviruses similar or identical to those in HIV, and you'd expect that from random chance anyway.

3) HeLa cells are not immune cells, they are cancer cells. They are really quite different from normal human cells in numerous ways.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

The thing I was pointing out was how this thread is pretty much all people who claim that it is well established by now that SARS-CoV2 is man made, when there is in fact no evidence pointing towards that and what scientific papers have been published on the issue are in consensus to the opposite.

The whole "It might be man made"-thing that's surfacing now is all politics. It is all attempts at putting pressure on China to cooperate with the WHO's team that's searching for SARS-CoV2's origins. Since China is stonewalling a lot of their progress, by refusing to let the team get data and logs from the Wuhan laboratory for example, we are now seeing ranking official's in the west posture to make China comply.



Using stuff like CRISPR leaves notable marks in the DNA sequence being altered for one. Comparing a virus to other viruses of its family and seeing patterns is also a way. I am not a geneticist, but I know that there are plenty of ways to determine if a DNA sequence (or a whole genome as with SARS-CoV2) has been altered. If you want more information about this you can ready those two links in my previous posts, in which actual experts in the field discuss how they determined that SARS-CoV2 has come about via natural evolution.

Pushing the "it didn't come from a lab" before was political as well. Like I said before, if we had evidence the empirically shows that it wasn't man-made, would these top level people be saying it's a possibility?

 

[SilentPony]

1) There are no HIV proteins expressed by SARS-CoV-2. This is categorically untrue.

2) Proteins are macromolecules made up of one or more chains of linked amino acids; amino acids are if you like the "building blocks" of proteins just as nucleotides are the building blocks of DNA. If anything, you would argue that there are amino acid sequences in SARS-CoV-2 proteins that are similar to sequences of HIV proteins. However, this is not as interesting as it seems. There are short amino acid sequences of lots of coronaviruses similar or identical to those in HIV, and you'd expect that from random chance anyway.

3) HeLa cells are not immune cells, they are cancer cells. They are really quite different from normal human cells in numerous ways.

I mean direct quote:
"We found 4 insertions in the spike glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses. Importantly, amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identities to those in the HIV-1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag"

 

[Silvanus]

Im pretty sure they meant they were trying to cure the virus but it got out. Thus its not man made.

The conspiarcy would be hiding the testing and accidental release

Right, that would be a conspiracy. But SilentPony seemed to be saying that the people who don't believe it originated in a lab are the conspiracy theorists.

 

[SilentPony]

Right, that would be a conspiracy. But SilentPony seemed to be saying that the people who don't believe it originated in a lab are the conspiracy theorists.

I mean yes, they are. They're the ones believing the Chinese Government's increasingly changing story. First it was it was just a fluke strain, then it was from Horseshoe bats, but then when it came out the Virology Center was experimenting on Horseshoe bats it was changed to pangolins, and when that didn't take off it was changed to a research center in New Jersey I think it was actually staged the outbreak in Wuhan to make the Chinese government look bad.
That it came from nature and could have started anywhere is the line of either the Chinese government directly, people courting favor with them, or in the case of WHO from the data the Chinese government released to them and conclusion they wrote for them. In a way its similar to police shootings where the police conduct their own investigation into themselves and found they did no wrong. So to this Virology Center experimenting with Covid in the city the strain started in. They concluded they were fault-free.
But then Trump said Wuhan Virus and fuck me did liberals and Democrats go on a huge flurry over that. Was he being racists and doesn't understand what happened? Sure, yes. But do we name viruses after the place they originate from? I mean Zika virus from the Zika forest, Ebola from the Ebola river, Hantavirus from the Hantan River, Guinee Worm, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Lyme Disease.
But as soon as Trump opened his fat fucking mouth and said some racist shit, it became politically incorrect to even say Wuhan, and from there it was pretty easy for the Chinese government to spin that not only can't you call it the Wuhan Virus, it didn't even come from Wuhan and we are in no way responsible for slack safety regulations.

 

[Agema]

I mean direct quote:
"We found 4 insertions in the spike glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses. Importantly, amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identities to those in the HIV-1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag"

Yes, but:
a) this is likely to be random chance, as demonstrated by various analyses.
b) those insertions are also present in samples of other (natural) coronaviruses, some found years ago.

* * *

There is actually no significant "positive" evidence to support a lab leak. The rationale for a lab leak is nothing more than the absence of compelling evidence for a precise route of natural zoonotic transmission, and as nature abhors a vacuum, so into that absence goes a great deal of people's fears, suspicions, prejudices, political biases, etc.

 

[Silvanus]

I mean yes, they are. They're the ones believing the Chinese Government's increasingly changing story. First it was it was just a fluke strain, then it was from Horseshoe bats, but then when it came out the Virology Center was experimenting on Horseshoe bats it was changed to pangolins, and when that didn't take off it was changed to a research center in New Jersey I think it was actually staged the outbreak in Wuhan to make the Chinese government look bad.

Ok, but you don't necessarily need to believe whatever the Chinese government's story is in order to believe it evolved naturally, particularly since that's also been the consensus held by the scientific community outside of China.

That it came from nature and could have started anywhere is the line of either the Chinese government directly, people courting favor with them, or in the case of WHO from the data the Chinese government released to them and conclusion they wrote for them. In a way its similar to police shootings where the police conduct their own investigation into themselves and found they did no wrong. So to this Virology Center experimenting with Covid in the city the strain started in. They concluded they were fault-free.

Nor does one have to believe that the Chinese government is fault-free if one believes that the virus originated outside of a laboratory.

The CCP holds responsibility for the wet markets it tolerates operating, and its complete lack of functional regulation for them. It holds responsibility for almost certainly falsifying data on the severity of the outbreak early on for PR reasons. Its actions exacerbated the issue a hundredfold.

 

[Agema]

I mean yes, they are. They're the ones believing the Chinese Government's increasingly changing story. First it was it was just a fluke strain, then it was from Horseshoe bats, but then when it came out the Virology Center was experimenting on Horseshoe bats it was changed to pangolins,

None of these statements are inconsistent or inaccurate.

1) It is a fluke strain. Everywhere, all around the world, there are viruses in animals potentially a few mutations away from causing a human pandemic. It's a numbers game. It might be a billion-to-one chance, but roll the dice enough times, eventually you're pretty much guaranteed to have the worst result.

2) Bats (particularly horseshoe bats) are indeed the main genetic "reservoir" for this type of coronavirus. From these bats, mutations can cause zoonotic spread to other animals, such as...

3) ...pangolins. From which further mutation and adaptation may spread to other animals, including ultimately humans. Pangolins were specifically identified because there's a pangolin coronavrius which had high similarity (in places) to SARS-CoV-2. More recently, the pangolin link has become thought less likely.

But you have to stop and consider how hard it is to identify exactly where and how SARS-CoV-2 got from bats to humans. Think of all the animals, wild and domesticated, that it could have gone through. The exact route could be like finding a needle in a haystack - it could be quite a narrow path with few animals infected until we got unlucky and it made the leap to humans. It might have come direct from a bat, but again, it's not necessarily easy to find that bat population.

 

[SilentPony]

Ok, but you don't necessarily need to believe whatever the Chinese government's story is in order to believe it evolved naturally, particularly since that's also been the consensus held by the scientific community outside of China.
Nor does one have to believe that the Chinese government is fault-free if one believes that the virus originated outside of a laboratory.
The CCP holds responsibility for the wet markets it tolerates operating, and its complete lack of functional regulation for them. It holds responsibility for almost certainly falsifying data on the severity of the outbreak early on for PR reasons. Its actions exacerbated the issue a hundredfold.

I mean to me that's the conspiracy. I mean of course the Chinese government lied about the severity of the outbreak to save face. Of course they lied about the number of dead and continue to lie. Of course they lied about travel measures and lockdown measures. Of course they lied about the conditions of their wet markets, and the general un-sanitary nature of their poorer markets and areas. And of course they'd withhold data from a Virologist center that previously published papers about their experiments to make a new, human compatible strain of Covid and of course they would prevent 3rd party investigators from searching these Centers and of course they are happy to provide their own proof of where they say Covid came from.
But lie about it accidently leaking from a lab? Well now that's just crazy talk! Not the open and trustworthy Chinese government.

 

[Silvanus]

I mean to me that's the conspiracy. I mean of course the Chinese government lied about the severity of the outbreak to save face. Of course they lied about the number of dead and continue to lie. Of course they lied about travel measures and lockdown measures. Of course they lied about the conditions of their wet markets, and the general un-sanitary nature of their poorer markets and areas. And of course they'd withhold data from a Virologist center that previously published papers about their experiments to make a new, human compatible strain of Covid and of course they would prevent 3rd party investigators from searching these Centers and of course they are happy to provide their own proof of where they say Covid came from.
But lie about it accidently leaking from a lab? Well now that's just crazy talk! Not the open and trustworthy Chinese government.

But nobody here is saying they wouldn't lie in the event that a lab-grown virus escaped.

I'm saying that regardless of what they claim, the scientific consensus outside of China is also that it's naturally evolved.

 

[SilentPony]

But nobody here is saying they wouldn't lie in the event that a lab-grown virus escaped.

I'm saying that regardless of what they claim, the scientific consensus outside of China is also that it's naturally evolved.

But its not. The consensus outside of China, using the data the Chinese have provided, is that its naturally evolved. And the mounting evidence that China specifically doesn't want people to know, like that workers at the Wuhan Center of Virology reported getting sick with a new strain of Covid in November of 2019, keeps adding up to a different conclusion than the one China is pushing.
The whole idea it came from nature came from WHO: https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the-virus
a report that specifically says its going off what the Chinese government told them, wrote the report with the help of the Chinese government, and has no direct evidence it came from nature and wasn't allowed to inspect the Wuhan labs.
All of which adds up to that the conspiracy theory isn't that it came from a lab, but that China wants you to know it came from nature.

Both WHO and the Chinese government admit there is 0 direct evidence it came from nature. And in fairness there is 0 direct evidence it came from a lab. Circumstantial evidence leans heavily towards the lab theory. And the nature theory not only directly comes from the Chinese government, it also conveniently is very PR friendly and economically protecting for the Chinese government. Like I said early very much like police departments clearing themselves of wrong doing, and in this case to expand the metaphor the DA represents the WHO, and the DA going off the police recommendation also found no evidence of wrong doing.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Pretty much both of these combined. The fact that basically every story about this a year back was "experts" saying that is was literally impossible for this to be man-made was not science in the least. You really can't trust much if that's the type of dialog we have that basically put people who said it was possible it was from a lab on equal par with flat-earthers.

Science reporting in a nutshell TBH.


I'm glad info is finally coming out now and people are questioning the very weird "Well some-one ate a pangolin that ad been bitten by an infected bat" claims while China was super sketchy about not letting the WHO actually examine places and just wasting their time and running them round on BS PR distraction stuff.

Okay, great. It's a dangerous lab grown super virus.

So, masks and vaccines? Social distancing?

If CDCs recent findings are right social distancing is almost pointless now as it is actually airborne meaning you know how it was 2M before? It's 4M and still barely effective to even be worth it.

Masks still work though.
Vaccines too.

You semi-misunderstand.

A lot of liberals understood and believe this virus was man-made. As a progressive who lost from it, I'm an example of just that sort of thing.

What a lot of liberals wanted to prevent, however, was the cult's knee-jerk reactions to their Puppet Master's words. Covid fueled Racism is a thing. A horrible thing that logical people could sidestep, but we weren't dealing with logical people back then, were we? People who take umbrage over attempts to save their lives.

More over, this is the plague of our lifetimes, and Trump made it into a racial slur. More over did he deny it was anything and pretended it was going to magically fade away and no one was going to suffer because of it.

In short, Trump took every avenue to make this situation the absolute worse it could possibly be. Like I've said before, if Trump took it seriously and did what he could to save lives, I wouldn't have minded if he was re-elected. He would have at least shown leadership. However, he stoked racial hatred and made it policy to put us at risk.
And that's why I took the 'opposite stance'. Because it was the only logical stance to take.

Dude called it the China Virus.
We now have the English Variant and the Indian Variants
If we're going to get pissy over naming everyone better be using the names

B.1.525 and B.1.617 instead lol

Maybe time to people stop falling for China playing it's stupid games using various systems to try and avoid any accountability by hoping it can yell racism and embarrass people into shutting up while they call it everything from the American Virus to the Europe Virus back in China.

China is not the Chinese people and people I'd hope would be smart enough to know that. China's government isn't the Chinese people either.

Trump tried to shut down travel but that was deemed racist and refused.
Early on some states were pretending there was no threat and yet others managed to make the pandemic death numbers worse by putting suspected cases into nursing homes (I note that seems to have vanished from media attention a bit)
Trump even as president only have so much power and if state governors and going to refuse to take advice or act then he couldn't force them to do so under the law.

I don't know, ask the republican party about that. They've made their bed with actively disregarding "science" at every level, openly scoffing it and those who use it to try and advise best courses of action. They are famous for listening to "talking heads" namely their Glorious Leader and religious figure heads, who babble bullshit, contrary to established, confirmed science, because they were told it was BS.

Besides, learning that this is man made, doesn't change how the response to it should've been. And whether it was man made or natural, the fact is, that the conservative party, and republican citizens, fucking ignored just about every single precaution and safeguard advised by science. So this would hardly have changed how they reacted to it. All it would've done was make their anti-asian bigotry likely be more widespread than it already was. Because they probably would've been encouraged, by the talking head trump, to go out there and do it.

So have the Democrats more and more recently with some of the activist groups who hate Trump et al pushing for all kinds of madness.
Hell you only have to look at Goop labs bullshit to see the anti-science stuff left republican exclusivity years ago.

No some democrats were too busy trying to prove how not racist they were to care.

“It is important to support the Chinese community in New York City. Unfortunately many businesses and restaurants in Chinatown, Flushing and Sunset Park are suffering because some customers are afraid of the coronavirus. But those fears are not based on facts and science. The risk of infection to New Yorkers is low. There is no need to avoid public spaces. I urge everyone to dine and shop as usual,” said Speaker Corey Johnson.

^ February 2020

 

[Phoenixmgs]

Dr. Marty Makary just said the other day he thinks it most likely came from the lab (nothing to do with man-made or natural) and he's been batting basically 1.000 the whole pandemic so I'm willing to believe him and he doesn't give 2 shits about politics.

Dude called it the China Virus.
We now have the English Variant and the Indian Variants
If we're going to get pissy over naming everyone better be using the names

B.1.525 and B.1.617 instead lol

Maybe time to people stop falling for China playing it's stupid games using various systems to try and avoid any accountability by hoping it can yell racism and embarrass people into shutting up while they call it everything from the American Virus to the Europe Virus back in China.

China is not the Chinese people and people I'd hope would be smart enough to know that. China's government isn't the Chinese people either.

Trump tried to shut down travel but that was deemed racist and refused.
Early on some states were pretending there was no threat and yet others managed to make the pandemic death numbers worse by putting suspected cases into nursing homes (I note that seems to have vanished from media attention a bit)
Trump even as president only have so much power and if state governors and going to refuse to take advice or act then he couldn't force them to do so under the law.

Yeah, I never got this. Sure there's some super idiots out there that will hate on asians because of it. However, the vast vast majority of people are not gonna blame asians that had nothing to do with it. It's like blaming the Spanish for the flu (even though it didn't even originate there). Or calling someone racist because their great great great great grandpa had slaves.

I also remember how the media spun the fact that Trump told that asian reporter to "ask China" and claimed it as being racist when Trump said China because that's where the virus came from and had nothing to do with race. And I very much dislike Trump, he's a conman in my book, but I ain't gonna claim he's racist over a comment that had nothing to do with race.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

What are people rambling about here... Fauci isn't saying he's convinced it's man made. He just isn't convinced it isn't. It's not the same.
A lot of scientists have been more and more vocal about the fact they do not buy the official Chinese version and demand more transparance.
But what the scientific community isn't doing is claiming it's man made. There are actually three hypotheses: the official one (that it jumped from an animal to humans), that it is a natural virus which escaped from a lab and that it is a "man-made" virus which escaped from a lab. The latter one seems to be the least likely according to the scientific community. But scientists are now urging we take into consideration all possibilities as long as China keeps on hiding data and there is no solid evidence of the "official version". Taking into consideration all possibilities doesn't equate to just accepting it was man made.

I mean cyanide can occur naturally too it doesn't mean we'd consider a cyanide leak to be natural
It's entirely possible it's a natural virus.
Considering 3 Wuhan lab staff were admitted to hospital just before the officially start of the outbreak happened

WSJ News Exclusive | Intelligence on Sick Staff at Wuhan Lab Fuels Debate on Covid-19 Origin

Three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a U.S. intelligence report, fueling debate over Covid-19’s origin.

www.wsj.com

Suggests something was going on.
An entirely plausible theory based on info we have is as follows.

Wuhan was studying bats and was studying samples taken from wild bats on an expedition somewhere.
They found and isolated the virus because unique virus they've not seen before and think it could be used for Science.
Poor procedures / dodgy equipment because it's China leads to 3 researchers being infected by it.
They spread it round by accident possibly before even falling sick with it.
Go to the hospital and it spreads out more.

The virus can be both perfectly naturally occurring and have leaked from the lab and become a pandemic due to human actions.

Where is that Picard gif of him going "Mild Shock."?

I think a lot of stuff is going to come out about this virus in the next year or two. Reports of inaccurate testing, inaccurate fatality reports, government influence over hospital reporting, all kinds of shit, false new reports, lies, deception, you know.....typical stuff.

Depends how many of the people on the project survive.

The Scientist behind the Wuhan Bat research has been scrubbed from official sources in China already apparently.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

The thing I was pointing out was how this thread is pretty much all people who claim that it is well established by now that SARS-CoV2 is man made, when there is in fact no evidence pointing towards that and what scientific papers have been published on the issue are in consensus to the opposite.

The whole "It might be man made"-thing that's surfacing now is all politics. It is all attempts at putting pressure on China to cooperate with the WHO's team that's searching for SARS-CoV2's origins. Since China is stonewalling a lot of their progress, by refusing to let the team get data and logs from the Wuhan laboratory for example, we are now seeing ranking official's in the west posture to make China comply.



Using stuff like CRISPR leaves notable marks in the DNA sequence being altered for one. Comparing a virus to other viruses of its family and seeing patterns is also a way. I am not a geneticist, but I know that there are plenty of ways to determine if a DNA sequence (or a whole genome as with SARS-CoV2) has been altered. If you want more information about this you can ready those two links in my previous posts, in which actual experts in the field discuss how they determined that SARS-CoV2 has come about via natural evolution.

The stonewalling makes me wonder if there was more going on at the lab that people should be more worried about and we might have got lucky that it was only Covid-19 we got......

I am still undecided by "gain-of-function research ". In essence, you research diseases, make new viruses more lethal than natural-based variants, and then make a vaccine.

Risky, but may be necessary, I just wouldn't trust some countries with dubious safety standards, that and humans are by nature error-prone.

I mean if you're a real scumbag country you release the virus somewhere and get to blame some other country for the outbreak then you take a few months pissing about then you suddenly reveal you've mad a vaccine and sell it to the world then profit massively.