Dr. Fauci “not convinced” coronavirus developed naturally

[SilentPony]

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.

Again I want to ask because I feel like I have lead to a misunderstanding about what I mean about "from a lab".
What is the difference between a man-made virus, and a natural virus artificially made more virulent in a lab by man? I believe the phase is "gain of function" research where they specifically add something to a virus to make it more likely to infect humans to better study the virus and come up with cures.

Spoiler

Yeah here's an interview with evolutionary biologists talking about just such thing.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

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.

Add to this this the WHO was just accepting their claims while ignoring neighbouring countries presenting data that countered the Chinese claims.........

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.

China was trying to blame I think it was Swedish meat or something at one point.

 

[Dreiko]

One of the more convincing facts I've heard about this was to do with the way mutations of the virus end up similarly if not more lethal than the original strain.


This is not how normal viruses operate, they don't wanna kill the host, cause if the host dies the virus dies, so when they mutate they may be more contagious but they have lived within the host to know what to not do so the host will live longer and hence keep the virus alive for longer too.


Only viruses programmed to mutate in a specific way from a lab don't do this but instead keep being just as lethal if not more so.


Now this just makes common sense logic and is a simplistic look but it sounds solid enough for me.

 

[Gordon_4]

Honestly I find any of the three hypothesis for the origin of COVID-19 to be plausible. It being a random freak of nature that occurred because wet markets and bush meat have less regulation than offshore tax dodging, it being a lab escapee from the Wuhan Virology Lab because someone was careless/stupid/drunk as either a research project into the virus for obvious reasons or as a potential bioweapon.

I find the Bioweapon one to be the least probable because so far it’s hurt the Chinese themselves the most in terms of their reputation as reliable labour markets and increased scrutiny on distributed manufacturing platforms. Doesn’t mean it’s impossible, just the one I find least likely to be true.

The other two I’d personally put even odds on.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

Again I want to ask because I feel like I have lead to a misunderstanding about what I mean about "from a lab".
What is the difference between a man-made virus, and a natural virus artificially made more virulent in a lab by man? I believe the phase is "gain of function" research where they specifically add something to a virus to make it more likely to infect humans to better study the virus and come up with cures.

Spoiler

Yeah here's an interview with evolutionary biologists talking about just such thing.

Both would be considered man-made. I very much doubt we are creating completely new viruses anywhere so a man-made virus would be a natural virus artificially changed. Why start from scratch when most of the work has already been done for you basically. I have no idea about if editing the genetics of something can be done without there being evidence of the edits (though a doctor I listen to said it's not that hard to do now, though he's not in genetics). I haven't delved deep into researching it so I really don't know.

I've watched a few of the DarkHorse videos (with those same people) and I really don't know how to feel about them as one second they seem pretty good and rational and at other times not so much. They had Geert Vanden Bossche on talking about how vaccinating people is ill-advised, which just totally makes no logical or rational sense to me at all. I just can't trust their arguments because of that.

 

[tstorm823]

Putting aside the idea that the virus was made as a bioweapon and released from the lab, I feel no need to even consider such a thing, I have a particular thought about this situation. I really, truly think that whether this came from a lab or a wet market is less significant of a concern than the fact that Maggie Haberman of the New York Times said on CNN that the reason they took the stance a year ago that it couldn't have come from the lab is because Donald Trump said he had seen evidence that it had. That is the standard by which news is reported "our enemy said one thing, so the opposite must necessarily be true."

 

[Thaluikhain]

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.

Are expected to do, or should do? Looking at, say, how the US or UK responded to covid, if it had started there, we'd not have seen a great initial response either. That's not to excuse China's failures, though.

This is not how normal viruses operate, they don't wanna kill the host, cause if the host dies the virus dies, so when they mutate they may be more contagious but they have lived within the host to know what to not do so the host will live longer and hence keep the virus alive for longer too.

I think you're anthropomorthising too much, the virus doesn't want or know anything. Being more lethal might stop the virus from spreading, but that's not something the virus can do anything about, beyond evolving.

 

[Dreiko]

I think you're anthropomorthising too much, the virus doesn't want or know anything. Being more lethal might stop the virus from spreading, but that's not something the virus can do anything about, beyond evolving.

No what I'm saying is that mutations evolve in predictable fashions with viruses that are naturally-occuring, and those tend to be less lethal but more contagious when it happens in nature. You need to artificially create them and make them such that they mutate in more lethal ways instead, they don't do that naturally. They may mutate in ways which are more lethal for a different organism than the one they were infecting first, but for that first organism they mutate in ways that keeps em alive.

 

[fOx]

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.

2005 Wuhan Institute of Virology announces they're going to begin experiments on Sars-Covid for the purposes of finding a vaccine.
2015 Wuhan Institute of Virology announces they're researching how to infect human HeLa immune cells with Sars-Covid
2018 Wuhan Institute of Virology announces they've successfully found Sars-Covid antibodies in human subjects in villages near Horseshoe bat caves, bats are then started to be used in testing
2018 US diplomats send cable home that warns Wuhan Institute of Virology is slacking in their safety procedures, operating at BSL-2 meaning face masks and PPE when they should be operating at BSL-4 full body suits and warn of potential outbreak.
November 2019 several workers at Wuhan Institute of Virology report pneumonia like symptoms, related to new "unknown" Covid strain.
December 2019 Covid strain found in general public in Wuhan.
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.

So is it 1000% provable? No, nothing is. But the ones who think "Oh yeah Randy Marsh fucked a bat and that's how we got here" really are more the conspiracy theorists.

Viruses don't develop naturally anymore. They haven't for many decades now.

With modern medical facilities in place, labs know about and predict natural virus development years in advance, and prepare vaccines before hand. Any virus that developed this quickly was man made. It's part of the virologist meta contention. Labs predict the next evolution in viruses and prepare. Labs know that other labs are doing this. They try to develop virus weapons that will work around the coming vaccines. Labs in other countries know this, and attempt to predict the meta, and prepare for it. If they get it right, you don't notice a thing. If they don't, the world economy collapses. This isn't the first viral chinese attack, but it is the most effective thus far. There will be more.

It doesn't help that corporations know about this, and try to monetize it.

 

[Trunkage]

Putting aside the idea that the virus was made as a bioweapon and released from the lab, I feel no need to even consider such a thing, I have a particular thought about this situation. I really, truly think that whether this came from a lab or a wet market is less significant of a concern than the fact that Maggie Haberman of the New York Times said on CNN that the reason they took the stance a year ago that it couldn't have come from the lab is because Donald Trump said he had seen evidence that it had. That is the standard by which news is reported "our enemy said one thing, so the opposite must necessarily be true."

I mean... Trump could have just provided the evidence. It's not like he didn't have people in the lab.

But he didn't. He could have proved the evil MSM wrong. But he didn't. Trump is vindictive, if he had something, he would have said to own her.

All we have, still 18mths later, is conjecture. SO MANY PEOPLE should have known more, including Merkel,, Macron, Johnson, the WHO, the CDC. Especially that last one. No one has provided appropriate and definitive evidence one way or the other.

And I'm a person who thinks something happened in a lab

 

[Agema]

Again I want to ask because I feel like I have lead to a misunderstanding about what I mean about "from a lab".
What is the difference between a man-made virus, and a natural virus artificially made more virulent in a lab by man? I believe the phase is "gain of function" research where they specifically add something to a virus to make it more likely to infect humans to better study the virus and come up with cures.

No. Nothing is "specifically added" to a virus in gain of function experiments - that's why it's become so popular for theories that SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab.

Viruses have a particular molecular "target" by which they identify and gain access to cells in order to replicate. In the case of SARS-CoV-1/2 that's an enzyme on the cell membrane called ACE2. What you would do with a gain of function experiment is to express the target protein in another "vehicle" - so for instance for SARS variants, to genetically modify a mouse so its cells express human ACE2. Then infect the mice with virus. The virus will naturally mutate and go through evolutionary processes in the process of infecting the mice, and the laboratory can isolate new variants of the virus, and use the more successful ones to infect more mice and induce further mutation, etc. So this is "speeding up" evolution.

The reason this has become a hot topic is that it's much harder to tell a virus created by gain of function from a virus from the wild, because they both develop through the same processes - it's just the gain of function route allows it to be done faster than waiting for nature. As there is no evidence of cruder virus manipulation (directly and artificially inserting / deleting / changing bits of genetic code), obviously those who want to believe this was made in a lab have reached instead for gain of function to keep their suspicions flying.

Gain of function is controversial, and its dangers well recognised: that's why governments regulate the seven shades of shit out of it. It is deeply improbable that any gain of function experiments were going on in Wuhan the Chinese government was not aware of. Although, of course, the Chinese government is secretive and extremely hostile to external scrutiny, so we could not trust the Chinese government in the slightest to be open and honest about what was going on in the Wuhan labs even if doing so vindicated them.

 

[Agema]

Viruses don't develop naturally anymore. They haven't for many decades now.

With modern medical facilities in place, labs know about and predict natural virus development years in advance, and prepare vaccines before hand. Any virus that developed this quickly was man made. It's part of the virologist meta contention. Labs predict the next evolution in viruses and prepare. Labs know that other labs are doing this. They try to develop virus weapons that will work around the coming vaccines. Labs in other countries know this, and attempt to predict the meta, and prepare for it. If they get it right, you don't notice a thing. If they don't, the world economy collapses. This isn't the first viral chinese attack, but it is the most effective thus far. There will be more.

It doesn't help that corporations know about this, and try to monetize it.

Sorry, but this is a load of bollocks.

Labs cannot "predict" natural virus development in the way you make out. They can identify potential mutations which could cause viruses to become more problematic, but there is no guarantee. They can store the genetic codes of various virus mutations, from which vaccines may rapidly be developed. However, the benefits of this are nothing like what you suggest. Trying to develop a vaccine to a laboratory experiment is in large part a waste of resources, because there is no guarantee the virus that eventually emerges will be sufficiently similar for the vaccine to be effective. At best, it might help guide some vaccine optimisation. When a new disease appears, and as happened with SARS-CoV-2, the genetic code of the virus (as was infecting the human populace now) was quickly revealed and published, and all the vaccines were developed from it. Why use a worse equivalent from an experimental prediction when the real thing is right there?

The delay in vaccine production is safety and efficacy testing. There is no point preparing vaccines to theoretical lab-developed variants, because they could not reasonably be tested. We would need to create thousands and thousands of vaccines to cover all the possibilities generated in labs, and running these through trials would be exorbitantly expensive (and pointless, see above), never mind all but impossible given we have no way of testing the efficacy of a vaccine against a virus that no-one catches.

If this came from a Chinese lab for which China had already prepared vaccines, why didn't China have a vaccine ready? Several Western companies had vaccines ready and tested before China did, and China's vaccine was significantly less effective (in fact, it only just squeaked past minimal standards for approval by the narrowest of margin). Bluntly, Russia - probably less technologically advanced than China in biotech - developed a better vaccine from a standing start in the same timeframe. So there is a fundamental inconsistency in claiming SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab, and that these lab experiments facilitate advanced vaccine development in the way you say.

Finally, no sane country prepares a biological weapon of this sort. As we have seen with Covid-19, such viruses wreak havoc globally: it poses a vast risk to one's own country. The modern "gain of function" experiment is very new, it has not been going on for decades. Any viruses pre-~2010 would need to be artificially manipulated in ways that would be obvious from their genetic code, and no-one has found such a virus doing the rounds. Where there have been lab leaks, they are of "old" viruses - variants from the past that have been stored for analysis, not new and altered ones.

A quick look through history tells us these sorts of pandemics keep occurring. Again, there are a lot of viruses out there in humans, in animals, mutating and evolving all the time. Many of these are a few mutations away from being transmissable to humans, and of those inevitably some will eventually develop the potential for a Covid-19 level of infectiousness. Every unit time, nature rolls a million billion-sided dice. Every once in a while, it rolls a 1 and we have a new major health concern. That's just the way it is.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

One of the more convincing facts I've heard about this was to do with the way mutations of the virus end up similarly if not more lethal than the original strain.


This is not how normal viruses operate, they don't wanna kill the host, cause if the host dies the virus dies, so when they mutate they may be more contagious but they have lived within the host to know what to not do so the host will live longer and hence keep the virus alive for longer too.


Only viruses programmed to mutate in a specific way from a lab don't do this but instead keep being just as lethal if not more so.


Now this just makes common sense logic and is a simplistic look but it sounds solid enough for me.

Kinda but not quite.
Viruses don't learn they survive or die as various strains and mutations and genes picked up from latent viral DNA in humans.
If a virus strain kills the host quick it can't spread thus eventually it dies out.
Normally viruses trend towards more spreading but less lethal and they become one of the many viruses in the seasonal flu. You are right though it's unusual with Covid as it seems to me mostly maintaining how lethal it is.

 

[Agema]

(though a doctor I listen to said it's not that hard to do now, though he's not in genetics).

That didn't trouble you when you wanted to cite a gastrointestinal surgeon's opinion on virology, why worry about it here?

 

[tstorm823]

I mean... Trump could have just provided the evidence.

Not if it was classified.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Honestly I find any of the three hypothesis for the origin of COVID-19 to be plausible. It being a random freak of nature that occurred because wet markets and bush meat have less regulation than offshore tax dodging, it being a lab escapee from the Wuhan Virology Lab because someone was careless/stupid/drunk as either a research project into the virus for obvious reasons or as a potential bioweapon.

I find the Bioweapon one to be the least probable because so far it’s hurt the Chinese themselves the most in terms of their reputation as reliable labour markets and increased scrutiny on distributed manufacturing platforms. Doesn’t mean it’s impossible, just the one I find least likely to be true.

The other two I’d personally put even odds on.

From a purely hypothetical Bio weapon perspective all they'd have to do is release it in another country while China itself has a vaccine ready to go and devastate whatever country it wanted while sitting back with it's vaccine until the time was right then start offering it to countries and make serious bank.

Hell you make it lethal enough to kill fast enough you have a nice assassination tool.

Worse if you release it in a country likely to have bio weapon labs in black site areas then you can even pass the bad PR onto said country and force them to expose their viral arsenal or face the PR damage

Are expected to do, or should do? Looking at, say, how the US or UK responded to covid, if it had started there, we'd not have seen a great initial response either. That's not to excuse China's failures, though.



I think you're anthropomorthising too much, the virus doesn't want or know anything. Being more lethal might stop the virus from spreading, but that's not something the virus can do anything about, beyond evolving.

Swine flu started (or was found as the 2nd main infected region) in the USA and locked down so the thing didn't spread.

If it had started in the US or UK It do think the response would have been at least different to China who were still allowing international tourist flights etc and trying to claim it was racist to pull diplomats out of the country as a precaution or to even stop travel. You know while also sealing Wuhan itself down very tight and blocking travel there.

Viruses don't develop naturally anymore. They haven't for many decades now.

With modern medical facilities in place, labs know about and predict natural virus development years in advance, and prepare vaccines before hand. Any virus that developed this quickly was man made. It's part of the virologist meta contention. Labs predict the next evolution in viruses and prepare. Labs know that other labs are doing this. They try to develop virus weapons that will work around the coming vaccines. Labs in other countries know this, and attempt to predict the meta, and prepare for it. If they get it right, you don't notice a thing. If they don't, the world economy collapses. This isn't the first viral chinese attack, but it is the most effective thus far. There will be more.

It doesn't help that corporations know about this, and try to monetize it.

Not technically true. There are a lot of viruses and bacteria out there we don't know about the development is them being able to cross a species barrier more often than not.

We can predict only the viruses we know humans or closely related animals can catch we can't predict some obscure virus from some other animal from a small region of the world just happening to both mutate enough to infect humans and also be able to spread beyond that area (which most rare viruses and unheard of ones will be in more isolated areas which already limits the spread)

I mean... Trump could have just provided the evidence. It's not like he didn't have people in the lab.

But he didn't. He could have proved the evil MSM wrong. But he didn't. Trump is vindictive, if he had something, he would have said to own her.

All we have, still 18mths later, is conjecture. SO MANY PEOPLE should have known more, including Merkel,, Macron, Johnson, the WHO, the CDC. Especially that last one. No one has provided appropriate and definitive evidence one way or the other.

And I'm a person who thinks something happened in a lab

Can't provide evidence when it could compromise operatives or is classified to that level really. It's unfortunate but it's how it goes. Doesn't help that Trump has a suspicions round his honesty which wasn't helped by the media helping make him seem more dishonest.

 

[Agema]

Not if it was classified.

That's not as compelling as it should be, given Trump is known to have about half a dozen instances of releasing classified material to foreign agencies / public domain.

Secondly, I'm pretty sure the president has the right to declassify pretty much anything if he wants.

 

[tstorm823]

That's not as compelling as it should be, given Trump is known to have about half a dozen instances of releasing classified material to foreign agencies / public domain.

Secondly, I'm pretty sure the president has the right to declassify pretty much anything if he wants.

And if he didn't want to?

Keep in mind, you're trying to help rationalize the stance that if Trump said something and didn't provide evidence for the statement, it's rational to strongly assume the opposite, to the level of reporting it as fact on CNN. That disagreement with a political figure is sufficient to determine the news. Remember, this thread isn't about the sudden discovery that it came out of the lab, it's about the sudden admission that it's possible that happened, because the previous stance taken by lots of public figures was that any explanation involving that lab was explicitly false. Had there remained a nuanced acceptance of the possibility of a lab accident, there would be no story here.

 

[Silvanus]

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.

No, it expressly did not come solely from information provided by the Chinese government, or solely from the WHO's in-house analysis.

We have the genome; it has been analysed and compared multiple times, by multiple research teams independently. And its closest known relative is found in nature.

The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Is this definitive proof? No, of course not, hence Fauci's scientific scepticism. But you don't actually have anything anywhere near that solid.

As untrustworthy as the CCP is (which is very), you need a bit more than just insinuation.

 

[tstorm823]

As untrustworthy as the CCP is (which is very), you need a bit more than just insinuation.

I agree with this. No matter how untrustworthy someone is, that is only ever reason not to trust their word, not sufficient reason to strongly believe the opposite.