[Godstud]

@Rich What happened to numbers 2 to 4? I must have destroyed your arguments for you to ignore them. It's hard to dispute facts with your beliefs in conspiracies, pseudoscience and political narratives.

[foxdemon]

I like everyone else am not immune to error. Errors of act, errors of logic and errors of presentation. But I have to say I feel I nailed this one down pretty early on. The key points being.

1 This is a biological attack by the Nazi China regime against its own protesting people and against the free West. it did not evolve naturally and the scientific friends of China have made clear this it was effectively impossible for this to have escaped from a lab by accident.

2 This was probably more serious than the bad Flu outbreaks of recent decades, it may even be worse than the China 57 virus, but it is not much worse than the China Flu of 1918 as the scare mongers have made out.

3 Even though it may be pretty serious in its health repercussions, lock downs are not a credible long term strategy to deal with this. A higher level of mortality and long term illness will be accepted. Sweden's course will eventually seen as the wise and prudent strategy. Its just a matter of time for the people to accept the inevitable and for the politicians to climb down with minimal loss of face.

I have since added an extra point:

4 Lock down Liberals have looked for any possible signs that surviving the virus does not provide long term immunity. They want compulsory vaccines. Most of them were too stupid to realise that if the actual virus doesn't provide immunity, its extremly unlikely that any vaccine will.

You are trying to show intention.

I am not saying anything about intention at this point. I only want to decide if the virus is natural or artificial in origin.

It is looking like it is artificial.


This does not mean it is a bio weapon. The gain of function research is conducted to assess the pandemic potential of various diseases. So it could be that medical research was the motivation, not weapons development.


Having said that, the medical research only needed the ACE2 binding site and polybasic cleavage site enhancements. I don’t understand why they turned it into a retrovirus.


https://www.wsj.com/video/why-fully-recovering-from-coronavirus-might-take-longer-than-expected/985A51E7-D3C9-4375-BC3B-9E5E2E03691E.html


Watch the video on the link. It explains recovery but touches on retroviruses.

Herpes, or cold sores if you like, are retroviruses. They insert themselves in your DNA and periodically reappear. You never get rid of them.

This Novel corona virus has shown signs of reactivating behaviour. But it is too early to be certain.

If, as the article linked in my previous post claims, HIV genes for retroviral function are present, then I expect there is more bad news coming about this virus in the months ahead.

Lockdown and vaccines are not going to be effective.

Oh, another thing, just in case that wasn’t bad enough news. The study also claimed the viral genome was not yet in equilibrium. Corona viruses generally are stable compared to rhinoviruses, like influenza. So they don’t mutate as aggressively. Not this corona virus. If the fellow is right, then we can expect some mutation activity. Let’s hope it doesn’t get any more lethal.

So there you go: a highly contagious, airborne retrovirus which has some mutating to do before it settles down.

[Donna]

Spoken just like a left-wing Democrat that can't except truth. If they had really wanted to contain the virus and not to spread the virus all over the world, the CCP would and should have accepted all the help they could get. But their goal was to conceal and cover up the source of the virus. Now, they are making the outrageous claim that the virus came from the USA. I don't doubt that you left-wing Democrats will eat that crap up.

I'm not a Democrat.

[late]

It is looking like it is artificial.

You need lies that aren't artificial...

[foxdemon]

You need lies that aren't artificial...

Lies like ‘it is just the flu’ and ‘don’t worry about masks’? Your Establishment is very good at coming up with lies that suit them. But those lies get discredited as the nature of the virus becomes evident. We can plainly see it is much worse than the flu. We can also see masks reduce the spread.

As the difficulty in recovering from the virus becomes increasing evident due to reactivating, the idea that this is a natural virus will become untenable. Corona viruses are not known to be retroviruses.

Other evidence against a natural origin:

The ACE2 receptor binding site is highly attuned to human ACE2. Related bat viruses that this virus could have evolved from would need 20 to 50 years to evolve this form. The natural origins argument requires a intermediate host species with very similar ACE2 to humans (eg: cats, primates, pigs). There needs to be a dense population for this model, also.

Additionally, the virus then needs to acquire the furin cleavage site insertion. No related bat corona virus, or even other suggested corona viruses (eg: pangolin) have that cleavage site. Human corona virus do. So do other human viruses like HIV.

Furthermore, genetic distance studies show there is a very recent origin due to lack of mutinous between early SARS-cov-2019 samples.

The suggestion from scientists is that the virus must have evolved the receptor binding site in cats, pigs, primate or an unknown species before acquiring the cleavage site either immediately prior or just after infecting a human host.


This is not impossible. But an artificial origin is more parsimonious.


Now, when we consider the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been conducting gain of function research into this type of bat corona virus, specifically in the regions of RNA in question, and that the outbreak occurs right next to it, the parsimonious explanation matches the circumstantial evidence.


Bu this would mean the scientists involved in the field are lying to us. Why would they do that?

It turns out they and their universities are getting funding from China and the companies they are associated with have commercial interests in China. These interests are now under investigation, as I am sure you are aware.

[foxdemon]

By the way, how they did it might frighten those who aren’t familiar with modern biotechnology — because the authors inserted this coronavirus spike-like protein into inactivated HIV:
Briefly, MERS-CoV-spike-pseudotyped retroviruses expressing a luciferase reporter gene were prepared by cotransfecting HEK293T cells with a plasmid carrying Env-defective, luciferase-expressing HIV-1 genome (pNL4–3.luc.R-E-) and a plasmid encoding MERS-CoV spike protein.
Perhaps this is what prompted Indian researchers to look for sequences similar to HIV in the CoV2 genome (but their preprint was quickly criticized for bad methodology and erroneous conclusions). In fact, experts use such pseudoviruses regularly, and in general, one should not be scared of retroviruses as a class — their subspecies lentiviruses have been used for gene therapy for many years.

https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748



BINGO!


So now we know why there are traces of HIV in the SARS-2 virus.

So the idiots used HIV to recombine with a bat corona virus in order to make a strain with high infectivity in human hosts. A side effect was they turned it into a retrovirus.

Those two who did this research are Shi Zhengli and Ralph Baric.

The first is the bat lady herself, star researcher at the WIV. The second is one of the authors of the most commonly cited article att moving to down play a possible lab origin of the novel corona virus.

@late and @Donna @Godstud . Are you ready to concede the argument?

[Godstud]

From the very article you posted:

So there you have it. It remains possible that the mysterious virus host was a lab

Possibility does not mean fact.

As for the author:
Yuri Deigin, MBA is a serial biotech entrepreneur, longevity research evangelist and activist, and a cryonics advocate.

He is not a scientist. He's got an MBA, and not a doctorate.

So, I can only concede, given the argument you have posted, that there is a slight possibility.

Previous investigations, however have found otherwise:

2 days ago:
US military chief: COVID-19 'natural and not man-made'
US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley said Tuesday that the "weight of evidence" shows the coronavirus pandemic points towards natural origins.

"The weight of evidence is that it was natural and not man-made," Milley told reporters at the Pentagon.

The top general's remarks came days after President Donald Trump said he had seen evidence that gave him a "high degree of confidence" that COVID-19 came from a lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Yet the president said he was not allowed to discuss it.

On the same day, the president contradicted the Office of the Directorate of National Intelligence, which said the intelligence community "concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified."
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/u ... de/1830458

[foxdemon]

@Godstud The good general doesn’t say what his evidence is, so I can’t do much about that. However, I can start showing the unsupported assertions in the articles by scientists (who should of know better) and then I show how easily falsified those assertions are.

Let’s take this guy...

https://www.bioworld.com/articles/433087-article-headline

“From everything I’ve looked at, there is zero evidence for genetic engineering; it looks like normal evolution,” said Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, who has been using genomes sequences taken from patient samples to track the spread of the virus since Jan. 11.

“Thousands of mutations are distributed across the genome. If you’re engineering something, you wouldn’t do that. There are no signals for biological engineering. It looks like natural evolution,” Bedford told attendees of the AAAS meeting on Feb. 14.

A Spanish team used a bacterial method to clone a virus. So obviously they couldn’t do it without leaving obvious traces. Whereas Baric can do it without leaving traces.

True, they didn’t do it as elegantly as Baric, as their final assembly of the synthetic virus included their added restriction enzyme sites, while Baric learned to combine fragments “seamlessly”. But this is a minor point, the Spanish approach is just as robust — in 2013, with its help, the same authors had created a synthetic clone of MERS, and in 2015 their technique was included in a coronavirus textbook (chapter 13).

https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748


So that guy’s assertion that it is natural due to lacking the markers he expected is unsupported and easily shown to be false.


Another claim, this one being the commonly cited article for claiming the virus is natural, bases this claim in the assertion that the RDB site was not effectively predicted by computer models, therefore none could have created it. Must be natural.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

While the analyses above suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may bind human ACE2 with high affinity, computational analyses predict that the interaction is not ideal7 and that the RBD sequence is different from those shown in SARS-CoV to be optimal for receptor binding7,11. Thus, the high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.

OK, so what about taking a binding site from a know virus with high infectivity and just splice it in, without bathing with a computer Model? In fact that is way it has been done for 50 years.

But, I decided to check their references.

https://jvi.asm.org/content/94/7/e00127-20


This paper (by Ralph himself) shows the models used by the authors didn’t completely explain the confirmation of the new virus. But it was very close.

Reading the last few paragraphs of these articles can be very informative. They put their assertions at the beginning, but include their doubts in the discussion.

What is the source of 2019-nCoV, and did a key intermediate host play an important role in the current 2019-nCoV outbreak? Similarly to SARS-CoV, 2019-nCoV most likely has originated from bats, given its close phylogenetic relationship with other β-genus lineage b bat SARS-CoV (Fig. 2). Moreover, 2019-nCoV likely recognizes ACE2 from a diversity of animal species, including palm civets, as its receptor. In the case of SARS-CoV, some of its critical RBM residues were adapted to human ACE2, while some others were adapted to civet ACE2 (26); this type of partial viral adaptation to two host species promoted virus replication and cross-species transmission between the two host species. In the case of 2019-nCoV, however, there is no strong evidence for adaptive mutations in its critical RBM residues that specifically promote viral binding to civet ACE2. Hence, either palm civets were not intermediate hosts for 2019-nCoV, or they passed 2019-nCoV to humans quickly before 2019-nCoV had any chance to adapt to civet ACE2. Like SARS-CoV, 2019-nCoV will likely replicate inefficiently in mice and rats, ruling them out as intermediate hosts for 2019-nCoV. Moreover, we predict that either 2019-nCoV or laboratory mice and rats would need to be genetically engineered before a robust mouse or rat model for 2019-nCoV would become available. Pigs, ferrets, cats, and nonhuman primates contain largely favorable 2019-nCoV-contacting residues in their ACE2 and hence may serve as animal models or intermediate hosts for 2019-nCoV. It is worth noting that SARS-CoV was isolated in wild palm civets near Wuhan in 2005 (9), and its RBD had already been well adapted to civet ACE2 (except for residue 487). Thus, bats and other wild animals in and near Wuhan should be screened for both SARS-CoV and 2019-nCoV.

The problem is the virus is thought to have needed 20 - 50 years in an intermediate host species to evolve the binding site sequence from a bat virus origin. That host species must have very similar ACE2 proteins as human proteins. And the virus still needs that cleavage site (a matter a avoided in the earlier article by Anderson).

This is why I say the lab origin hypothesis is more parsimonious than the natural origin hypothesis.

It is still possible that it had a natural origin, but the lab origin seems more plausible, all things considered.

Of course this would be an enormous scandal. Think of the headlines: “Genetically Engineered Virus escapes lab and kills over 200,000 people”.

Having said all of this, you can still accuse anyone of claiming the virus is a bio weapon to be a conspiracy theorist. There is nothing I have seen yet that suggests anything other than this is due to scientists being twats. The research field, as @late might be able to attest, is very competitive.


So we need to ban two things. One is banning live exotic animals in wet markets (they create an ideal environment for introducing zoonotic disease) and the second is banning gain of function research on such diseases.

[Hindsite]

I'm not a Democrat.

At least I got the left-wing part right.

[Godstud]

So we need to ban two things. One is banning live exotic animals in wet markets (they create an ideal environment for introducing zoonotic disease) and the second is banning gain of function research on such diseases.

There is, at least, two things we can agree upon.

[Tainari88]

I'm not a Democrat.

Hiney's brain only accepts two labels. Democrat and Republican. Liberal is Democrat.

He can't handle socialist, communist, anarchist, social democrat, libertarian or something different.

It doesn't compute. If you push him hard he becomes increasingly sexist and racist.

You then become a mongrel if you are not 'white' or some ugly label for being a woman.

You are about as difficult for him to figure out as can be.

He won't ever stop thinking of you as a Democrat or a liberal. No matter what you tell him.

[Hindsite]

So we need to ban two things. One is banning live exotic animals in wet markets (they create an ideal environment for introducing zoonotic disease) and the second is banning gain of function research on such diseases.

That type of research is part of biological warfare in case some people do not know. Biological warfare is what the Chinese Communist Party are trying to conceal from that lab.

[Godstud]

No @Hindsite, that's not proven and is the stuff of conjecture. It's not fact, and even the US military and intelligence isn't saying that it is.


You are very good at believing every conspiracy theory that comes around, but that's a sign over very unhealthy skepticism, taken to the extreme.'

[Hindsite]

No @Hindsite, that's not proven and is the stuff of conjecture. It's not fact, and even the US military and intelligence isn't saying that it is.

I have a good track record of being proven right.

[foxdemon]

What evidence is there for the bioweapon theory?

@ThirdTerm has presented evidence of a French man having the virus as early as late December 2019. How could it have got there that early?

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11565077/fears-coronavirus-europe-october-french-athletes-military-games-wuhan/


Various news articles, such as the one in the link, are claiming French participants in the Wuhan Military Games in October, had flu like symptoms.

The molecular evidence shows possible September origin.

https://www.scmp.com/video/coronavirus/3081393/exclusive-coronavirus-outbreak-may-have-started-september-say-british


So that would be enough to get a guy in France infected by December. But the virus must have got to the military games soon after first appearing. Was a participant at the games involved in the organisation that was developing the virus?


This is where the Chinese conspiracy theory that it was American soldiers who brought the virus to Wuhan comes from. But it seems rather implausible. A Chinese military participant who got exposed at a lab in Wuhan is more believable. But then why would any military personnel be associated with the bat lady’s lab if they were ‘t involved in bioweapon research?

So there is that.


There is evidence of companies working with the Wuhan lab that also get bioweapon research money from the Pentagon.

https://americanpriority.com/news/congressman-probes-into-pentagon-wmd-grant-to-firm-that-funded-wuhan-lab/


Oh look. Dr Daszak. He is one of the guys who writes those articles insisting the corona virus could not possibly have come from a lab.


So the WIV is one step away for US biological warfare research. That alone would suggest PLA involvement in the WIV just to get inside the US military bio research.


Umm, what else? The two bat virus strains that both RaTG13 and SARS-cov-19 are thought to come from (by those who are skeptical of RaTG13), were collected by CCP researchers. From second link in my first post yesterday.


So there is some very circumstantial evidence for military involvement. But it is extremely weak compared to the evidence for a lab origin.

None the less, the growing number of high grade BSL4 labs around the world could very well be used for military biological warfare research and weapons development.

Now I will get @Godstud to agree a third time.

We really need a lot more transparency in not just the Wuhan lab, but in all similar labs around the world. The CCP’s lack of willingness to allow the lab to be visited and examined is not acceptable. International arrangements to keep these labs under scrutiny need to be redoubled.

[Godstud]

We really need a lot more transparency in not just the Wuhan lab, but in all similar labs around the world. The CCP’s lack of willingness to allow the lab to be visited and examined is not acceptable. International arrangements to keep these labs under scrutiny need to be redoubled.

You're on a roll now, although I don't see how many countries, even the USA, would allow independent bodies to inspect and examine labs. Even then, who would believe them?


@Hindsite You putting the is the response to your absolutely stupid statement. You rarely prove anything. You assert the insane as truth, and facts as fake news.

[foxdemon]

You're on a roll now, although I don't see how many countries, even the USA, would allow independent bodies to inspect and examine labs. Even then, who would believe them?

The last Cold War was wound down through mutual confidence building exercises, central of which was site inspections.

If the Chinese want to be seen as honest actors, then they must agree to inspections. We are quite happy to allow mutual inspections of our own BSL4 labs in Oz and NZ. So the Australian and New Zealand diplomatic position is the correct one. The Chinese are only breeding distrust by refusing to cooperate with our reasonable request. If they don’t allow inspections, we will be forced to assume the worst case scenario, that being those labs are in fact bioweapon facilities.

What other explanation can there be for Chinese recalcitrance on this matter?

[Godstud]

You know why they wouldn't want to? Power.

They lose power by allowing another to police them. Right now there is a lot of mistrust between both USA and China. most of it, I think, is fabricated to advance certain political agendas. As long as these agendas are furthered, I can't see China altering its attitude.

Assumptions of wrong-doing do not make those assumptions real, nor factual.

[Atlantis]

Nobody believes Trump or his secretary of state. They are among the most discredited people on this planet.

The German Spy Agency, BND, filed a report to the German Ministry of Defence today which doubts that COVID-19 virus originated in a Chinese lab.

It also claims that German intelligence had asked members of the "Five Eyes" network, US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand for any evidence and that "no one wanted to support Pompeo's claim".

The report ended that the accusations were a "deliberate attempt to divert public attention away from President Trump's own failures".

German spy agency doubts US ‘China lab’ coronavirus accusations, report says

[late]

This is not impossible. But an artificial origin is more parsimonious.

For some of us, there is a difference between fantasy and reality. There are multiple studies now, and they've come to the same conclusion.