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Statesman
 
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Post 28 Aug 2021, 9:12 am

The root cause of the COVID-19 pandemic is zoonosis — the transmission of pathogens from animals to humans. Zoonotic disease is frequently compounded by a broad set of environmental conditions. Zoonoses are responsible for about 60 percent of infectious diseases in humans, estimated to total about one billion cases of illness and millions of deaths every year. These figures don’t even take into account the impact of COVID-19.


You sound like a typical conspiracy theorist Freeman.
No explanation will suit you that doesn't meet your preconceived notion that the Chinese are somehow guilty of being the origins of Covid19.

You want an example of your inconsistent reasoning?

Actually, there is evidence that Spanish Flu was around as early as 1916 but didnt TV really hit until 1918 (and did it come from a jump from animals to humans?) Again an example of a virus jumping from animals to humans and then quickly becoming hughly transmissible would be nice.

And yet earlier you dismissed the Italian research that showed that the Covid 19 virus may have been present in Italy in July 6 months before the Chinese outbreak was recognized.

You need to settle down and just realize that there is much unknown, that science may get some answers eventually, but that politicizing Covid has damaged the process. And that dwelling on the tenuous to try and prove some non-existent conspiracy is unhealthy.
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Post 29 Aug 2021, 5:34 am

Ricky:
When the investigation stopped being purely scientific and became politicized by Pompeo and Trump the chance that a definitive answer would be found evaporated in ill will and suspicion.


It's weird to play the Trump card here. :smile: The Biden administration has just done a 90 day review which has not been fully released. The headlines are that some agencies think it developed naturally with low level confidence of that belief. Another agency believes that it came from the lab with a moderate level of confidence.

By calling it a conspiracy theory you are equating it with us not really landing on the moon or H. Clinton involved in pedophilia. But this is not a right wing conspiracy theory. It is believed by many in the Biden administration, some of whom have more detailed knowledge than any of us and spend their time researching this.

Ricky:
We probably will never know definitely.
We agree. Why is that? It's because China has not been forthcoming with information and has done what it can to hinder the investigation.
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Statesman
 
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Post 29 Aug 2021, 8:20 am

rayjay
The headlines are that some agencies think it developed naturally with low level confidence of that belief.

Here''s what I've read.
"All the agencies in the intelligence community, though, had low confidence in either of the Covid-19 origin theories -- a lab accident or natural emergence --"
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/24/politics ... index.html

But I suppose it would be worth waiting for the actual publication rather than jumping on your favorite (and apparently mistaken if CNN is accurate) headline.

rayjay
By calling it a conspiracy theory you are equating it with us not really landing on the moon or H. Clinton involved in pedophilia.


Definition: A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation, when other explanations are more probable.

Pompeo came out with the original claims about a "lab leak" or worse. As the recent comprehensive probe indicates with apparently little or no real evidence. The very definition of a "conspiracy theory"
Why? To deflect from the disastrous response to Covid 19 by his administration.

Freeman's insistence on listing his speculative questions as if they represent a path to truth, when all the resources of the American Intelligence community haven't made progress... is natural for a conspiracy theorist. No simple answer is ever enough. No authority can ever be correct if it is agreeing with his pre conceived notion.

rayjay
It's weird to play the Trump card here


Not when its his administration that created the "conspiracy theory" and refused to allow the scientific inquiry to be conducted without interference. And if you don't think leaping to accusations with little or no evidence isn't interference than you have another think coming...Anyone who expected a society like China to react to his claims in any other way than they have isn't aware of anything about China's governance or history.

Rayjay
It's because China has not been forthcoming with information and has done what it can to hinder the investigation.


What do you think they would do once Pompeo made his accusations? Honestly? The communists are going to invite US scientists in to find the truth? AS it was the Wuhan facility had western scientists working there and over time the scientific community was fairly open. There was always a chance that a more polite approach through the scientific community, to ensure that level 4 lab protocols are sufficient around the world, might have produced a result. But no...... Pompeo, Trump and the "wuhan virus".

I understand today that Biden's administration is calling for an investigation "BY THE US" into the origins of Covid 19.
Now, if that's true, its the height of arrogance, and establishes pretty well that the US really isn't serious about getting to the truth.

I suspect that may be because the lingering doubt about a lab leak plays into the US geopolitical competition with China. They really don't want China to cooperate at this point...

You want a theory? The US intelligence knows, or at least strongly suspects, the virus was a natural event and is playing up the conflict with China.
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Post 29 Aug 2021, 7:41 pm

Gosh, youre so condescending Ricky in defending a totalitarian regime that commits human rights abuses. RJ is a fair-minded individual and so am I. If you had made convincing arguments we would accept them. Everyone has an ego but you play the Trump biased against Asians card and the conspiracy card, and US trying to deflect card when you get frustrated at our arguments. And thats just annoying. I dont see RJ and I doing that; we're just makng arguments. And the Biden Admin is not out to get China on this, please. They shut down the Trump probe and only restarted it after new evidence put pressure on them to do it. And the unredacted report doesnt indicate theyre trying to get China. As RJ said they have access to material we dont and there is disagreement in the intelligence community, but they certainly dont view the lab theory as being a conspiracy theory. But neither is there a
consensus. Usually if youre going after someone you have more of a consensus and less disagreement.

By the way, a summary of the report is out. The highest degree of confidence was moderate degree of confidence from one segment of IC community was for A LAB LEAK, four plus national intell segments plis intelligence councol said low degree of confidence for your theory; and three were not able to determine a cause with any degree of confidence. And the report said the only way they could come up with a definite opinion would be if China cooperated, which they havent been doing

The biggest objection from me originally was how China used its power to try and shut down scientific debate on the origin question. And contrary to your contention China tried to cover this up since the beginning, not just Pompeo blamed them. And it wouldnt be the US that got access; it would be a team from the WHO.

Please try to make arguments without using the China bias card, the conspiracy card, and the the deflection card? Thats not actually evidence. I just asked you to explain facts; instead of trying to dispute the facts or explain them you played the conspiracy card. It gets tiresome.
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Post 22 Oct 2021, 12:06 pm

Here's a particularly powerful statistical analysis providing a high degree of confidence that Covid-19 originated in a lab.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-c ... os7&page=1

Within months of the SARS-1 and MERS outbreaks, scientists found animals that had hosted the viruses before they made the jump to humans. More than 80% of the animals in affected markets were infected with a coronavirus. In an influential March 2020 paper in Nature Medicine, Kristian Andersen and co-authors implied that a host animal for SARS-CoV-2 would soon be found. If the virus had been cooked up in a lab, of course, there would be no host animal to find.

Chinese scientists searched for a host in early 2020, testing more than 80,000 animals from 209 species, including wild, domesticated and market animals. As the WHO investigation reported, not a single animal infected with SARS-CoV-2 was found. This finding strongly favors the lab-leak theory. ...

A coronavirus adapts for its host animal. It takes time to perfect itself for infecting humans. But a pathogen engineered via accelerated evolution in a laboratory using humanized mice would need no additional time after escape to optimize for human infection. In their Nature Medicine paper, Mr. Andersen and colleagues pointed to what they considered the poor design of SARS-CoV-2 as evidence of zoonotic origin. But a team of American scientists mutated the stem of the coronavirus genome in nearly 4,000 different ways and tested each variation. In the process they actually stumbled on the Delta variant. In the end, they determined that the original SARS-CoV-2 pathogen was 99.5% optimized for human infection—strong confirmation of the lab-leak hypothesis.
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Post 23 Oct 2021, 1:56 am

Interesting. Pretty much what Redfield said: natural viruses don't come out fully ready to infect humans. And we know that the SARS virus wasn't. It takes a while and of course our immune systems get uses to the virus too. But when a virus is trained to infect humans and we have no experience with the virus...disaster. This dang gain-of-function research.
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Post 26 Oct 2021, 1:06 pm

Its not surprising that the same publication, and the same journalist who pushed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq are pushing this oft debunked theory by Muller (climate science denier) and Quarry (pathologist with a book on "how to survive Covid").

https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/06 ... cy-theory/

from the above article.

First of all, CGGCGG is not all that uncommon. It has been found in other coronaviruses, for example, some isolates of MERS coronavirus. Furin cleavage sites are also found in a number of other coronaviruses, as discussed in this recent review article. Although uncommon, furin cleavage sites are not so uncommon in coronaviruses as to be any sort of strong evidence of laboratory manipulation.

Moreover, there are known mechanisms by which such a sequence could have arisen. This has been discussed extensively on Twitter, including the fact that this nonsense from Quay and Muller is not new and was debunked many months ago:
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Post 25 Nov 2021, 7:39 am

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... et/620794/

A fair treatment of the coincidence of the lab leak theory vs. the coincidence of the Huanan Market theory.
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Post 01 Dec 2021, 5:07 am

freeman3 wrote:Interesting. Pretty much what Redfield said: natural viruses don't come out fully ready to infect humans. And we know that the SARS virus wasn't. It takes a while and of course our immune systems get uses to the virus too. But when a virus is trained to infect humans and we have no experience with the virus...disaster. This dang gain-of-function research.
It doesn't take "long".

It's a question of mutation in one species leading to a jump to another. Mutations happen all the time (and coronaviruses clearly mutate a fair amount, given the variants we are seeing, which are just those successful enough to be noticeable).

I think we are underestimating nature (a common human failing) if we assume a complex thing is a result of human action without real direct evidence.
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Post 01 Dec 2021, 3:24 pm

The problem is making the jump and being transmissible enough to survive the jump. Other similar coronaviruses-SARS and MERS--were not very transmissible and were snuffed out relatively easily.. So how did Covid get to be so transmissible to humans apparently BEFORE it made the jump. You can see how the virus gets beneficial mutations with regard to humans when it is mutating after infecting humans. But in the wild in bats so there is no reason for the virus to have mutations that would be better at infecting humans that would be selected for. And if Covid had been out for years to give it enough time to get beneficial mutations, then why wasn't it noticed?

SARS and MERs were not as infectious--basically what you might expect from a virus jumping from animals to humans. Covid was. So not conclusive but you wonder why it was so infectious as soon as it was noticed.
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Post 08 Dec 2021, 12:32 pm

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-sho ... death-rate

Since May, 2021 Trump counties (voted for him in 2020) have 3 times death rate of Biden counties ...
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Post 08 Dec 2021, 2:16 pm

freeman3 wrote:https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828993/data-vaccine-misinformation-trump-counties-covid-death-rate

Since May, 2021 Trump counties (voted for him in 2020) have 3 times death rate of Biden counties ...


It makes me sick to my stomach. That's thousands, 10s of thousands, who likely died needlessly because of mass hysteria.

More than that, I think of all the people who needed hospitals over the past 20 months, who have been screwed by the disaster that is our health care system under COVID. They're not counted in the stats, but their deaths are just as much to blame. Just sick.
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Post 13 Dec 2021, 4:06 pm

Other similar coronaviruses-SARS and MERS


SARS tended to lead to severe illness and then to kill its hosts rather quickly. So the opportunity to spread was a far shorter period. Whilst it was infecting a host, it was very transmissible.

Intensive and immediate quarantine of the infected, along with a very quick infection rate leading to a quick death meant that there wasn't time or contact opportunities for the virus to spread. (Explained to me by my daughter who is a medical researcher). Toronto was one of the few places where SARS took off in 2012... But it was isolated to a couple of hospitals very quickly. If the reaction hadn't been immediate quarantine it could have spread... and would have been much worse than Covid 19.

I don't know about MERS.
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Post 16 Dec 2021, 4:21 am

freeman3 wrote:The problem is making the jump and being transmissible enough to survive the jump. Other similar coronaviruses-SARS and MERS--were not very transmissible and were snuffed out relatively easily.. So how did Covid get to be so transmissible to humans apparently BEFORE it made the jump. You can see how the virus gets beneficial mutations with regard to humans when it is mutating after infecting humans. But in the wild in bats so there is no reason for the virus to have mutations that would be better at infecting humans that would be selected for. And if Covid had been out for years to give it enough time to get beneficial mutations, then why wasn't it noticed?

SARS and MERs were not as infectious--basically what you might expect from a virus jumping from animals to humans. Covid was. So not conclusive but you wonder why it was so infectious as soon as it was noticed.


Well there's a lot to unpack here. First of all, evolution isn't simply about a reason for a mutation - mutations that have no "reason" but don't negatively impact the success of the organism will still survive, and may prosper. Also, we don't necessarily know that a variation that means a virus can infect a human would not also have a benefit for the virus in its current host.

Secondly, there's a difference between infectivity and transmission. transmission is about the viablity of the virus outside a host and in what media. Infectivity is simply about whether if it enters a host how easy it is to infect them. A virus could be latent for us if one of those is missing, until a variation gives it a boost.

SARS has an R0 of 3. Covid 19 started out with about the same R0 (it's higher now with Delta and then Omicron). MERS was about 1, so easy to control - except in some hospital-based outbreaks where it went up to between 2 and 5. So no, Covid is not significantly different on that score.

The main difference is down to the course of the disease - in many cases the symptoms are mild to non-existent, but the disease can still be spread. This makes it hard to control as people don't know that they even have it to take precautions. The incubation period (pre-symptoms) is about the same for all three diseases which means there would be a similar risk of transmission in that period, but Covid has an earlier "peak" viral load, meaning that a person with symptoms (however mild) will be transmitting more virus before they really know they have it.

It isn't that different from SARS (the full name of SARS is SARS-CoV and the full name of the Covid disease is SARS-CoV2).

There may be other reasons for it not being noticed before late 2019 / early 2020, and the main theory is that it didn't simply jump from bats to people, but that it came via other species as intermediate hosts, and the exposure to the novel genetic material in a new host led to a set of mutations that made it something that could threaten us.

Sources: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7382925/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32056235/
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Post 18 Dec 2021, 8:07 am

The R rating is similar but that's with no precautions are being taken and it doesn't take into account that SARs was only transmissible when people were very sick. But with regard to adaptability these two studies indicating that Covid had stronger binding power to the key ACE2 receptor protein on humans than other species including Pangolins. So if Pangolins were the go-between It's a little odd that ACE2 receptor protein on pangolins is less infectious (presumably a tighter bond means greater ability to infect).



https://news.flinders.edu.au/blog/2021/ ... a-mystery/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92388-5

Other coincidences:

(1) bats are not endemic to Wuhan
(2) Wuhan has the Wuhan lab with the "bat lady" who specializes in studying coronaviruses. It also does gain in function research. Wow what a coincidence. If you randomly picked a city in China for the outbreak what are the odds that you would pick the one with two labs (Virulogy and Chinese CDC lab that do research on bats with coronaviruses)
(3) Virulogy lab reportedly has safety issues
(4) traffic around the Wuhan lab of virology decreased around the Virulogy lab in late summer early fall
(5) Chinese version of CDC moved its lab on December 2 to within a few hundred yards of Wuhsn Market (early epicenter of cases)t week before first case found
(6) US Intelligence found that 3 Wuhan Virulogy lab workers fell illand had to go to hospital in October, 2019
(7) Chinese tried to cover up outbreak and have not cooperated with investigation, including not sharing any data from Virulogy Lab with WHO.

Then there this:

"The latest piece of evidence came out this week in the form of a set of murkily sourced PDFs, with their images a bit askew. The main one purports to be an unfunded research grant proposal from Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a global nonprofit focused on emerging infectious diseases, that was allegedly submitted to DARPA in early 2018 (and subsequently rejected), for a $14.2 million project aimed at “defusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses.” Released earlier this week by a group of guerrilla lab-leak snoops called DRASTIC, the proposal includes a plan to study potentially dangerous pathogens by generating full-length, infectious bat coronaviruses in a lab and inserting genetic features that could make coronaviruses better able to infect human cells."

The proposal was rejected. But the Wuhan lab is connected to that group. So It's concerning to say the least that this kind of research was being considered. Also, the proposed research would have created a fur cleavage site which Covid has and some searchers thought was indicative of bioengineering (while it appears that cleavage site could have occurred naturally, just another coincidence)


https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatl ... le/620209/