No self-respecting scientist concluded that either a natural origin or a lab leak were the definitive cause of the pandemic. This is clear if you actually read scientific literature. It’s why phrases akin to “the most supported hypothesis is X” or “the Y theory is unlikely without more supporting evidence” are used. Both hypotheses were and are still possible explanations.
It’s people who get their scientific info from sources like the Telegraph that keep jumping to conclusions. Or people who don’t understand what a section leader at the NIH does, how research grants work, or what gain of function research is. You know, like yourself.
Yeah, it was just coincidence that the exact same strain evolved in the wild and transferred to humans in the same place at the same time!
The original grant was to the EcoHealth Alliance, which then subcontracted the Wuhan institute to collect wild samples from bats. In other words, the whole point of the research was to try and catalogue viruses that existed in the wild with pandemic potential.
It’s not coincidence that lab samples there or in other facilities exist that are close in sequence to viruses later identified in humans. That was, in fact, the goddamn point of surveying bat coronaviruses: to identify those with spillover potential. And it’s absolutely possible one of these collected samples was mishandled and leaked from the lab. After all, lab leaked viral outbreaks happen almost every other year, and there were already safety concerns at this particular site published long before the pandemic.
But what you and every other mouthbreathing idiot is trying to say is that Fauci, a director of the NIAID at the time, personally directed gain of function research to engineer new viruses to infect humans and then that virus escaped. Which, speaking as a molecular biologist myself, is laughably backwards.
It seems like you’ve read enough to get halfway there.
You should go back and read the source documents and go over what ecohealth alliance were actually doing, and where they were doing it. The funding proposals were extremely detailed, right down to carrying out gain of function research to aerosolise the corona viruses harvested from bats.
It is almost impossible to immunise bats using droplet transmission and this is the source of the global fuckup.
At some stage during this process, the modified pathogen from very early stages of developing a corona vaccine FOR BATS (the stated goal of the funding request) it somehow got out of one of the labs involved. (Malice or stupidity, we’ll never know)
At that stage it would still be fair to call the original escaped variant a VIRUS because it had not yet reached the development stage of being attenuated sufficiently to be called a vaccine, but it was a long way from a wild type variant.
This lines up with early sequencing of the virus that is widely documented. Those with any scientific integrity have acknowledged from day 1 that there were portions of the sequence that can not occur without human intervention.
In short, this was all being done with US funding in labs with woefully inadequate safety protocols.
So long as we are prepared to accept the risk/reward profile of gain of function research being carried out anywhere in the world, the risk of a similar global pandemic will never go away.
If you were secure in your beliefs, you could use logic, science, or evidence.
You use insults. I question, you insult. Who is wrong?
sigh I know you’ve probably either already made up your mind or you’re not arguing in good faith, so I’m not gonna engage any further except to say that it’s entirely possible for a virologist to do research on zoonotic viruses. Just because it’s a bat virus doesn’t mean it stays a bat virus.
Also, there are probably billions if not trillions or quadrillions of individual COVID viruses out there. Each time a new one’s made, there’s a chance for it to mutate into something else. It’s totally possible for a virus to evolve similar features in separate environments. I believe the term, “convergent evolution” applies here, and you can find examples larger than viruses in plants and animals, where even separate species can sometimes evolve the same features independently from one another. Carcinisation is an extreme example of this.
Just so you know, not only them are reading your response. I appreciate your response.
And as someone that isn’t working in the field, I have to admit that it is very illogical that they would conduct gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in a country previously hit by a coronavirus outbreak while violating safety standards. Obviously that’s hindsight but shouldn’t this be very obviously a bad idea? It’s not like the existence of a virus like COVID-19/sarscov-2 was completely unexpected.
Of course virologists study viruses, and sloppy government labs in backwater parts of authoritarian countries have lax safety protocols. You haven’t contradicted me one time. You’ve just thrown up strawmen and irrelevant arguments.
