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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31722 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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I honestly don’t have time to respond to you in full right now but the basic problem is you are talking about data from early 2020 after covid had been spreading in Wuhan for at least one month. That doesn’t show anything re origination.

This would be true of samples but not of our case tracking. It's fine to say all data should be taken with a grain of salt, but you overstate our reliance on China given we are not using their reported cases. Saying "everything is a lie" does not bring us closer to having evidence for a lab-oriented origin.

With respect to furin cleavages, read what Wuhan lab were proposing! It was what occurred.

It wasn't what occured though right? EcoHealth has multiple coronavirus grant proposals; the only one to my knowledge that proposed a furin cleavage site was rejected, and was supposed to have happened not in Wuhan but North Carolina.

The argument - not just from Andersen et all but most scientists I've seen weigh in - is that human molecular engineering has some established, effective ways to create a cleavage site. If the goal is to intentionally create a virus that can latch on to humans then you use one of the most effective ways to do that. Instead Covid has a distinctly suboptimal cleavage site that is more likely to have evolved randomly rather than have been used by a University of North Carolina scientist with better tools at their disposal, and furthermore that it would be hard to sustain a laborotory environment. I cited them writing on that in the study but here's from the Congressional testimony:

I mean, again, there would be certain -- again, if you insert the site into the virus, which has been done for all the viruses, including coronaviruses, then typically people use what we know to be a good furin cleavage site.

There are multiple versions of a furin cleavage site, right? There's optimal ones and there's sub optimal ones. And when research have done this in the past, they do with, like, we know that this is an optimal furin cleavage site. We know it will definitely be cleaved by furin. That's what people insert.

This is not that, right? It's a sub optimal site. It is good enough to be cleaved by furin, but it's not a great site and, in fact, has since evolved to become a beta site in things like Omicron and alpha and other variants, right...

Q -- is it possible, or has it been done before -- two separate questions -- to gain it in a coronavirus just through either culture or animal passage?

A I don't believe so. So, again, this is where, you know, my early thinking was this, that I thought it was possible, but I just think that -- because, again, I've looked, you know, everywhere for a reference that would suggest that it can be gained during passage, for example, and I just haven't found anything. And, again, what's important here for SARS 2, specifically we know that it has a tendency to actually lose it as its passage in tissue culture.

if it loses it in a laboratory, then it ain't going to gain it, right? It's one or the other. The fact that it even loses it is interesting because -- and it probably has to do with the fact that furin cleavage sites are probably important for respiratory transmission of a virus, which is probably also why they're pretty rare in bats, right, because bats don't transmit viruses between themselves in the respiratory route. They do this with the good old fecal-oral route. And that's different than that in mammals. That's why a lot of coronaviruses in rodents, for example, have furin cleavage sites because that's a respiratory route. In bats it's not a respiratory route, so there the furin cleavage sites are rarer, although still present.

When you're in tissue culture, that's a totally artificial selection environment, right? It's nothing to do with a respiratory route, for example. The furin cleavage site itself probably makes the virus less stable, and that's probably detrimental in tissue culture. And that means that if there is a version of the virus that emerges in this tissue culture experiment that doesn't have the furin cleavage site, then they'll out-compete all the other viruses in the same cell, and very quickly you'll end up with basically having viruses that -- viral particles that don't have that furin group,

Given that argument for the lab origin seems to rest on cleavage insertion that wasn't funded and wasn't going to happen in Wuhan, probably we stick with the simpler explanation.

Finally, the whole recombinant point was according to one author of the paper when he appeared on the Megyn Kelley podcast something that cane out after he spoke with Fauci (well before the paper was finalized). That was, it was a matter of a few days. Maybe you are right but that means there was yet another lie in the timeline.

No idea what you mean. The email expressing uncertainty is from Feb 1st, the finalized paper was released March 17th. They testified under oath to that timeline and a panel of politicians trying to embarass them couldn't find anything closer in time that would reflect significant doubts.

Throughout all this I've said that I fully consider politicization of this study to be a concern and that I personally consider a lab leak possible. But the arguments people are making against this study are pretty weak.

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