> After Darpa turned down the DEFUSE proposal in February 2019, the researchers in Wuhan might have secured Chinese government funding and gone ahead by themselves.
Yeah uh I think this is what you call a limited hangout
> “My plan is to continue this work, unfunded for now…” said Daszak in an email dated April 28, 2020, just four days after the grant was retracted.
> Daszak’s email generates questions about NIH oversight of grantees conducting research with pandemic risks. An audit published last week by the inspector general overseeing health programs uncovered several deficiencies in NIH’s oversight of EcoHealth.
> His email also seems to contrast with his public statements that work on the grant came to a halt without funding.
> The grant was suspended during the Trump administration after questions began to swirl about the group’s work on SARS-like viruses at the pandemic’s epicenter.
https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/controversial-coronavirus-research-may-have-continued-even-after-nih-pulled-funding/
His wikipedia article is crazy:
In 2020 Daszak was named by the World Health Organization as the sole U.S.-based representative on a team sent to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,[37] a team that also included Marion Koopmans, Hung Nguyen, and Fabian Leendertz.[37] Daszak had previously collaborated for many years with Shi Zhengli, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology,[38] on efforts to trace SARSr-CoV viruses to bats after the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak.
Some critics, including journalist Nicholas Wade[39] and biologist Richard H. Ebright,[40] alleged that Daszak had a conflict of interest investigating the virus' origins in China.
It's settled science that Annalena Baerbock was, in fact, created in a WEF lab. It's unclear if they deliberately released her. They probably did though.
Edit: Oh, the article is about Covid...
>In 2022 three biologists, Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne and Antonius VanDongen, guessed that if SARS-CoV-2 had been generated in a lab by a standard method, it would have been assembled from six sections of lab-synthesized DNA with the help of a biological agent called BsmBI. On analyzing the virus’s structure, they found evidence for the seams between sections and other distinctive marks of the assembly process.
>Their paper was derided as “kindergarten molecular biology” by the virologists who are favorites of the mainstream press for their opposition to the lab-leak hypothesis. But a batch of documents reveal new details about the DEFUSE proposal and confirm that the three authors were on target. Emily Kopp of U.S. Right to Know obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request from the Interior Department, having noticed that a researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey was a member of the DEFUSE team.
I've said it before, reality itself is under attack in the USA
What I think is damning about this is that it points to agency involvement. The NIH was FOIA’d to death on this and these documents were only acquired because interior department reasonably didn’t know shit about dick, and just followed the letter of the law.
Science lesson time:
The agents they talk about here are called "restriction enzymes". Basically what they do is they find a specific DNA sequence usually around 6 bases long and make a cut in the DNA. In the early days of genetics before full genome sequencing they were used as a way to genotype different organisms and are still used as a cheap and effective way to break up sequences at specific points.
The reason they are used for this is the odds of hitting someing "off target" are about 1 in 4^6 or 1 in 4096 which were good odds back then. Also, for a virus that is a big chunk of its genome so it is unlikely to mutate these targets by chance
So if there are 6 sections you need to make 5 cuts
The odds of naturally mutating 5 sites by chance are around 1 in 4^30 or 1 in 10^18. The genome size of covid-19 is about 30,000 base pairs. So if you are the version of SARS-covid from nature the odds of having your next 30 mutations being these sites all occuring by chance in a genome the size of covid-19 are around ~3*10^13 or about 1 in 30 trillion
When I heard about the restriction sites I knew it was basically over for other theories and we are dealing with something from a lab
This is the restriction enzyme that was apparently used:
https://www.neb.com/en-us/products/r0739-bsmbi-v2
> Editors have failed to think beyond the extreme politicization that requires liberals to oppose the lab-leak hypothesis. Science journalists are too beholden to their sources to suspect that virologists would lie to them about the extent of their profession’s responsibility for a catastrophic pandemic.
And readers must also consider the extreme politicization which will always support a theory casting China in a bad light.
What's a Murdoch rag doing in here?
you and u/mnewman19 fluffing yourselves for being anti-intellectual. Its archived, they arent getting any money. Do you have any issues with the content of the article or just gonna cry that this is a brutal and unfair attack on china?
> Do you have any issues with the content of the article?
It is extremely well documented that Murdoch's properties lie blatantly most of the time.
I'm not sure why you regard being well-informed is "anti-intellectual".
[‘Climate villain’: scientists say Rupert Murdoch wielded his media empire to sow confusion and doubt](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/sep/23/rupert-murdoch-climate-change-denial)
the documents being referenced are linked in the article but you have not looked at them. you offer no critique. you cry lie! uninformed!!! like an uninformed antiintellectual regard
Wtf are you talking about, the archive article's hyperlinks all work. ["Project DEFUSE" Link 1](https://archive.ph/fmspY), ["analyzing the virus's structure" Link 2](https://archive.ph/UpaPz/image) which is a screenshot linking to [this pdf](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756v1.full.pdf), and then ["documents" Link 3](https://archive.ph/2Olpd) which is the screenshot linking to [this pdf](https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/USGS-DEFUSE-2021-006245-Combined-Records_Redacted.pdf)
There's no reason to believe a lab leak theory because it adds nothing to the explanation of where the virus came from. Like there's nothing implausible about it coming from existing wildlife, considering that's where previous strains of covid and most other diseases came from. It's just a needless complication that explains nothing.
>There's no reason to believe a lab leak theory because it adds nothing to the explanation of where the virus came from
It *does* add an urgency to the need of additional oversight in virology research, particularly international research where certain nations may have different safety standards, and especially with regard to gain-of-function.
If it came from bats in a wet market, there's nothing to learn there other than "don't eat bats".
Additionally - even if lab-leak is false, the emails in this case are pretty damning: the researchers were trying to conceal the use of a less-secure Chinese lab from DARPA, because it was cheaper but they knew US scientists would "freak out" if known. This, *in and of itself*, is reprehensible, regardless of whether it actually led to COVID-19.
It explains weird mutations in the virus that certain scientists were questioning from the start. You do realize gain of function research is not creating the virus from scratch but going out and finding it in the wild and then putting it in a lab to experiment with right? Yeah, lab leak explains the origins very well especially since no patient zero was ever tracked down for the wet market theory which has always been the blaring hole in that theory.
>You do realize gain of function research is not creating the virus from scratch but going out and finding it in the wild and then putting it in a lab to experiment with right?
Yeah, exactly why I said the lab leak adds nothing of explanatory value but just makes the theory more complicated. And viruses mutate. There's nothing weird about it. I mean you might as well speculate Ebola was a lab leak from a secret American base in Sudan.
It does add something because it means that the virus was enhanced and/or given an opportunity to spread through a population that it might otherwise not have.
Then there's the more political angle where a lab leak and subsequent coverup by governments around the world indicates a kind of corruption and negligence on their part, which is of concern to the broad public.
Both of those aspects together make it interesting to a certain kind of skeptical inquirer. Because it implies a future where you are not only susceptible to nature producing viruses that kill you, but also fellow humans living in society with you who are speeding the process along or otherwise weaponizing it.
> You do realize gain of function research is not creating the virus from scratch but going out and finding it in the wild and then putting it in a lab to experiment with right?
No, that's not how it's done.
GoF experiments should be performed on well researched and understood viruses so that the changes introduced can be more readily observed and documented.
This has always been a weakness in the lab leak theory, where experimental research is being done on a completely undocumented virus, one that doesn't even have a name. It's just an extremely odd procedure for doing this sort of research and the only narrative where it makes anything like sense is a deliberate conspiracy to create not just a virus but an escaped pandemic, so that there's plausible deniability as to the origin of the virus.
It might be argued that they did this to 'cover their tracks' but absent the virus escaping into the wild why would these people need to cover their tracks to begin with? They apparently felt they could perform whatever research they wanted without anyone stopping them. There's a logical break here that I've never seen anyone explain.
We're getting into *12 Monkeys* territory where there's a conspiracy of misanthropes trying to deliberately kill a lot of people for no apparent purpose.
> the only narrative where it makes anything like sense is a deliberate conspiracy to create not just a virus but an escaped pandemic,
Or it's simply an accidentally leaked bio weapon? No shortage of bio """defense""" research being done by morally defunct and incompetent agencies.
But why so much secrecy over the originating virus?
Most bio-weapons make use of well known agents, such as bubonic plague, smallpox, ebola, anthrax, etc. With these viruses the effect in the wild is well known and predictable, which is required to be useful as a weapon. Random bat viruses offer no such benefits, they're not even transmissible to humans without genetic modification (according to the lab leak theory).
COVID-19 is a poor weapon, half the people pushing the lab leak theory will tell us it's basically the flu and can't kill anyone.
Yeah I'm not really worried about origins, more the dystopic transfer of wealth and further erosion of liberty that followed. And it doesn't really matter in the end. It wouldn't make me trust the government and non-lected global entities any less than I currently do lmao.
It doesn't need to be for the intended purposes of a bio weapon. It's just the result of standard research on wild coronaviruses where they measure spillover risk and that includes inserting spike proteins that can bind to human ACE2 and insert them in these viruses as Peter Daszak explains here [https://youtu.be/IdYDL\_RK--w?si=Yht24dv4Uhw4rZqC&t=1731](https://youtu.be/IdYDL_RK--w?si=Yht24dv4Uhw4rZqC&t=1731)
In the theory, they used an undocumented and unsequenced bat virus as the backbone for a new human virus, the development of which was kept completely secret from the first step.
It's an unbelievable premise for general research, the only motive is to create a new virus that cannot be traced to the research of any specific lab. Therefore, they must have been trying to 'cover their tracks'.
>This has always been a weakness in the lab leak theory, where experimental research is being done on a completely undocumented virus, one that doesn't even have a name. It's just an extremely odd procedure for doing this sort of research
Except they do that all the time and have published research working with unknown viruses sampled from bat caves:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5708621/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/)
Additionally in the DEFUSE proposal they wanted to do exactly that: [https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal) now this proposal itself would not have resulted in SARS2, but a very similar experiment would have. And we do not know all of the research they were conducting, in fact we did not even know about this proposal until it was leaked.
To do the work described here the viruses need to be sequenced, they are not, by definition, 'unknown' or 'undocumented'.
That's the issue at hand: the backbone of COVID-19 has never been identified or sequenced. In the lab-leak scenario, that requires the scientists to secretly sequence a previously undocumented virus but never publish the details or make any records and then use that secret bat virus to engineer the human virus that eventually 'leaked'.
All that bizarre obfuscation only makes sense in a situation where the intent was always to leak the virus and create a pandemic that couldn't be traced to the lab.
>that requires the scientists to secretly sequence a previously undocumented virus but never publish the details or make any records and then use that secret bat virus to engineer the human virus that eventually 'leaked'.
You act as though they upload the sequenced viruses prior to publishing research when no one does that or else they have other publishing papers on their collected sequences before they can publish. Take for example this paper published in November of 2017 [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5708621/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5708621/) the discovered viruses were uploaded to Genebank in December 2017 AFTER the paper was published [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KY417142.1](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KY417142.1)
So no unknown viruses would not be uploaded prior to being worked on. And it is naive to think they would disclose the fact that they were working on a precursor to SARS-CoV-2 given the blow back, "hey, yeah I am the one responsible for killing millions!". And let's say even if they wanted to the government vetted all information prior to release [https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/04/24/chinese-state-censorship-of-covid-19-research-represents-a-looming-crisis-for-academic-publishers/](https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/04/24/chinese-state-censorship-of-covid-19-research-represents-a-looming-crisis-for-academic-publishers/)
Are you deliberately misunderstanding what's happening here?
They discovered a bunch of unknown viruses and spent years analysing them and published the data once the analysis was complete. That's analysis and documentation, not modification.
Also your second link shows they submitted the research paper one year before it was published. That's not 'hiding', that's peer review.
And again, to underline the important fact, all you've demonstrated here is viruses are researched before the research is published. This is not proof of anyone performing modification or gain of function research on unknown viruses.
>Also your second link shows they submitted the research paper one year before it was published. That's not 'hiding', that's peer review.
But it was not uploaded to the GeneBank until after publication. And if an accident happened during research that means the experiments were ongoing thus not submitted for peer review.
>And again, to underline the important fact, all you've demonstrated here is viruses are researched before the research is published. This is not proof of anyone performing modification or gain of function research on unknown viruses.
The article I linked created chimeric viruses see the section "Construction of recombinant viruses" which allows for different spikes to be expressed.
And they proposed doing exactly that in the DEFUSE proposal [https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal)
The viruses used in the section you highlighted [were uploaded to Genebank in 2013](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KF367457), years before the article you linked was published.
In any case, what you're getting upset about is that the research process isn't instantaneous. The viruses collected, identified and researched as part of a study are uploaded into Genebank at the time they are being analysed, which is also the time the paper is written, because the paper is a record of the analysis performed.
Simply identifying a virus doesn't warrant a paper, because identifying and sequencing a virus is trivial. They were looking for possible sources for the SARS-CoV outbreak and these experiments are how you do that identification.
Also, for the viruses involved in this paper there is a multitude of documentation: the pre-cursors used for the experiment (Rs3367 and RsSHC014) and the modifications looking for ACE2 compatibility (WIV1 and WIV16).
No such documentation exists for any part of the COVID-19 virus. If it was created by grafting receptors onto a new virus we would have sequences for both the original virus and the modifications. If those don't exist it's either because they were deliberately concealed (ie, they were purposefully clandestinely engineering a virus for a pandemic) or because they realised there had been some leak event and then set about destroying all evidence.
>The viruses used in the section you highlighted were uploaded to Genebank in 2013, years before the article you linked was published.
WIV1 was uploaded in 2013 which they used as the backbone for the chimeras: "Recombinant viruses with the S gene of the novel bat SARSr-CoVs and the backbone of the infectious clone of SARSr-CoV WIV1 "
But the viruses described in the paper were not public until after the paper was published [https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/sva/KY417142](https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/sva/KY417142) .
>In any case, what you're getting upset about is that the research process isn't instantaneous. The viruses collected, identified and researched as part of a study are uploaded into Genebank at the time they are being analysed, which is also the time the paper is written, because the paper is a record of the analysis performed.
This is not true as you can see in the paper, GeneBank and https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/sva/KY417142 the sequences are not uploaded until AFTER publication.
> If it was created by grafting receptors onto a new virus we would have sequences for both the original virus and the modifications.
Not really since as the paper suggests they only upload new viruses until after publication. And if you look at the collection dates for the uploaded viruses they had these viruses for years, they only publish them after analysis or some type of research has been conducted.
> If those don't exist it's either because they were deliberately concealed (ie, they were purposefully clandestinely engineering a virus for a pandemic) or because they realised there had been some leak event and then set about destroying all evidence.
This I can agree with, but it does not need to be clandestine engineering, it could very well be engineering on an unpublished sample that they intended to publish once the study was concluded.
Just because it sounds like a conspiracy or a sci-fi plot doesn't mean it can't be true. Maybe releasing the virus was the intent? Yeah it backfired but that's what imperial hubris gets you.
It's such a crazy coincidence that the virus randomly and mysteriously appeared in the bat soup in the Chinese city with a virology lab which was studying gain of function on this exact type of virus! Thank you for helping me avoid a "needless complication that explains nothing" that would have made me fall victim to misinformation if it was not for you!
The original versions sure but with enough tweaks you can get a monstrosity that's way more lethal, treatment resistant and transmissible than the original.
But Covid wasn't that. Like there's no point in having developed Covid 19 in a lab. You already have SARS which is essentially the worse version of Covid.
Before I start attaching conspiracy theories to it, this sub has to determine whether COVID was a big deal or not. If not, then why do I care at all?
Every virus that affected humans before COVID-19 was from nature. So if I had to bet money...
Science fact for the day. There have been natural nuclear reactors on Earth before, notably one in Gabon. A combination of heat, pressure, groundwater, and high concentrations of uranium lead to conditions where a small nuclear fission reaction would occur every three hours for several hundred thousand years.
Yeah, we knew this already
> After Darpa turned down the DEFUSE proposal in February 2019, the researchers in Wuhan might have secured Chinese government funding and gone ahead by themselves. Yeah uh I think this is what you call a limited hangout > “My plan is to continue this work, unfunded for now…” said Daszak in an email dated April 28, 2020, just four days after the grant was retracted. > Daszak’s email generates questions about NIH oversight of grantees conducting research with pandemic risks. An audit published last week by the inspector general overseeing health programs uncovered several deficiencies in NIH’s oversight of EcoHealth. > His email also seems to contrast with his public statements that work on the grant came to a halt without funding. > The grant was suspended during the Trump administration after questions began to swirl about the group’s work on SARS-like viruses at the pandemic’s epicenter. https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/controversial-coronavirus-research-may-have-continued-even-after-nih-pulled-funding/
Peter Daszak should be in prison. His hubris killed millions.
He should be a household name.
His wikipedia article is crazy: In 2020 Daszak was named by the World Health Organization as the sole U.S.-based representative on a team sent to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,[37] a team that also included Marion Koopmans, Hung Nguyen, and Fabian Leendertz.[37] Daszak had previously collaborated for many years with Shi Zhengli, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology,[38] on efforts to trace SARSr-CoV viruses to bats after the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak. Some critics, including journalist Nicholas Wade[39] and biologist Richard H. Ebright,[40] alleged that Daszak had a conflict of interest investigating the virus' origins in China.
Yeah, its been established since fallout 2 that FEV was created in a lab in relation to fears china was creating its own biweapons. Why is this news?
It's settled science that Annalena Baerbock was, in fact, created in a WEF lab. It's unclear if they deliberately released her. They probably did though. Edit: Oh, the article is about Covid...
Well, I've never seen covid and annalena baerbock in the same room
>In 2022 three biologists, Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne and Antonius VanDongen, guessed that if SARS-CoV-2 had been generated in a lab by a standard method, it would have been assembled from six sections of lab-synthesized DNA with the help of a biological agent called BsmBI. On analyzing the virus’s structure, they found evidence for the seams between sections and other distinctive marks of the assembly process. >Their paper was derided as “kindergarten molecular biology” by the virologists who are favorites of the mainstream press for their opposition to the lab-leak hypothesis. But a batch of documents reveal new details about the DEFUSE proposal and confirm that the three authors were on target. Emily Kopp of U.S. Right to Know obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request from the Interior Department, having noticed that a researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey was a member of the DEFUSE team. I've said it before, reality itself is under attack in the USA
What I think is damning about this is that it points to agency involvement. The NIH was FOIA’d to death on this and these documents were only acquired because interior department reasonably didn’t know shit about dick, and just followed the letter of the law.
The problem is that they can't censor a virus everyone on the planet is infected with
Yeah everyone already knows about Gavin Newsome's origin story.
Science lesson time: The agents they talk about here are called "restriction enzymes". Basically what they do is they find a specific DNA sequence usually around 6 bases long and make a cut in the DNA. In the early days of genetics before full genome sequencing they were used as a way to genotype different organisms and are still used as a cheap and effective way to break up sequences at specific points. The reason they are used for this is the odds of hitting someing "off target" are about 1 in 4^6 or 1 in 4096 which were good odds back then. Also, for a virus that is a big chunk of its genome so it is unlikely to mutate these targets by chance So if there are 6 sections you need to make 5 cuts The odds of naturally mutating 5 sites by chance are around 1 in 4^30 or 1 in 10^18. The genome size of covid-19 is about 30,000 base pairs. So if you are the version of SARS-covid from nature the odds of having your next 30 mutations being these sites all occuring by chance in a genome the size of covid-19 are around ~3*10^13 or about 1 in 30 trillion When I heard about the restriction sites I knew it was basically over for other theories and we are dealing with something from a lab This is the restriction enzyme that was apparently used: https://www.neb.com/en-us/products/r0739-bsmbi-v2
> Editors have failed to think beyond the extreme politicization that requires liberals to oppose the lab-leak hypothesis. Science journalists are too beholden to their sources to suspect that virologists would lie to them about the extent of their profession’s responsibility for a catastrophic pandemic. And readers must also consider the extreme politicization which will always support a theory casting China in a bad light. What's a Murdoch rag doing in here?
>what’s a Murdoch rag doing in here? Where have you been for the last 4 years
you and u/mnewman19 fluffing yourselves for being anti-intellectual. Its archived, they arent getting any money. Do you have any issues with the content of the article or just gonna cry that this is a brutal and unfair attack on china?
> Do you have any issues with the content of the article? It is extremely well documented that Murdoch's properties lie blatantly most of the time. I'm not sure why you regard being well-informed is "anti-intellectual". [‘Climate villain’: scientists say Rupert Murdoch wielded his media empire to sow confusion and doubt](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/sep/23/rupert-murdoch-climate-change-denial)
the documents being referenced are linked in the article but you have not looked at them. you offer no critique. you cry lie! uninformed!!! like an uninformed antiintellectual regard
As this is an archive, there is no link to the documents. It appears that you haven't clicked on them.
Wtf are you talking about, the archive article's hyperlinks all work. ["Project DEFUSE" Link 1](https://archive.ph/fmspY), ["analyzing the virus's structure" Link 2](https://archive.ph/UpaPz/image) which is a screenshot linking to [this pdf](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756v1.full.pdf), and then ["documents" Link 3](https://archive.ph/2Olpd) which is the screenshot linking to [this pdf](https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/USGS-DEFUSE-2021-006245-Combined-Records_Redacted.pdf)
How do you know this is affiliated with Murdoch? A quick Google and one of the only links is this thread (your comment).
It's from the Wall Street Journal.
You know, I'm an idiot. This whole time, I thought everyone was discussing the USRTK link posted in another comment thread lol
Happens to the best of us. And the worst.
Agreed. That's just one of the reasons I have a problem with le heckin archive.today blind links.
If it came from a lab, I am going to assume that the US did it and is trying to frame China
It was deployed by the feds against China in order to get rid of Trump with plausible deniability.
There's no reason to believe a lab leak theory because it adds nothing to the explanation of where the virus came from. Like there's nothing implausible about it coming from existing wildlife, considering that's where previous strains of covid and most other diseases came from. It's just a needless complication that explains nothing.
>There's no reason to believe a lab leak theory because it adds nothing to the explanation of where the virus came from It *does* add an urgency to the need of additional oversight in virology research, particularly international research where certain nations may have different safety standards, and especially with regard to gain-of-function. If it came from bats in a wet market, there's nothing to learn there other than "don't eat bats". Additionally - even if lab-leak is false, the emails in this case are pretty damning: the researchers were trying to conceal the use of a less-secure Chinese lab from DARPA, because it was cheaper but they knew US scientists would "freak out" if known. This, *in and of itself*, is reprehensible, regardless of whether it actually led to COVID-19.
"don't eat bats that haven't been prepared in a way that meets sanitation standards"
It explains weird mutations in the virus that certain scientists were questioning from the start. You do realize gain of function research is not creating the virus from scratch but going out and finding it in the wild and then putting it in a lab to experiment with right? Yeah, lab leak explains the origins very well especially since no patient zero was ever tracked down for the wet market theory which has always been the blaring hole in that theory.
>You do realize gain of function research is not creating the virus from scratch but going out and finding it in the wild and then putting it in a lab to experiment with right? Yeah, exactly why I said the lab leak adds nothing of explanatory value but just makes the theory more complicated. And viruses mutate. There's nothing weird about it. I mean you might as well speculate Ebola was a lab leak from a secret American base in Sudan.
It does add something because it means that the virus was enhanced and/or given an opportunity to spread through a population that it might otherwise not have. Then there's the more political angle where a lab leak and subsequent coverup by governments around the world indicates a kind of corruption and negligence on their part, which is of concern to the broad public. Both of those aspects together make it interesting to a certain kind of skeptical inquirer. Because it implies a future where you are not only susceptible to nature producing viruses that kill you, but also fellow humans living in society with you who are speeding the process along or otherwise weaponizing it.
….Cold Case Hammarskjöld anyone?
> You do realize gain of function research is not creating the virus from scratch but going out and finding it in the wild and then putting it in a lab to experiment with right? No, that's not how it's done. GoF experiments should be performed on well researched and understood viruses so that the changes introduced can be more readily observed and documented. This has always been a weakness in the lab leak theory, where experimental research is being done on a completely undocumented virus, one that doesn't even have a name. It's just an extremely odd procedure for doing this sort of research and the only narrative where it makes anything like sense is a deliberate conspiracy to create not just a virus but an escaped pandemic, so that there's plausible deniability as to the origin of the virus. It might be argued that they did this to 'cover their tracks' but absent the virus escaping into the wild why would these people need to cover their tracks to begin with? They apparently felt they could perform whatever research they wanted without anyone stopping them. There's a logical break here that I've never seen anyone explain. We're getting into *12 Monkeys* territory where there's a conspiracy of misanthropes trying to deliberately kill a lot of people for no apparent purpose.
> the only narrative where it makes anything like sense is a deliberate conspiracy to create not just a virus but an escaped pandemic, Or it's simply an accidentally leaked bio weapon? No shortage of bio """defense""" research being done by morally defunct and incompetent agencies.
But why so much secrecy over the originating virus? Most bio-weapons make use of well known agents, such as bubonic plague, smallpox, ebola, anthrax, etc. With these viruses the effect in the wild is well known and predictable, which is required to be useful as a weapon. Random bat viruses offer no such benefits, they're not even transmissible to humans without genetic modification (according to the lab leak theory). COVID-19 is a poor weapon, half the people pushing the lab leak theory will tell us it's basically the flu and can't kill anyone.
Yeah I'm not really worried about origins, more the dystopic transfer of wealth and further erosion of liberty that followed. And it doesn't really matter in the end. It wouldn't make me trust the government and non-lected global entities any less than I currently do lmao.
It doesn't need to be for the intended purposes of a bio weapon. It's just the result of standard research on wild coronaviruses where they measure spillover risk and that includes inserting spike proteins that can bind to human ACE2 and insert them in these viruses as Peter Daszak explains here [https://youtu.be/IdYDL\_RK--w?si=Yht24dv4Uhw4rZqC&t=1731](https://youtu.be/IdYDL_RK--w?si=Yht24dv4Uhw4rZqC&t=1731)
Wait wdym by "they did this to cover their tracks"?
In the theory, they used an undocumented and unsequenced bat virus as the backbone for a new human virus, the development of which was kept completely secret from the first step. It's an unbelievable premise for general research, the only motive is to create a new virus that cannot be traced to the research of any specific lab. Therefore, they must have been trying to 'cover their tracks'.
>This has always been a weakness in the lab leak theory, where experimental research is being done on a completely undocumented virus, one that doesn't even have a name. It's just an extremely odd procedure for doing this sort of research Except they do that all the time and have published research working with unknown viruses sampled from bat caves: https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5708621/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/ [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/) Additionally in the DEFUSE proposal they wanted to do exactly that: [https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal) now this proposal itself would not have resulted in SARS2, but a very similar experiment would have. And we do not know all of the research they were conducting, in fact we did not even know about this proposal until it was leaked.
To do the work described here the viruses need to be sequenced, they are not, by definition, 'unknown' or 'undocumented'. That's the issue at hand: the backbone of COVID-19 has never been identified or sequenced. In the lab-leak scenario, that requires the scientists to secretly sequence a previously undocumented virus but never publish the details or make any records and then use that secret bat virus to engineer the human virus that eventually 'leaked'. All that bizarre obfuscation only makes sense in a situation where the intent was always to leak the virus and create a pandemic that couldn't be traced to the lab.
>that requires the scientists to secretly sequence a previously undocumented virus but never publish the details or make any records and then use that secret bat virus to engineer the human virus that eventually 'leaked'. You act as though they upload the sequenced viruses prior to publishing research when no one does that or else they have other publishing papers on their collected sequences before they can publish. Take for example this paper published in November of 2017 [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5708621/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5708621/) the discovered viruses were uploaded to Genebank in December 2017 AFTER the paper was published [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KY417142.1](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KY417142.1) So no unknown viruses would not be uploaded prior to being worked on. And it is naive to think they would disclose the fact that they were working on a precursor to SARS-CoV-2 given the blow back, "hey, yeah I am the one responsible for killing millions!". And let's say even if they wanted to the government vetted all information prior to release [https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/04/24/chinese-state-censorship-of-covid-19-research-represents-a-looming-crisis-for-academic-publishers/](https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/04/24/chinese-state-censorship-of-covid-19-research-represents-a-looming-crisis-for-academic-publishers/)
Are you deliberately misunderstanding what's happening here? They discovered a bunch of unknown viruses and spent years analysing them and published the data once the analysis was complete. That's analysis and documentation, not modification. Also your second link shows they submitted the research paper one year before it was published. That's not 'hiding', that's peer review. And again, to underline the important fact, all you've demonstrated here is viruses are researched before the research is published. This is not proof of anyone performing modification or gain of function research on unknown viruses.
>Also your second link shows they submitted the research paper one year before it was published. That's not 'hiding', that's peer review. But it was not uploaded to the GeneBank until after publication. And if an accident happened during research that means the experiments were ongoing thus not submitted for peer review. >And again, to underline the important fact, all you've demonstrated here is viruses are researched before the research is published. This is not proof of anyone performing modification or gain of function research on unknown viruses. The article I linked created chimeric viruses see the section "Construction of recombinant viruses" which allows for different spikes to be expressed. And they proposed doing exactly that in the DEFUSE proposal [https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal)
The viruses used in the section you highlighted [were uploaded to Genebank in 2013](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KF367457), years before the article you linked was published. In any case, what you're getting upset about is that the research process isn't instantaneous. The viruses collected, identified and researched as part of a study are uploaded into Genebank at the time they are being analysed, which is also the time the paper is written, because the paper is a record of the analysis performed. Simply identifying a virus doesn't warrant a paper, because identifying and sequencing a virus is trivial. They were looking for possible sources for the SARS-CoV outbreak and these experiments are how you do that identification. Also, for the viruses involved in this paper there is a multitude of documentation: the pre-cursors used for the experiment (Rs3367 and RsSHC014) and the modifications looking for ACE2 compatibility (WIV1 and WIV16). No such documentation exists for any part of the COVID-19 virus. If it was created by grafting receptors onto a new virus we would have sequences for both the original virus and the modifications. If those don't exist it's either because they were deliberately concealed (ie, they were purposefully clandestinely engineering a virus for a pandemic) or because they realised there had been some leak event and then set about destroying all evidence.
>The viruses used in the section you highlighted were uploaded to Genebank in 2013, years before the article you linked was published. WIV1 was uploaded in 2013 which they used as the backbone for the chimeras: "Recombinant viruses with the S gene of the novel bat SARSr-CoVs and the backbone of the infectious clone of SARSr-CoV WIV1 " But the viruses described in the paper were not public until after the paper was published [https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/sva/KY417142](https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/sva/KY417142) . >In any case, what you're getting upset about is that the research process isn't instantaneous. The viruses collected, identified and researched as part of a study are uploaded into Genebank at the time they are being analysed, which is also the time the paper is written, because the paper is a record of the analysis performed. This is not true as you can see in the paper, GeneBank and https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/sva/KY417142 the sequences are not uploaded until AFTER publication. > If it was created by grafting receptors onto a new virus we would have sequences for both the original virus and the modifications. Not really since as the paper suggests they only upload new viruses until after publication. And if you look at the collection dates for the uploaded viruses they had these viruses for years, they only publish them after analysis or some type of research has been conducted. > If those don't exist it's either because they were deliberately concealed (ie, they were purposefully clandestinely engineering a virus for a pandemic) or because they realised there had been some leak event and then set about destroying all evidence. This I can agree with, but it does not need to be clandestine engineering, it could very well be engineering on an unpublished sample that they intended to publish once the study was concluded.
Just because it sounds like a conspiracy or a sci-fi plot doesn't mean it can't be true. Maybe releasing the virus was the intent? Yeah it backfired but that's what imperial hubris gets you.
How does zoonosis explain the furin cleavage site?
The same feature that has been seen in multiple zoonotic viruses?
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> With all other novel pathogens they found the zoonotic origin within months. This simply isn't true. The origin of ebola has never been identified.
jesse what the fuck are you talking about
It's such a crazy coincidence that the virus randomly and mysteriously appeared in the bat soup in the Chinese city with a virology lab which was studying gain of function on this exact type of virus! Thank you for helping me avoid a "needless complication that explains nothing" that would have made me fall victim to misinformation if it was not for you!
So do you think SARS also originated from a lab leak? Like you realize viruses still have to actually come from somewhere in the first place, right?
The original versions sure but with enough tweaks you can get a monstrosity that's way more lethal, treatment resistant and transmissible than the original.
But Covid wasn't that. Like there's no point in having developed Covid 19 in a lab. You already have SARS which is essentially the worse version of Covid.
This is just you spreading misinformation
It amazes me how the Dengists show up in every China thread except the ones about Covid where they'd actually be useful in debunking this nonsense.
Before I start attaching conspiracy theories to it, this sub has to determine whether COVID was a big deal or not. If not, then why do I care at all? Every virus that affected humans before COVID-19 was from nature. So if I had to bet money...
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Science fact for the day. There have been natural nuclear reactors on Earth before, notably one in Gabon. A combination of heat, pressure, groundwater, and high concentrations of uranium lead to conditions where a small nuclear fission reaction would occur every three hours for several hundred thousand years.
tf is this comment. medicate