Just curious, anyone have a plan, or preps for global pandemic?

[AlPater]

18 hours ago, Ron Put said:

All discussion was effectively ended after the Lancet published a strongly worded letter from "the scientists" expressing “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China” and proclaiming “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” This was used by the leftist media to brand anyone who raised the issue as a crackpot, and the topic and those who discussed it were banned on most social media. Of course, now we know that the Lancet piece was produced and pushed Peter Daszak, who repackaged US grants and funnelled money to facilities conducting gain-of-function research, including the Wuhan lab. And of course, Daszak and others around him, including Fauci, had something to lose if the lab was blamed.

I agree basically with Saul to go with the scientists.  Maybe reports from Chinese scientists would require scrutiny, but I would imagine that "good guy" scientists could analyze the viruses genome in comparison with that from bats and find that its genome had been manipulated in the lab, if that were the case.  They are investigating the lab infections in China and let's wait and see what the come up with.

Edited June 6, 2021 by AlPater

[Ron Put]

On 6/6/2021 at 11:36 AM, AlPater said:

I agree basically with Saul to go with the scientists.

What does this mean, exactly? Who is "the scientists?"

Is it Fauci and Daszak, or the talking heads promoted by CNN, MSNBC, and NPR? Or is it Redfield, Levitt and the number of other scientists who were censured, sometimes banned, or "cancelled" for holding an opinion contradicting the Left's narrative?

Or, maybe it's Anderson, who first wrote to Fauci about the CGG sequence (see below) a year ago, suggesting that the virus was engineered, then went silent and then cobbled together an article "categorically" denying the possibility. And then he was immediately rewarded with a nice NIH grant. BTW, he is deleting his old tweets these days, now that Congress is looking into it. It's crazy that we even speak in such terms, but the new dogma points to the extent to which politics have corrupted some in the scientific community.

Here is what two scientists say in the WSJ yesterday:

"But the most compelling reason to favor the lab leak hypothesis is firmly based in science. In particular, consider the genetic fingerprint of CoV-2, the novel coronavirus responsible for the disease Covid-19. 

In gain-of-function research, a microbiologist can increase the lethality of a coronavirus enormously by splicing a special sequence into its genome at a prime location. Doing this leaves no trace of manipulation. But it alters the virus spike protein, rendering it easier for the virus to inject genetic material into the victim cell. Since 1992 there have been at least 11 separate experiments adding a special sequence to the same location. The end result has always been supercharged viruses.

A genome is a blueprint for the factory of a cell to make proteins. The language is made up of three-letter “words,” 64 in total, that represent the 20 different amino acids. For example, there are six different words for the amino acid arginine, the one that is often used in supercharging viruses. Every cell has a different preference for which word it likes to use most.

In the case of the gain-of-function supercharge, other sequences could have been spliced into this same site. Instead of a CGG-CGG (known as “double CGG”) that tells the protein factory to make two arginine amino acids in a row, you’ll obtain equal lethality by splicing any one of 35 of the other two-word combinations for double arginine. If the insertion takes place naturally, say through recombination, then one of those 35 other sequences is far more likely to appear; CGG is rarely used in the class of coronaviruses that can recombine with CoV-2.

In fact, in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus.

Although the double CGG is suppressed naturally, the opposite is true in laboratory work. The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG. That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it. An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.

Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?

Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact—that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers—implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape."

[AlPater]

Thanks, Ron.

I could not find the authors' publication in scientific journals on their views on this matter.

Also: "The Journal editorial board has promoted views that differ from the scientific consensus on climate change, acid rain, and ozone depletion, as well as on the health harms of second-hand smoke, pesticides and asbestos.^[13] "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall_Street_Journal

Edited June 8, 2021 by AlPater

[Sibiriak]

10 hours ago, AlPater said:

The Journal editorial board has promoted views that differ from the scientific consensus on climate change

With all due respect,  you seem to be attacking the source of an argument,  rather than the argument itself-- a very unscientific tactic.

More importantly, there doesn't appear to be any scientific consensus when it comes to the origin of the Covid-19 virus.   Or rather, if there is a consensus it is that BOTH the natural-origin and lab-origin hypotheses are plausible. 

Media blackout

Quote

So why, after the strenuously enforced blackout of the past year, are Biden, the corporate media and the scientific establishment suddenly going public with the possibility of a China lab leak?

The answer to that seems clear: because Nicholas Wade’s article [1], in particular, blew open the doors that had been kept tightly shut on the lab-leak hypothesis. Scientists who had formerly feared being associated with Trump or a “conspiracy theory” have belatedly spoken up. The cat is out of the bag.

Or as the Financial Times reported of the new official narrative, “the driving factor was a shift among scientists who had been wary of helping Trump before the election or angering influential scientists who had dismissed the theory”.

The journal Science recently upped the stakes by publishing a letter [2] from 18 prominent scientists stating that the lab-leak and animal-origin theories were equally “viable” and that the WHO’s earlier investigation had not given “balanced consideration” to both – a polite way of suggesting that the WHO investigation was a fix.

 

Right now,  almost all of the arguments being made are about the plausibility of one hypothesis compared to another.    But plausibility is not evidence.  And it doesn't look like we are going to get any decisive concrete evidence very soon on this question.    So politics  will continue to dominate.
 

1.The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?  Nicholas Wade, May 5, 2021.  "[Jonathan Cook:] Nicholas Wade, a former New York Times science writer, set out  in May, in an in-depth investigation, why the case for a lab leak was scientifically strong, citing some of the world’s leading virologists.  But Wade also highlighted a much deeper problem for US elites: just before the first outbreak of Covid, the Wuhan lab was, it seems, cooperating with the US scientific establishment and WHO officials on its virus experiments – what is known, in scientific parlance, as “gain-of-function” research."

2. Investigate the origins of COVID-19,  Science,  14 May 2021.  " In May 2020, the World Health Assembly requested that the World Health Organization (WHO) director-general work closely with partners to determine the origins of SARS-CoV-2 (2). In November, the Terms of Reference for a China–WHO joint study were released (3). The information, data, and samples for the study's first phase were collected and summarized by the Chinese half of the team; the rest of the team built on this analysis. Although there were no findings in clear support of either a natural spillover or a lab accident, the team assessed a zoonotic spillover from an intermediate host as “likely to very likely,” and a laboratory incident as “extremely unlikely” [(4), p. 9]. Furthermore, the two theories were not given balanced consideration. Only 4 of the 313 pages of the report and its annexes addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident (4). Notably, WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus commented that the report's consideration of evidence supporting a laboratory accident was insufficient and offered to provide additional resources to fully evaluate the possibility (5).

As scientists with relevant expertise, we agree with the WHO director-general (5), the United States and 13 other countries (6), and the European Union (7) that greater clarity about the origins of this pandemic is necessary and feasible to achieve. We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data.

A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest.

Public health agencies and research laboratories alike need to open their records to the public. Investigators should document the veracity and provenance of data from which analyses are conducted and conclusions drawn, so that analyses are reproducible by independent experts."

.

 

Edited June 9, 2021 by Sibiriak

[AlPater]

U.S. NEWS 06/09/2021 01:40 pm ET
U.S. Deaths From Heart Disease And Diabetes Climbed Amid Pandemic
The number of lives lost directly or indirectly to the coronavirus in the U.S. appears to be far greater than the officially reported COVID-19 death toll.
Mike Stobbe
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/heart-disease-diabetes-covid-19_n_60c0fb4ee4b0af343e9b6e34 

[Ron Put]

On 6/8/2021 at 11:22 AM, AlPater said:

Also: "The Journal editorial board has promoted views that differ from the scientific consensus on climate change, acid rain, and ozone depletion, as well as on the health harms of second-hand smoke, pesticides and asbestos.^[13] "

I don't even know what to say to this. Do you have any specific objections to the perfectly valid assertions made in the WSJ?

Steven Quay and Richard Muller certainly know what they are talking about, and they are only the most recent scientists to point out that the CGG-CGG sequence is not found in other coronaviruses, but it is the favored sequence for lab researchers. Did you miss that part? This is the argument, not the WSJ. Perhaps you should question why the media has suppressed coverage of this and so many other pandemic-related issues?

Or the fact that way back in January 2020, the same unusual CGG-CGG sequence was brought up in a private email to Fauci's attention by none other than Kristian Andersen, with the suggestion that this virus has “unusual features” that “look engineered”? Kristian Andersen went publicly silent after that exchange with Fauci and then in March 2020, he wrote an article in Nature about how it's impossible for Covid-19 to have come from a lab, without a mention of his prior observation. And almost immediately after he got an almost $2 million grant from NIH.

And here is something else about to be published, along the same lines:

An explosive new study claims that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in a Wuhan lab, then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats.

The paper's authors, British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen, wrote that they have had 'prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China' for a year - but were ignored by academics and major journals.   

Dalgleish is a professor of oncology at St George's University, London, and is best known for his breakthrough creating the first working 'HIV vaccine', to treat diagnosed patients and allow them to go off medication for months.

Sørensen, a virologist, is chair of pharmaceutical company, Immunor, which developed a coronavirus vaccine candidate called Biovacc-19. Dalgleish also has share options in the firm. 

The shocking allegations in the study include accusations of 'deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data' at Chinese labs, and it notes the silencing and disappearance of scientists in the communist country who spoke out. 

The journal article, exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com and submitted for publication in the coming days, is set to make waves among the scientific community, as the majority of experts have until recently staunchly denied the origins of COVID-19 were anything other than a natural infection leaping from animals to humans. 


And some more, since most of the US media continues to be largely silent on the subject:
Chinese virologist who was among first to tout Wuhan lab theory says Fauci's emails back up what she's been saying all along - the coronavirus is 'an unrestricted bioweapon' - and blasts Fauci and medical experts for cover-up."

Bits and pieces of this and the intelligence reports were known since last year, but the media squashed it, social media banned it, and the response was that it's a "racist Trump conspiracy." It's starting to look more like a successful Chinese propaganda operation, leveraging its assets and connections in the West, and exploiting the apparent synergies with the Western Left, which took the bait.

[Saul]

I'll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge real cheap.

  --  Saul

 

[Ron Put]

On 6/9/2021 at 6:57 PM, Saul said:

I'll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge real cheap.

LOL. Are you trying to flip it? Is the title you got written in Lishu? :)

You should have sold it to Biden, but he already bought it (after first shutting down the investigation started under Trump). And now the EU opened an official investigation into the lab theory, so you missed your chance there too.

All kidding aside, it's bewildering how so many were so easily convinced that this coronavirus "definitely was not man-made." Even though logically it's the likely explanation: China's main lab working with coronaviruses is there and the Chinese have been conducting gain-of-function research for decades, with at times less than secure protocols.

The Chinese government was unusually eager to prevent any association of the virus with China, conducting a documented broad campaign to rename the virus and ensure it did not contain a reference to China. Then they made statements about Trump's "racism" designed to appeal to the American Left, which lapped up the Chinese narrative and made it its own.

It just shows how well the Chinese manipulated this and how well propaganda works, especially in an already polarized society. And despite intelligence services suggesting that it was a lab leak, the West hamstrung itself by actively preventing timely investigation and engaging in political infighting and broad and unprecedented censorship. Now it may be way too late to really find out:

The evidence that is leading scientists towards the theory that coronavirus originated in a Wuhan lab

"[T]he former MI6 chief, Sir Richard Dearlove, said that evidence of the novel coronavirus leak from the Wuhan lab that could be the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic would have been destroyed by Chinese officials. He added that it would now be challenging to prove that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was working on experiments to make a coronavirus that would be more deadly to humans. ...

On May 26, US President Joe Biden released a statement acknowledging that the intelligence community had "coalesced around two likely scenarios" and announced that he had asked for a more definitive conclusion within 90 days.

His statement read: "The failure to get our inspectors on the ground in those early months will always hamper any investigation into the origin of Covid-19."

The idea of a lab leak is thought to have first originated from Chinese social media users who began sharing their suspicions as early as January 2020.

A research paper co-authored by two Chinese scientists then went about finding out how a novel bat coronavirus got to a major metropolis of 11 million people in central China, in the dead of winter when most bats were hibernating, and turn a market where bats weren’t sold into the epicenter of an outbreak.

The paper stated: "We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus."

The first was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which sat just 280 meters from the Huanan market and had been known to collect hundreds of bat samples. The second, the researchers wrote, was the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The paper's staggeringly blunt conclusion about Covid-19 read: "The killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.... Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center [sic] and other densely populated places.""

[Mike41]

 

[Todd Allen]

Article by Katherine Eban, author of Bottle of Lies, exploring background of the controversy around SARS-CoV-2 origin

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins

 

Edited June 14, 2021 by Todd Allen

[Saul]

I read the vanityfair link.

News reporters are not the best virologists.  The genetic structure of the virus makes it impossible to have been human modified.  True, it might have come from a lab leak by people studying the novel coronavirus.  But, if this was the case, it wasn't "tweaked" by them.

Probably most likely, it jumped to humans from an animal -- no lab needed.

  --  Saul

[Ron Put]

2 hours ago, Saul said:

Probably most likely, it jumped to humans from an animal -- no lab needed.

What do you base this conviction on? With all due respect, it's actually far less likely to be a non-modified virus. Someone had quiped that it's like seeing a tiger on the street in London and focusing on how it might have tracked from India, while ignoring the giant circus tent on the next block.

-- Apart from Chinese scientists, the Fauci-Anderson emails show that Anderson brought up the highly unusual CGG-CGG sequence of the virus, which is never seen in the wild but is common in lab research. This same point has been made by a number of other scientists, but ignored, or outright suppressed by "the scientists" in the media and by social media.

-- Three of the Wuhan Institute technicians were hospitalized with SARS symptoms in November of 2019. China hid the epidemic until January of 2020, but there is evidence that it had already spread, with a study showing coronavirus infections in Los Angeles as early as December of 2019.

-- Trump-era intelligence officials have maintained that evidence points to a lab leak, but have been ignored and laughed at, because the media and the Left really, really hate Trump.

-- Chinese labs have a poor record, with about a dozen leaks in as many years. The Washington Post published diplomatic wires from 2018 identifying the two labs in Wuhan as particularly worrisome:

State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses
 

“During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” states the Jan. 19, 2018, cable...

The research was designed to prevent the next SARS-like pandemic by anticipating how it might emerge. But even in 2015, other scientists questioned whether Shi’s team was taking unnecessary risks. In October 2014, the U.S. government had imposed a moratorium on funding of any research that makes a virus more deadly or contagious, known as “gain-of-function” experiments. ...
There are similar concerns about the nearby Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab, which operates at biosecurity level 2, a level significantly less secure than the level-4 standard claimed by the Wuhan Insititute of Virology lab, Xiao said. That’s important because the Chinese government still refuses to answer basic questions about the origin of the novel coronavirus while suppressing any attempts to examine whether either lab was involved.
Sources familiar with the cables said they were meant to sound an alarm about the grave safety concerns at the WIV lab, especially regarding its work with bat coronaviruses."

Since the WP article is from April of 2020, there is the silly requisite disclaimer used to discredit Trump that "the scientists" agree it came from animals. But if the issue had not been politicized and open discussions had been permitted, we all might be in a much better position now.

[Saul]

Yeah.

Politicians will say that -- e.g, in both the Trump and Biden administrations.

  --  Saul

[Todd Allen]

On 6/14/2021 at 1:23 PM, Saul said:

The genetic structure of the virus makes it impossible to have been human modified.

Strong claims require strong evidence.  Can you in any way at all support this assertion?

Considering the Wuhan Institute of Virology has published research of modifications of quite similar viruses what is it that makes this one so special that it is incapable of being a product of serial passage in a lab?

Edited June 18, 2021 by Todd Allen

[mccoy]

Guys, what's so strange about a virus migrating from a pangolin to a bat (or vice-versa, it's not well clear) , then finding its way to humans? Pangolins and bats are such common pets.

Seriously, I don't know what to think, but lately I tend to favour the lab hypothesis. The conflict of interests in the chief of the investigating party was huge.

How can you ask a researcher to investigate objectively the fruit of his efforts? 

[Todd Allen]

5 hours ago, mccoy said:

Guys, what's so strange about a virus migrating from a pangolin to a bat (or vice-versa, it's not well clear) , then finding its way to humans? Pangolins and bats are such common pets.

It's not strange.  But it is very unusual for a novel respiratory virus to make a first jump to a human host already extremely well adapted for human to human transmission.  And in this case it looks like the market didn't have bats, the virus erupted in winter and there are no wild horseshoe bats in Wuhan.   To date no source animal population has been found for SARS-CoV-2 and horseshoe bats are the host of the closest known relative to the virus and that virus was being worked with at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

[Gordo]

I'm in the "unsure" group as to the origins of the first case, hope someone can figure it out but it may be impossible when you consider the first person infected could have had very mild symptoms (maybe even asyptomatic).  I have seen comments about employees from the Wuhan lab supposedly having been infected very early in the pandemic, but China has also denied that and said no one from the lab was ever infected at all (which others stay is ridiculously improbable given that Wuhan was the epicenter).  If China has been lying about things, is it evidence that it was leaked from the lab?  I don't know, they lie about things all the time, haha.

Here's a good read: 

A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence

Published online 2015 Nov 9

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/

NIH funded study where:

"Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations"

"Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system², we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus "

Fun times!

 

[Mike41]

Some are saying this animal to human transmission is just one more reason to go vegan. They claim animal farming etc. increases the probability of this sort of pandemic

Edited June 17, 2021 by Mike41

[Saul]

1 hour ago, Gordo said:

I'm in the "unsure" group as to the origins of the first case, hope someone can figure it out but it may be impossible when you consider the first person infected could have had very mild symptoms (maybe even asyptomatic).  I have seen comments about employees from the Wuhan lab supposedly having been infected very early in the pandemic, but China has also denied that and said no one from the lab was ever infected at all (which others stay is ridiculously improbable given that Wuhan was the epicenter).  If China has been lying about things, is it evidence that it was leaked from the lab?  I don't know, they lie about things all the time, haha.

Here's a good read: 

A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence

Published online 2015 Nov 9

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/

NIH funded study where:

"Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations"

"Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system², we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus "

Fun times!

 

Interesting.

[Gordo]

The U.K. recorded 11,000 daily Covid-19 cases for the first time since February, even as it reached the milestone of vaccinating more than 80% of adults.

Looks like the spread is mostly among the unvaccinated, but its kind of impressive of this virus that it can keep spreading with 80% of adults vacinated. Also note that 10% of those hospitalized were fully vaccinated - that's a bit disappointing, but I suppose it could be worse, those people may (likely) also have comorbidities.

[AlPater]

On 6/18/2021 at 7:25 AM, Gordo said:

The U.K. recorded 11,000 daily Covid-19 cases for the first time since February, even as it reached the milestone of vaccinating more than 80% of adults.

Looks like the spread is mostly among the unvaccinated, but its kind of impressive of this virus that it can keep spreading with 80% of adults vacinated.

That is quite bad per capita compared with Canada and even the US https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries .  The delta variant seems pretty bad.  I guess the % vaccinated figure depends on how it is calculated (% of adults, total population, over 18s, etcetera), and the first doses https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations provide the bulk of the protection.

Also, consider the relative number of new deaths yesterday in the respective countries.  Vaccination may have a lot more effect on deaths than new infections.

Edited July 4, 2021 by AlPater

[Gordo]

1 hour ago, AlPater said:

consider the relative number of new deaths yesterday in the respective countries.  Vaccination may have a lot more effect on deaths than new infections.

Good point, almost no one is dying in the UK from covid anymore despite the uptick in new cases:

[Gordo]

Looks to me like the unvaccinated are going to get immunity the old fashioned way 😉

That Delta strain is super contagious.

[AlPater]

Neutralization of SARS-CoV-2 Variants B.1.429 and B.1.351.
Shen X, Tang H, Pajon R, Smith G, Glenn GM, Shi W, Korber B, Montefiori DC.
N Engl J Med. 2021 Jun 17;384(24):2352-2354. doi: 10.1056/NEJMc2103740. Epub 2021 Apr 7.
PMID: 33826819 Free PMC article. No abstract available.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMc2103740?articleTools=true
"The geometric mean ID50 titer against B.1.351 was 13.1 times lower than against D614G for convalescent serum and 9.7 times and 14.5 times lower than against D614G for serum from persons who had received the mRNA-1273 and NVX-CoV2373 vaccines, respectively (Figure 1C)."

[Ron Put]

On 6/17/2021 at 2:03 PM, Gordo said:

Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations

As posted earlier, this is the strain collected and apparently likely to be the subject of gain-of-function research by the Wuhan Institute. 

See also this.

And the Wuhan Institute lab workers seeking hospital care in November is not just the subject of some comments, but part of a body of intelligence reports, with some intelligence dating back to January of 2020. And it jives, as there is also evidence that Covid was in Los Angeles as early as December 2019, and the peak of the first wave in NY was in mid-March 2020. Way before the lockdowns.

We may not get proof, but there is a growing likelihood, and growing evidence of a cover-up in China, as well as by Fauci and some other US players. And the reason why an early and proper investigation was not on the front burner of the US and the media was all politics. China played and continues to play the Left in the US and in Europe (and NZ, and Victoria in Australia).

There have been new reports of a confidential meeting by Fauci, Anderson, and others, that served to coordinate the disinformation campaign that started with the Lancet and Nature. See this for a pretty well-backed timeline:

Emails Reveal How Influential Articles That Established COVID-19 Natural Origins Theory Were Formed