Post
Topic
Board Politics & Society
Re: Coronavirus Outbreak
by
TECSHARE
on 21/03/2020, 14:41:56 UTC
While I agree it was likely a bio-weapon, and that study seems to make some very strangely worded conclusions for a scientific paper giving me the distinct impression it serves more political purposes than scientific ones. Even if the article is totally accurate, this is only something that excludes genetic engineering, not an accelerated forced mutation process done by raising many generations of the virus in a targeted environment. This would essentially be mostly indistinguishable from natural evolution.

Sorry to burst your bubble but you don't know more about this issue than the authors of this article, who work for the largest non-profit biomedical research organization in the United States.

An "accelerated forced mutation process"? Because you have no idea how little you understand about the issue, you will have no way of understanding why you are so incredibly wrong.

"This would essentially be mostly indistinguishable from natural evolution."

 Cheesy

First of all, there's an entire section of the article called "Evidence for natural evolution".

Quote
"These two features of the virus, the mutations in the RBD portion of the spike protein and its distinct backbone, rules out laboratory manipulation as a potential origin for SARS-CoV-2"

Quote
"They conclude that the virus is the product of natural evolution,"

"Accelerated forced mutation" is NOT the same thing as "natural evolution."

They're not saying "similar to natural evolution," they're saying it is natural evolution. But because you are so very very smart you know better than the people whose jobs it is to study the topic day and night, right?

They studied the issue. You did not. That is why I support their conclusion:

Quote
In one scenario, the virus evolved to its current pathogenic state through natural selection in a non-human host and then jumped to humans. This is how previous coronavirus outbreaks have emerged, with humans contracting the virus after direct exposure to civets (SARS) and camels (MERS)...

In the other proposed scenario, a non-pathogenic version of the virus jumped from an animal host into humans and then evolved to its current pathogenic state within the human population. For instance, some coronaviruses from pangolins, armadillo-like mammals found in Asia and Africa, have an RBD structure very similar to that of SARS-CoV-2...

over yours:

Quote
likely a bio-weapon

1,000x, every day of the week.

Oh, but let me guess, they are just political pawns used to facilitate a cover-up. And meanwhile you're completely unbiased and just presenting facts as you see them. Right.

Huh. Look what we have here: https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/03/19/china-owns-nature-magazines-ass-debunking-the-proximal-origin-of-sars-cov-2-claiming-covid-19-wasnt-from-a-lab/

Sounds a lot like what I was saying already.

"As our report mentions right at the start, scientists passed the H5N1 Bird Flu through a series of ferret hosts until it gained ACE2 affinity and then became incredibly virulent, which is what’s seen with COVID-19 since its affinity to ACE2 is orders of magnitude higher than SARS. That process would leave a genome that appears “natural” and not purposeful as well since it wouldn’t leave a genomic smoking gun and would simply appear to be the result of “natural” selection. However the addition of artificial generations produced by this process of passing through ferrets in the lab would create a lot of genetic distance from any possible relatives – precisely what is seen in COVID-19: it forms its own clade and appears very distant from all other bat coronaviruses. So this is lazy research, they’re either unaware of the Bird Flu study or are willfully ignoring it."