Red Mosquito

macphisto wrote:

Mickey wrote:100% hope she dies.

You’re 100% a bad guy.

tragabigzanda wrote:Was he by any chance blasting Gigaton?

McParadigm wrote:

McParadigm wrote:

Orpheus wrote:The mind honestly reels.

The bats that carry the family of coronaviruses linked to the new strain aren't found within 100 miles of Wuhan — but they were studied in both labs.

Here’s how a team of biologists, infectious disease researchers and biosecurity experts put it in a report published in the journal Nature Medicine: “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

Meanwhile, other researchers who sifted through the genetic sequences of dozens of preserved viral samples found that the new coronavirus is a distant cousin of the coronavirus that caused the SARS outbreak of 2002 and 2003, and the coronavirus that gave rise to MERS in 2009. The virus responsible for COVID-19 has distinctive features that separate it from its predecessors by generations, according to their report in the Journal of Virology.

But none of the genetic mutations looked like ones a scientist would engineer in a lab to tweak a virus for better performance, the researchers wrote. Instead, they have all the hallmarks of the gradual accretion of changes that occur over time as a virus encounters new environments and the immune systems of new organisms.

Still other researchers examined the nearly 30,000 pairs of RNA letters in the virus’s genome and located the juncture where a mutation most likely changed its anatomical features.

The authors of the analysis in Nature Microbiology offered plausible natural circumstances to explain how it would have happened. For instance, they cited research showing that when chickens were repeatedly exposed to a harmless virus from swans, the virus developed mutations that made it capable of killing every chicken it infected.

They cited lab experiments to show how the virus’s changing shape would have allowed the organism to latch onto, infect and hijack human cells.

They detected biological strategies the virus had adopted that enabled it to spread from host to host — but just barely. The mechanism looked a lot more like the kind of hack that would evolve naturally in a coronavirus, not like the optimal solution a genetic engineer would choose.

And finally, they looked for the telltale signs of genetic tampering that would have been left behind by purposeful manipulation in a lab. These so-called reverse genetic systems are used in the making of coronavirus vaccines and treatments, and they have been described in detail in scientific reports. None are present in SARS-CoV-2, the investigators found.

B wrote:

McParadigm wrote:

Not to mention, they don't sell toasters at hardware stores. He's clearly lying.