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Covid-19 miscellany

Jimmy Higgins said:
The lab leak arm chairers are quite curious. They straddle the line between Covid-19 wasn't that big of a deal and the Chinese created it and it got leaked into the public, this is all their fault!
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No straddling from me. The idea that the virus originated from a lab was put down as conspiracy theory nonsense and effectively censored. Times have changed.
 
TSwizzle said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
The lab leak arm chairers are quite curious. They straddle the line between Covid-19 wasn't that big of a deal and the Chinese created it and it got leaked into the public, this is all their fault!
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No straddling from me. The idea that the virus originated from a lab was put down as conspiracy theory nonsense and effectively censored. Times have changed.
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The idea of the virus being manipulated and engineered was taken very seriously by Dr. Fauci and those investigating the virus in the very early days. When the idea was suggested, Dr. Fauci made it a priority to determine the veracity of it. In fact, the initial soft consensus was that there was evidence the virus was engineered. link

article said:
Much has been made of your email to Dr. Fauci in late January 2020, shortly after the coronavirus genome was first sequenced. You said, “The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.”

Can you explain what you meant?

At the time, based on limited data and preliminary analyses, we observed features that appeared to potentially be unique to SARS-CoV-2. We had not yet seen these features in other related viruses from natural sources, and thus were exploring whether they had been engineered into the virus.

Those features included a structure known as the furin cleavage site that allows the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to be cleaved by furin, an enzyme found in human cells, and another structure, known as the receptor binding domain, that allowed the virus to anchor to the outside of human cells via a cell-surface protein known as ACE2.
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article said:
In March, you and other scientists published the Nature Medicine paper saying that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” Can you explain how the research changed your view?

The features in SARS-CoV-2 that initially suggested possible engineering were identified in related coronaviruses, meaning that features that initially looked unusual to us weren’t.

Many of these analyses were completed in a matter of days, while we worked around the clock, which allowed us to reject our preliminary hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 might have been engineered, while other “lab”-based scenarios were still on the table.

Yet more extensive analyses, significant additional data and thorough investigations to compare genomic diversity more broadly across coronaviruses led to the peer-reviewed study published in Nature Medicine. For example, we looked at data from coronaviruses found in other species, such as bats and pangolins, which demonstrated that the features that first appeared unique to SARS-CoV-2 were in fact found in other, related viruses.

Overall, this is a textbook example of the scientific method where a preliminary hypothesis is rejected in favor of a competing hypothesis after more data become available and analyses are completed.
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This information is worth a lot more than intelligence that is parsing together information and what they think China should have known and when. You are providing weigh too much weight to the certainty on a claim as it isn't the certainty of the actual conclusion.

A group at Mercy in Pittsburgh were on the fast track with Covid-19 too, because they happened to be studying Coronavirus as well. Coincidences happen. The fact that China was struggling without longer shutdowns implies they didn't have answers to the thing they allegedly created. That feels unlikely. Add that to the professional opinions of people who do the virology thing, and there is little weight to support a lab leak.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
You are providing weigh too much weight to the certainty on a claim as it isn't the certainty of the actual conclusion.
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I don't know where you get this from as I have never stated my opinion. I am pointing out that what was once dismissed and ridiculed as conspiracy theory nonsense and pretty much censored is now being openly discussed as not only plausible but is actually very likely.
 
TSwizzle said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
You are providing weigh too much weight to the certainty on a claim as it isn't the certainty of the actual conclusion.
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I don't know where you get this from as I have never stated my opinion.
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LOL
TSwizzle said:
I am pointing out that what was once dismissed and ridiculed as conspiracy theory nonsense and pretty much censored is now being openly discussed as not only plausible but is actually very likely.
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The report you are citing is from 2020. I'm going to put a lot more weight on what medical professional in virology have to say than speculation from intelligence groups.
 
TSwizzle said:
I don't know where you get this from as I have never stated my opinion.
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Seriously dude, there can't still be any intelligent people left who don't know that "JAQing off" is promoting an opinion, albeit while attempting to distance oneself from it.

You are not kidding anyone, except, perhaps, yourself.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
TSwizzle said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
You are providing weigh too much weight to the certainty on a claim as it isn't the certainty of the actual conclusion.
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I don't know where you get this from as I have never stated my opinion.
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LOL
TSwizzle said:
I am pointing out that what was once dismissed and ridiculed as conspiracy theory nonsense and pretty much censored is now being openly discussed as not only plausible but is actually very likely.
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The report you are citing is from 2020. I'm going to put a lot more weight on what medical professional in virology have to say than speculation from intelligence groups.
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Good to know. (y)
 
TSwizzle said:
crazyfingers said:
blastula said:
Insanity.

abcnews.go.com

MRNA vaccines now face attacks from some in the GOP

Republicans have proposed legislation in several states to ban the pioneering technology used in COVID shots.
abcnews.go.com abcnews.go.com
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Insane and stupid and evil
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Is it though? The Covid vaccines were rushed through with very limited testing. Maybe it is correct to have them go through the usual FDA clinical tests before handing these vaccines out willy-nilly?
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They did go through FDA testing. There were two big deviations between what happened with the Covid vaccine and what typically happens, neither of which have any impact on safety:

1) What we got is not a Covid vaccine. What we got was a slightly tweaked SARS vaccine. Many years of development went into it but since there was no longer any SARS in the wild human testing was not ethical. They took it as far as they could and then put it on the shelf. When SARS 2.0 came along they took it back off the shelf, tweaked the mRNA slightly and backtracked a bit on the testing because it was now a slightly different molecule. But the tweak worked as expected and there was very minimal animal testing needed.

2) Due to the urgency of the situation the production capacity for the vaccine was ramped up before the approval. When it passed testing there was already a lot of production capacity in place and thus the time from approval to availability was much shorter than normal.

And nobody has managed to demonstrate any real issues with the vaccine. Everything is either totally bogus or based on fallacies. (Yeah, the death rate was higher amongst those first vaccinated than in the population at large. Duh, they were focusing on the most vulnerable! That's like saying a cancer clinic kills people because it has a higher death rate than the population at large.)

There is a tiny risk of anaphylaxis. That is something that can almost always be handled if it's recognized in time. There inherently is a risk in riling up the immune system--but that happens any time you get sick with anything. The risk from a vaccine is lower. Other than that everything that's blamed on the vaccine is simply because it's Covid-lite, any side effects you get would be worse if you had been infected with the real thing.

TSwizzle said:
Anyway;

New evidence supports the Covid lab-leak theory with '80 to 95 percent certainty,' intelligence out of Germany claims. The German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) carried out a secret investigation into the origins of Covid nicknamed Project Saaremaa during the pandemic, the findings of which were only shared with the US in December 2024. German agents targeted Chinese government agencies and scientific institutions across the country, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology - the lab at the center of the lab-leak theory.
In Wuhan, the BND agents 'struck gold,' coming 'as close to the origins of the pandemic... as possible in China,' German media Die Zeit reported. They found unpublished dissertations from 2019 and 2020 that allegedly discussed the effects of coronaviruses on the human body.
Additionally, uncovered materials revealed Chinese scientists had 'an unusually large amount of knowledge about the supposedly novel virus available at an unusually early stage.' Based on the materials BND agents found and analyzed, they used a 'Probability Index' to measure the reliability of information, which determined the lab-leak theory was 'probable' with an '80 to 95 percent' certainty.
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Daily Mail

How times change.
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1) Whether it's lab-leak or not is clearly political, not scientific. No actual ability to measure it exists. The closest we can come is from looking at the genetics and that says there were at least two speciation events. That means that whatever the source was it wasn't actually Covid/Wuhan, but a precursor. Whatever the original bug it clearly has a history of occasionally making the jump to humans. Usually it doesn't fare very well after that, but this time it took off. There's simply no reason to think a lab is required for something that unquestionably happened without it in the past.

2) The origin has no bearing on how it should be handled. Would a nuke on Wuhan magically remove the virus from the population?
 
bilby said:
So... The Daily Mail thinks that the Lab Leak Hypothesis is plausible, because Chinese virologists studied coronaviruses, and knew a lot about corona viruses?

According to that level of evidence, I was responsible for COVID, in 1989.
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And note that Covid is basically SARS 2.0. Is it strange that Chinese virologists would have studied SARS??? It has a history of jumping to humans, it would be high on the list of things to look at.
 
blastula said:
katv.com

Ivermectin becomes accessible without prescription in Arkansas under new state legislation

Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has officially signed Senate Bill 189 into law, granting approval for the sale and purchase of ivermectin for human use without
katv.com katv.com

Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has officially signed Senate Bill 189 into law, granting approval for the sale and purchase of ivermectin for human use without a prescription.
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:facepalm2: :facepalm2: :facepalm2:
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Good. I hope all the morons love overdosing on a neurotoxin when they are trying to treat a cold.
 
Top Trump FDA official Brenner hits pause on Novavax Covid-19 vaccine decision - Politico

A top FDA official directly intervened in an agency review of Novavax’s Covid-19 vaccine, pausing the approval process to ask for more data on the shot, according to four people familiar with the decision granted anonymity to discuss the approval status.

Dr. Sara Brenner, FDA’s Principal Deputy Commissioner, took the highly unusual step, cutting against longstanding precedent at the agency designed to shield scientific assessments from political interference. Typically, political FDA appointees follow the advice of career staff tasked with reviewing reams of data on drugs and vaccines seeking approval.

The move comes amid HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to force out the top official responsible for reviewing such vaccines, Dr. Peter Marks, and put his deputy Julie Tierney on administrative leave.
 
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