Mereja Forum

[Deqi-Arawit]

COVID-19 has the genome sequencing combination of 'CGG-CGG'
Two US experts say that no naturally occurring coronavirus has ever had that combination
The 'CGG-CGG' combination is extremely rare, except when it used by scientists doing 'gain-of-function' in laboratories
The experts conclude that it is more likely than not that the virus was therefore created in a lab
In recent weeks, many of the world's top scientists have pushed to determine whether the virus was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
Two U.S. experts have penned a damning essay saying that science strongly suggests the novel coronavirus was manufactured inside a Chinese laboratory.



The claim was made by Drs Stephen Quay, CEO of biopharmaceutical company Atossa Therapeutics Inc, and Richard Muller, a physics professor at the University of California Berkeley, in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday.







https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... claim.html

[Thomas H]

COVID-19 has the genome sequencing combination of 'CGG-CGG'
Two US experts say that no naturally occurring coronavirus has ever had that combination
The 'CGG-CGG' combination is extremely rare, except when it used by scientists doing 'gain-of-function' in laboratories
The experts conclude that it is more likely than not that the virus was therefore created in a lab
In recent weeks, many of the world's top scientists have pushed to determine whether the virus was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
Two U.S. experts have penned a damning essay saying that science strongly suggests the novel coronavirus was manufactured inside a Chinese laboratory.



The claim was made by Drs Stephen Quay, CEO of biopharmaceutical company Atossa Therapeutics Inc, and Richard Muller, a physics professor at the University of California Berkeley, in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday.







https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... claim.html

You foken illiterate,
Viruses are constantly changing. Their genetic code is prone to changes called mutations that can change how a virus looks or affects its hosts.
The 2 US experts are telling you that "The 'CGG-CGG' combination is extremely rare" meaning this combination exists but less frequently. Tell them that Journalist Sir Thomas H( the most educated person in ER forum) rejects their theory which is BS.

[Blueshift]

Guys,
The Lab in question, some claim that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 aka Covid-19. The lab is staffed with US educated Chinese scientists. Some of these scientists requested to open a lab in the US, but they were rejected. Some say that a female scientist at the lab has confessed that she was experimenting with a sample of Corona viruses to the extreme that the sample mutated accidently into what we call today SARS-COV-2. I believe the story is unlikely. But I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case. it's a surprise that labs set up to study these pathogens were nearby to the Hunan wet market in China. Viruses mutate all the time naturally as well as in the labs. Actually, human beings ending on this planet is long overdue. 200,000 years of survival for any specie except the Dyno is long overdue. I believe the virus mutation apparatus will do the job. Either way, the is no definitive evidence to say otherwise.

As with pretty much everything in the pandemic, the ultimate answer is that things are somewhat uncertain. We know that new diseases commonly spring from animal origins, and that this is quite likely when it comes to COVID-19.
However, as numerous scientists have noted, it is still not impossible that SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from a lab. While the initial World Health Organization report into the issue said that it was "extremely unlikely", this investigation was not aimed at disproving the lab leak hypothesis, and as a recent letter from some prominent scientists noted it's not definitive on its own.

That being said, the evidence from the WHO report is also not entirely useless. For example, there is no evidence that people from the Wuhan Institute of Virology had antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak, which they would if the disease had slipped controls in the laboratory.

Nevertheless, the WHO investigation doesn't provide strong enough evidence to dismiss entirely the idea that COVID-19 came from a lab, which leaves us in an interesting position.

On the one hand, naturally occurring novel pathogens happen all the time, and it's no surprise that labs set up to study these pathogens were nearby when they did eventually outbreak - global health experts have been predicting for decades that this exact thing would happen. On the other, we still aren't certain that the virus didn't somehow escape from the lab, which means that both theories are possible at this point in time.

Thing is, that doesn't make them equally likely. Zoonotic transfers happen routinely, but if this pandemic was caused by an entirely new disease crafted in a lab it would be a massive world-first.

Moreover, much of the evidence "proving" that COVID-19 escaped from a lab is impressively lackluster. The most recent paper is just one example in an ongoing chain - another one that happened recently is when the Wall Street Journal published an explosive piece saying that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology attended hospital with flu-like symptoms in November 2019.

Sounds like a clear evidence that COVID-19 emerged from a lab leak!

Except, in China the majority of primary care services are provided from hospitals, which includes things like sick certificates for people who miss a day of work due to a cold. In other words, three people going to a hospital for care might literally be what you'd expect of a normal flu season and have no nefarious connotations at all.

This was even noted in the Wall Street Journal piece, but since it was buried deep down towards the bottom the fact that these hospital attendances are proof of very little was lost in the noise.

And this is the problem with most discussions about whether COVID-19 could've come from a lab - it's so politicized that the evidence is pretty unimportant. A popular theory among people who argue for a lab leak is the idea that the furin cleavage site of the virus is so unnatural that it implies a laboratory origin, even though this idea has been untrue since the very start of the pandemic - furin cleavage sites are not unknown among 'wild' coronaviruses, and they don't necessarily make viruses more deadly either.

That the idea doesn't prove anything related to whether scientists engineered SARS-CoV-2 hasn't stopped it from being promulgated widely as proof that the pandemic was man-made.

It's also worth noting that the idea that the virus "leaked" from a lab does not necessarily mean that it was man-made - it is entirely possible that researchers studying existing coronaviruses that were natural in origin accidentally let the virus slip out.

However, even if true, this is a vastly different situation from the ideas that have gained the most prominence, which imply that COVID-19 must be man-made because of its structure and design.

So yes, there are two possibilities**. One happens regularly, and is the basis for most new human diseases. The other has never happened before, and is a pretty unlikely scenario requiring a massive cover-up from the Chinese government and WHO officials.

We can't exclude the possibility that COVID-19 was constructed in a lab, but on balance it is a much less likely explanation.

*Note: This is quite funny, because Science and Nature are the two biggest scientific publications in the world, they reject 90 percent + of papers that are submitted, so it's a wild stretch to say that simply because one paper wasn't accepted it means much at all. Like most scientists, I too have had papers rejected from both Nature and Science - it's something of a right of passage.

**Note: in a very technical sense, this is a false dichotomy. While these are the two explanations most commonly posited for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, it's possible that other options exist. For example, it could've been aliens, or the CIA.

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Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz is an epidemiologist working in chronic disease in Sydney, Australia. He writes a regular health blog covering science communication, public health, and what that new study you've read about actually means.

[Tiago]

https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus ... n-lab.html


https://www.scripps.edu/news-and-events ... virus.html