If we know anything about the republicans, it’s that they can turn on someone they like really quickly.
Once the trump base moves on to desanctimonious, there’s not gonna be a lot of MAGA republicans left. And trump’s record as president will forever be a laughing stalk
that’s even assuming he doesn’t end up in prison
Democrats did not bail on Obama when he lost 60+ seats for them. Biden has not done anything that deserves everyone running away from him, other than being president in the wake of pandemic that caused all sorts of economic distortions that are still settling out.
Republicans could have bailed on Trump the many times he gave them real reasons to leave. Instead they stuck with him because he was too popular with the base.
I’m not sure about this. Right-wing Populism is a worldwide phenomenon.
Someone will pick up the MAGA torch. Hopefully not someone as scummy as Trump. And hopefully they’ll get outmaneuvered by the GOP next time.
okay, maybe MAGA will carry on, but trump as a person was only revered by a minority of people. Those people will be even smaller now. And history will only remember trump as a pussy grabbing criminal.
that seems oxymoronic to me
Don’t try to make this happen.
IT HAPPENED
The GOP and MAGA are the same thing. MAGA may have a platform of anti-science anti-human but the power for power’s sake, party first damn the rest, and a fundamental dependence on othering an arbitrary subset of humans to feed hate to their base as inspiration is all GOP.
I think you are slightly mistaken. Due to the danger, DARPA denied the EcoHealth grant application which sought to insert human-specific cleavage sites into CoVs, much like the unique furin cleavage site that SARS-CoV-2 has (see below and link). But according to Congressional committees, NIAID and NIH crafted a grant policy and funded EcoHealth in a way that sidestepped the existing moratorium on gain-of-function research (see letter linked below). I wonder if this is why Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins worked so hard to dispel the obvious possibility of the origin being research-related. It’s a little unclear to what extent EcoHealth violated the terms of the grant and reporting requirements to NIAID and how much that may absolve the research funding.
One poster stated that “the evidence is still overwhelming for covid being a natural virus.” This is incorrect. In fact, there’s almost no evidence at all that SARS-CoV-2 is a natural virus. The main piece of evidence, as presented by China early in the pandemic, was that many of the “initial” cases were clustered in December 2019 around the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, with zoonosis implications. However, numerous studies have since found seroprevalence and wastewater detection globally prior to December 2019, meaning SARS-CoV-2 had already spread globally before the “initial” cases at the Seafood Market ever happened (a few links below).
Moreover, any source of zoonosis has never been discovered and despite pursing a zero-COVID strategy, it’s unclear whether China actually continues to look for it.
We will analyze all SARS-CoV gene sequences for appropriately conserved proteolytic cleavage sites in S2 and for the presence of potential furin cleavage sites. SARS- CoV with mismatches in proteolytic cleavage sites can be activated by exogenous trypsin or cathepsin L. Where clear mismatches occur, we will introduce appropriate human specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in Vero cell and HAE cultures. [HAE = human airway epithetlial] In SARS CoV, we will ablate several of these sites based on pseudotyped particle studies and evaluate the impact of select SARS CoVS changes on virus replication and pathogenesis.
Sorry for polluting this thread with detailed COVID stuff, but I think this question is important.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal
Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the prepandemic period in Italy
The presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in human sewage in Santa Catarina, Brazil, November 2019
EDIT: here also is The Intercept article about the EcoHealth DEFUSE proposal, which links to the documentcloud site above and also includes the opinions/thoughts of several scientists.
And even though millions died, I realize many of you would be hesitant to click and read all these links, so I’ll summarize just a few thoughts of scientists included in an email from Jeremy Farrar to Tony Fauci, Francis Collins, and Lawrence Tabak on 2/2/20:
Mike Farzan:
- The RBD didn’t look ‘engineered’ to him – as in, no human would
have selected the individual mutations and cloned them into the
RBD (I think we all agree)- Tissue culture passage can often lead to gain of basic sites –
including furin cleavage sites (this is stuff they have seen with
human coronaviruses)- He is bothered by the furin site and has a hard time explain that as
> an event outside the lab (though, there are possible ways in nature,
> but highly unlikely)- Instead of directed engineering, changes in the RBD and acquisition
of the furin site would be highly compatible with the idea of
continued passage of virus in tissue culture- Acquisition of the furin site would likely destabilize the virus but
would make it disseminate to new tissues.
So, given above, a likely explanation could be something as simple
> as passage SARS-live CoVs in tissue culture on human cell lines
> (under BSL-2) for an extended period of time, accidently creating a
> virus that would be primed for rapid transmission between humans
> via gain of furin site (from tissue culture) and adaption to human
> ACE2 receptor via repeated passage.
…So, I think it becomes a question of how do you put all this
together, whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what
you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature –
accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40.
Bob Garry:
From Bob [Garry]:
Before I left the office for the ball, I aligned nCoV with the 96% bat
CoV sequenced at WIV. Except for the RBD the S proteins are
essentially identical at the amino acid level – well all but the perfect
insertion of 12 nucleotides that adds the furin site. S2 is over its
whole length essentially identical. I really can’t think of a plausible
natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar
to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotide
that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function
– that and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t
figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. Do the alignment
of the spikes at the amino acid level – its stunning. Of course, in the
lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you
wanted. Another scenario is that the progenitor of nCoV was a bat
virus with the perfect furin cleavage site generated over
3
evolutionary times. In this scenario RaTG13 the WIV virus was
generated by a perfect deletion of 12 nucleotides while essentially
not changing any other S2 amino acid. Even more implausible IMO.
That is the big if.
You were doing gain of function research you would NOT use an
existing close of SARS or MERSv. These viruses are already human
pathogens. What you would do is close a bat virus th[at] had not yet
emerged. Maybe then pass it in human cells for a while to lock in
the RBS, then you reclone and put in the mutations you are
interested – one of the first a polybasic cleavage site.
The fact that the letter is co signed by jim jordan, who supported trump’s lies to overthrow our democracy, doesn’t make me think this letter is rooted in any care about the truth.
Also the letter itself doesn’t seem to make any kind of cogent argument. Rather it raised a lot of “questions”.
I have read articles by scientists who actually care about the true origin of covid. They don’t read at all like this.
Perhaps a better question is to wonder why these republicans are working so hard to shift the blame for the pandemic onto fauci. i’m guessing it’s because trump is on record that he intentionally lied to the american public about the severity of the pandemic, and more generally has shown that he doesn’t care at all about public health, and they want to deflect from this fact.
No need to apologize. It does read like a bunch of conspiracy nonsense to me.
Speaking of COVID and the election. It’s possible that some close races were swung by the difference in COVID mortality among Republicans and Democrats though the article mentions this can’t be stated as fact since no study was done nor would it be easy to do such a study.
I did chuckle after your highly partisan post about a nonpartisan subject. You sound like you know what you’re talking about.
It’s not partisan to be interested in the truth.
I also know what science sounds like.
Not that letter.
Right… I think the NIH and NIAID funded collecting and sending bat-viruses to UNC, for Ralph Baric to engineer viruses and use them to infect humanized mice… This could have been ‘dangerous’? It might have been ‘GoF’? It depends on details. And yeah, EcoHealth certainly should have reported their findings. etc. But in any case… I don’t think that work created COVID.
Supposing that COVID was engineered, then it was probably created by the work outlined in the DARPA proposal. We (hopefully) turned down the DARPA proposal. So if that work happened, then it was funded by China, and without Baric’s help.
Which is sort of a point to you, and also a point to the others here. Maybe we screwed up by collaborating with China. But when we got to the final and really dangerous experiment, we followed our own rules, and maybe China went ahead without us.
And definitely, in the long run, China will continue to move on without us. They (and everyone else in the world) have plans to build more labs.
Of course that’s given the public information we have, which is unfortunately just some FOIAs and leaks, because our government is not particularly forthcoming.
Suppose covid is from a lab, even from gain or function.
What are the odds it’s from any particular study?
In other words, how many other studies in that area were in covid? Would we know about them?
I’m skeptical we can know any of these things.
In a sense, I’m saying it’s not any particular study. The DARPA proposal was rejected. So if it is from any research study, it’s from one we haven’t seen. It just happens the DARPA proposal outlines methods that would have made sense to accidentally make COVID.
I don’t think there were a lot of other researchers or labs, working in Wuhan, or with chimeric bat-coronaviruses, if that’s what you mean?
But I agree, broadly, that there’s presumably a lot we aren’t privy to at all. We don’t even share all our own cards. Nevermind China, which is very frustratingly secretive.
I think and hope that you are right. An investigation could confirm that NIAID and NIH did not fund any collaborative research that could have resulted in the particular SARS-CoV-2 incident. It is true they previously funded collaborative EcoHealth efforts with world CoV experts, and policies were modified in or around 2016 that could enable more dangerous types of research. What’s more certain to be true is that potentially dangerous knowledge of CoVs was bestowed upon multiple countries through this funding and this type of research. Reading through the leaked grant and some of the prior research papers, I was a bit shocked that seemingly well-intentioned research could have such dangerous implications.
It’s also true that research-related incidents are much more common than ideal. For example, SARS-CoV (the original) leaked from labs on at least 3 separate occasions in China and someone died in one of the outbreaks. In 2011 a researcher at Mount Sinai in Manhattan was bitten through protective gloves by a ferret inoculated with recombinant 1918 Spanish flu. There’s an entire wiki article just about lab biosecurity incidents.
I think i’ve read that it’s relatively easy for a state to create gain of function for cold and flu viruses.
I remember reading about a controversial academic article that created a highly virulent flu virus by repeatedly infecting ferrets.
However, the concern was that terrorist groups could learn how make super-flus. It was implied states could already do it.
I could be remembering wrong thought.