XPost: uk.politics.misc
On 13/01/2022 14:49, Incubus wrote:
On 2022-01-13, Java Jive <java@evij.com.invalid> wrote:
Fact-checkers label YouTube a 'major conduit of online disinformation'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59967190
Are you on YouTube?
h t t p s : / / w w w . t e l e g r a p h . c o . u k / n e w s / 2 0 2 1 / 1 2 / 1 5 / w u h a n - l a b - l e a k - n o w - l i k e l y - o r i g i n - c o v i d - m p s - t o l d /
TROLL! Fake news debunked twice already repeated for a third time:
Thanks for the link, but the book looks like bollocks to me, designed to
make the authors money, not shed any useful light on the origins of
SARS-Cov-2:
Times: "The book collates a series of circumstantial but damning points
in favour of the lab-leak hypothesis."
Self-contradiction, by definition circumstantial evidence is not
damning, though it may become convincing if there's enough of it that is
all true, however the latter condition is not met here ...
Times: "It opens with a cloak-and-dagger scene of a BBC reporter trying
to reach a mine in Mojiang, a rural area in southwest China. He finds
his way repeatedly barred by impromptu roadblocks; unmarked cars follow
him; he is threatened with violence. Another reporter is detained by
police for five hours after finding his way to the mine by mountain bike."
Covid: Wuhan scientist would 'welcome' visit probing lab leak theory
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-55364445
The BBC report of this has already been linked in this thread, and is
again above, but it also quotes the woman in charge of WIV saying that
she would like to throw open the doors of the lab to the then
forthcoming WHO investigation, but of course in time that decision was
made differently by the Chinese authorities. No-one is denying that the Chinese are covering up, but what they covering up doesn't have to be a lab-leak, there is at least one more likely cause for a cover-up. From
here and previous reports, we know that:
- The genetic diversity of the known initial cases suggests that the
outbreak began around early October, see again below;
- The official channels set up after SARS to notify the authorities of
a new emergent health problem were not used until January:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454
"The system appears to have been in active use only from 3 January."
- Local officials were sacked after a national government investigation.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/11/china-fires-two-senior-hubei-officials-over-coronavirus-outbreak
All this is suggestive of local officials either being negligent and/or
trying unsuccessfully to contain the outbreak before notifying national authorities, and, given the disastrous consequences, that would be very embarrassing for China to admit to the outside world.
Times: "In 2012 six workers at that mine had developed severe pneumonia
from an unknown virus. Samples from the six were sent to the Wuhan
Institute for Virology (WIV), more than 1,000 miles away. Three died.
The genome of that virus, described as a Sars-related coronavirus (or Sarsr-CoV), was sequenced; part of that genetic sequence was published.
And, later — much later — that genetic sequence was found to be 96.2 per cent identical to the Sars-CoV-2 virus that caused Covid.
Yet that similarity was noticed only after anonymous internet sleuths discovered an unpublished 2013 master’s thesis by a Chinese doctor
looking at the six Mojiang miners. They also discovered that the WIV had sequenced the virus in 2016, but changed its name (from 4991 to RaTG13)
in their literature, and not mentioned its origins or importance in any
of its subsequent papers, including a 2020 paper on the origin of the pandemic."
FALSE! The suggestion that the Chinese were trying to obscure the
identity between '4991' and 'RaTG13' is nonsense:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7744920/
"BtCoV/4991 and RaTG13 have been later asserted to be two different
coding names of the same strain, as their original authors at WIV
registered the two strains as one entry in the Database of
Bat‐associated Viruses (DBatVir).iv"
Times: "Yet despite much better sequencing technology, there has been no similar success identifying the animal hosts in the Huanan wet market in
Wuhan that the present outbreak was supposed to come from and the human
cases in that market were all of one strain, suggesting that it was a
later superspreader event and not the start of the outbreak."
FALSE: They weren't all of one strain. As previously linked here in my
post of 07/11/2021, 23:36:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct1l3t
Science in Action, 27/06/2021, 0:56-14:16
Tales of unexpected DNA data
"A new paper by virologist Jesse Bloom reported the discovery of some
early Wuhan partial genetic sequences. These were taken at an early
date in the outbreak there but the date meta data is not available, and
they give sequences that are two or three mutations closer to the
original bat virus compared to the ones that were previously considered
to have been the start of the outbreak, suggesting that the outbreak
began a month or more earlier than the Chinese authorities have so far admitted."
Times: "Also, Chan and Ridley say, the Sars-CoV-2 virus has not mutated anything like as quickly as the original Sars virus did, suggesting that
it was already well adapted to humans. Which is surprising if it had
just jumped from a wild animal, but not if it had been allowed to breed
in a laboratory animal designed to mimic human biology."
FALSE! Same reasons as rebuttals above and below.
Times: "And, they say, the virus has something called a “furin cleavage site”, which is unknown in coronaviruses of this type, but makes the
virus more effective at infecting human cells. A January 2020 paper by
WIV scientists, Chan and Ridley say, describes the entire viral genome
except for the genes coding for the furin cleavage site, which they say
is like discovering a unicorn, then writing a paper comparing it with
other horses, “describing in detail the hair and the hooves, but you
don’t mention the horn”."
FALSE!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8373617/
"The WIV possesses an extensive catalog of samples derived from bats
(Latinne et al., 2020) and has reportedly successfully cultured three SARSr-CoVs from bats—WIV1, WIV16, and Rs4874 (Ge et al., 2013; Hu et
al., 2017; Yang et al., 2015). Importantly, all three viruses are more
closely related to SARS-CoV than to SARS-CoV-2 (Ge et al., 2013; Hu et
al., 2017; Yang et al., 2015). In contrast, bat virus RaTG13 from the
WIV has reportedly never been isolated or cultured and only exists as a nucleotide sequence assembled from short sequencing reads (Cohen, 2020).
The three cultured viruses were isolated from fecal samples through
serial amplification in Vero E6 cells, a process that consistently
results in the loss of the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site (Davidson et
al., 2020; Klimstra et al., 2020; Liu et al., 2020b; Ogando et al.,
2020; Sasaki et al., 2021; Wong et al., 2021; Zhu et al., 2021b). It is therefore highly unlikely that these techniques would result in the
isolation of a SARS-CoV-2 progenitor with an intact furin cleavage site."
Some of the earlier part of this last NIH article also debunks the
single strain claim above.
Also:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7836551/
"Abstract
The spike protein is a focused target of COVID-19, a pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2. A 12-nt insertion at S1/S2 in the spike coding sequence
yields a furin cleavage site, which raised controversy views on origin
of the virus. Here we analyzed the phylogenetic relationships of
coronavirus spike proteins and mapped furin recognition motif on the
tree. Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in
the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural
occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2."
The rest of the Times article isn't quoting from the book, so I'll leave
it there, but from the above the book appears to be the usual conspiracy carcinogens.
The book is rather more critically reviewed by the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/nov/15/viral-by-alina-chan-and-matt-ridley-review-was-covid-19-really-made-in-china
"Ridley, a Conservative hereditary peer best known for his sceptical
writings on climate change [...]"
So again we find the believers in one absurd conspiracy theory often
believe in others.
"There is just one problem: nowhere do they present proof that
Sars-CoV-2 was manufactured. Take Chan’s claim that it appeared
pre-adapted to human transmission “to an extent similar to late epidemic Sars”. This claim rests on a single mutation in the spike protein that appears to “slightly enhance” (Chan and Ridley’s words) its ability to bind to human receptor cells and suggests that by the time it was first detected in Wuhan it had “apparently stabilised genetically”.
But this is highly misleading. As the subsequent alphabet soup of
variants demonstrates, the coronavirus has undergone repeated mutations
that have steadily increased its fitness. Furthermore, studies of
viruses isolated from pangolins, one of the animals suspected of being
an intermediary host, bind to human receptor cells even more efficiently
than Sars-CoV-2, suggesting capacity for further adaptation. As two
leading virologists put it, the virus was not perfectly adapted to
humans but was “just good enough”.
[...]
However, 21 leading scientific experts recently pointed out that the
furin sequence is suboptimal and that “near identical” sequences have
been found in coronaviruses that commonly infect humans and cattle. In
other words, although the feature is absent from known bat
coronaviruses, it could just as easily be the product of natural evolution.
[...]
This suggests it most likely emerged naturally, either via passage
through another animal host or directly via spillover from a bat,
perhaps when a farmer ventured into a cave in Yunnan or Laos in search
of guano. That is the most parsimonious explanation and fits with both
the forensic and epidemiological evidence: samples recovered from the
Wuhan seafood market are identical to human isolates and most of the
original human cases had a history of prior market exposure; by
contrast, there is no epidemiological link to the WIV or any other
research facility in Wuhan.
[...]
In other words, a zoonotic event is the null or default hypothesis; the
onus is on Chan and Ridley to demonstrate otherwise.
The tragedy is that in their desire to make a plausible case for a lab accident, Chan and Ridley neglect the far more urgent and compelling
story of how the trade in wild animals, coupled with global heating and
the destruction of natural habitats, makes the emergence of pandemic
viruses increasingly likely. That is the more probable origin story and
the scenario that should really concern us."
Anyway, FB argued in court that its "fact checkers" are only giving
opinions.
And FB is not???!!! The fact-checkers are giving opinions based on
proper research, FB is trying to maximise its profits by algorithms
which have a side-effect of leading people down denialist rabbit-holes.
Read:
Shoshana Zuboff: "The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism"
--
Fake news kills!
I may be contacted via the contact address given on my website:
www.macfh.co.uk
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