Posted on 01/29/2020 9:59:29 AM PST by SeekAndFind
As China attempts to contain the spread of a new coronavirus that has left more than 100 people dead, rumors and disinformation have spread amid the scramble for answers.
Some of the speculation has centered on a virology institute in Wuhan, the city where the outbreak began. One fringe theory holds that the disaster could be the accidental result of biological weapons research.
But in conversations with The Washington Post, experts rejected the idea that the virus could be man-made.
“Based on the virus genome and properties there is no indication whatsoever that it was an engineered virus,” said Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University.
Tim Trevan, a biological safety expert based in Maryland, said most countries had largely abandoned their bioweapons research after years of work proved fruitless.
“The vast majority of new, nasty diseases ... come from nature,” he said.
The British newspaper Daily Mail was among the first to suggest the possibility of a link between the newly spreading virus and the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, reporting last week that the lab, which opened in 2014 and is part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had been the subject of safety concerns in the past.
A separate article published by the Washington Times, a conservative newspaper in Washington, took the theories a step further, suggesting in a headline that the “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China’s biowarfare program” and pointing to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The article cited research by Dany Shoham, a former Israeli military intelligence officer, who told The Post he did not want to comment further.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Ezra Cheung
@ezracheungtoto
Just in: The Lancet chief editor, Richard Horton, says that the #nCoV19 virus has become “sufficiently divergent” to be a new human-infecting coronavirus and warns of further mutations of the virus. The #WuhanCoronavirus has infected more than 6,000 people and killed 132 so far.
Our results suggest that 2019-nCoV is
more likely to infect older adult males with chronic
comorbidities as a result of the weaker immune functions
of these patients
https://marlin-prod.literatumonline.com/pb-assets/Lancet/pdfs/S0140673620302117.pdf
“Experts debunk fringe”
Wow, a triple-whammy, in just 3 consecutive words. To get all Latin about it, argumentum ad verecundiam, petitio principii, and argumentum ad hominem. My BS meter is pegged.
“Based on the virus genome and properties there is no indication whatsoever that it was an engineered virus,” said Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University.
He then said: “There’s also no validity to rumors that within 4-12 hours after death, victims of the virus rise from the grave with an insatiable lust for human brains. No indication of that at all.”
If it was a bioweapon the death rate would be much higher than the current +/- 3%
In a post an hour or so ago, I stated that one person had died of Coronavirus in the United States. That was incorrect. Could have sworn I heard of a person in the Washington area that had died, but that seem to have been wrong.
As of 11:00pm last night, not one person has died outside of China.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
As for whether the study of race or gender has something to add to this situation. I don’t know. The Johns Hopkins site reveals 102 people infected outside of China. So far the mortality rate on them is 0.00%
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
It isn’t a fringe theory when a new, highly lethal flu strain breaks out in the city containing a biowarfare lab.
Another liberal fake news organization, WaPo, is telling us again that a story is already debunked, like Hunter Biden in Ukraine. This only tells me that it now probably true.
How could the story be debunked. Has there been an investigations? If so, then why has no one heard of it or viewed the results. Sounds like WaPo got a big pay day from China, which is how fake news works.
I thought it was just over 100 cases so far that a patient has fully recovered? If so we have no idea what the actual death rate may be.
We cannot be sure what the actual figures are inside China. I’m not sure we’d know much better if a mass infection took place here. Some folks don’t report. They hole up at home and ride it out.
What we can be reasonably sure of is the numbers of cases outside of China. So far there are 102 such cases around the world.
Of those cases, nobody has died. If this were a weaponized virus, we would see something more like 90% mortality numbers on those 102 people. So far it’s 0.00%.
It is very unlikely this is a weaponized virus.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3811964/posts?page=87#87
-->. Yes. Seems to be it wasn't the market.
2) This RNA #coronavirus mutates really fast.
-->. This isn't all that accurate. Fast is a relative term and Coronaviruses have a proof reading sub-unit in their polymerase so they're transcription is much less error prone than a retrovirus.
3) 🧬 has unusual middle segment never seen before in any coronavirus.
-->I've heard this stated but am not sure which scientific article provides the data or what is meant by "unusual middle segment".
4) Not from recent mixing.
--> yes, no signs it is recombinant. It's related most closely to a bat virus found in China.
5) That mystery middle segment encodes protein responsible for entry into host cells.
-->. Not sure about this but am sure that it uses the same surface protein, ACE2, to infect cells as other Coronaviruses. ACE2 is expressed highly in lung capillaries, hence the respiratory effect due to infection.
About 1/3 to 1/2 of the sequence. Protein. I didn’t look at the NA sequence.
Several significant deletions too.
How many bases does this region comprise is what I was asking.
Note that, no matter what differences there may be in the spike region, this virus uses ACE2 as a receptor, same as SARS.
My debunker was debunked.
It took the patients in China 10-14d to actually die once they were hospitalized.
We have no idea the mortality rate of the western patients, yet.
A weaponized virus needn’t kill 90% of the infected. 2%+ and crash their medical system would also work. Especially if 25% of their fighting force was in the ICU for several weeks and had permanently damaged lungs after that.
Therefore, we don't know for sure, for a large number of cases, what the time is from initial infection to severe symptoms.
There has also been talk that the novel "spike" which attaches the virus deep in the lung, has an affinity to a particular surface receptor, much more common in Chinese/Asiatics than caucasians.
Between that and the lack of knowledge of how long it takes the virus to progress to ARD ...and the totally unquantifiable variables of "what was the exact state of health / pulmonary vulnerability of the Chinese patients" (since China has bad air pollution)....
And the fact that the poor reporting and overcrowding in Wuhan (read: lack of test kits), means we don't know if there's a large pool of infected who resolve quietly without major sequelae...
we can't yet draw any conclusions either way over the fact that those few cases which have made it outside of China, have not yet deteriorated.
Chinese officials confirmed Wednesday that the number of people infected by a new form of coronavirus in the country has reached 5,974, a total that surpasses the official cases tallied on the mainland during an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2002 and 2003. SARS infected 5,237 people in mainland China, and killed almost 800 people across the world.
The new SARS-like form of coronavirus has killed 132 people in China
I divided the number of reported deaths by the number of confirmed cases and came up with 2.8%, the other day. That could change given another week; we’ll see.
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