Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate [2015 Article]

[Hassan Al-Somal]

Source: https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/lab-made-coronavirus-triggers-debate-34502

Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate

The creation of a chimeric SARS-like virus has scientists discussing the risks of gain-of-function research.

Jef Akst
Nov 16, 2015

Update (March 11, 2020): On social media and news outlets, a theory has circulated that the coronavirus at the root of the COVID-19 outbreak originated in a research lab. Scientists say there is no evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from a lab.

MERS coronavirus
flickr, niaid
Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week (November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine.

The results demonstrate the ability of the SHC014 surface protein to bind and infect human cells, validating concerns that this virus—or other coronaviruses found in bat species—may be capable of making the leap to people without first evolving in an intermediate host, Nature reported. They also reignite a debate about whether that information justifies the risk of such work, known as gain-of-function research. “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, told Nature.

In October 2013, the US government put a stop to all federal funding for gain-of-function studies, with particular concern rising about influenza, SARS, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). “NIH [National Institutes of Health] has funded such studies because they help define the fundamental nature of human-pathogen interactions, enable the assessment of the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents, and inform public health and preparedness efforts,” NIH Director Francis Collins said in a statement at the time. “These studies, however, also entail biosafety and biosecurity risks, which need to be understood better.”

Baric’s study on the SHC014-chimeric coronavirus began before the moratorium was announced, and the NIH allowed it to proceed during a review process, which eventually led to the conclusion that the work did not fall under the new restrictions, Baric told Nature. But some researchers, like Wain-Hobson, disagree with that decision.

The debate comes down to how informative the results are. “The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers University, told Nature.

But Baric and others argued the study’s importance. “[The results] move this virus from a candidate emerging pathogen to a clear and present danger,” Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which samples viruses from animals and people in emerging-diseases hotspots across the globe, told Nature.

 

[Hassan Al-Somal]

Obviously, this deadly pandemic came out of a lab, the scientist knew about it at least since 2015 or even before. But then someone chose to release it in Wuhen, China, and then threw the blame on a "bat soup". It was also then unleashed in Iran. But then to cover the tracks, some fella chose it to release it in Italy, where majority of the population is elderly.

Just like 9-11, the script is discovered. But it is a deadly one, and the people behind it aren't done yet it seems.

 

[denel]

Obviously, this deadly pandemic came out of a lab, the scientist knew about it at least since 2015 or even before. But then someone chose to release it in Wuhen, China, and then threw the blame on a "bat soup". It was also then unleashed in Iran. But then to cover the tracks, some fella chose it to release it in Italy, where majority of the population is elderly.

Just like 9-11, the script is discovered. But it is a deadly one, and the people behind it aren't done yet it seems.

Please stop this half baked theories.

Coronaviruses are widespread in bats. Please consult scientific literature or go back to school to educate yourself.

 

[AZADPAKISTAN2009]

Well it is no secret that USA/Russia all maintain and preserve copies of Plague from 1900
copies were maintained for scientific purpose because no cure existed for it


Article from 2015
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...cimens-mistakes-plague-encephalitis/71888694/
Latest military lab concerns involve plague bacteria, deadly viruses
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon's most secure laboratories may have mislabeled, improperly stored and shipped samples of potentially infectious plague bacteria, which can cause several deadly forms of disease, USA TODAY has learned.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flagged the practices after inspections last month at an Army lab in Maryland, one of the Pentagon's most secure labs. That helped prompt an emergency ban on research on all bioterror pathogens at nine laboratories run by the Pentagon, which was already reeling from revelations that another Army lab in Utah had mishandled anthrax samples for 10 years.

Army Secretary John McHugh ordered the research moratorium on Sept. 2, Pentagon officials say, out of an abundance of caution.

Moreover, officials point out that continuing testing has shown the suspect samples of plague contain a weakened version, and not the fully virulent form that was of concern to lab regulators at the CDC.

 

[manga]

conspiracy theories are so dumb, how would you explain some release of virus in US itself

 

[Hassan Al-Somal]

conspiracy theories are so dumb, how would you explain some release of virus in US itself

It is spreading from people traveling and contacting each other. Wth, it is TheScientist journal confirming that the Corona virus was discovered in a lab. The report was released in 2015. How is that a conspiracy theory? Did you read the link? I posted it below for you.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/lab-made-coronavirus-triggers-debate-34502

Please stop this half baked theories.

Coronaviruses are widespread in bats. Please consult scientific literature or go back to school to educate yourself.

Bats were around on this earth in millions of years. Many of them get in people's homes. In some cultures, people consumed bats. however, humans never contracted Corona virus from them before. If we did, the vaccines and treatments would've been known by now. So what is different in this instance? Besides, it is TheScientist journal documenting that it was engineered in a lab. It was an opinion-ed, but the journal allowed it to be published, and it was in 2015. Are we just gonna call it "conspiracy theory" and disregard it?

Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week (November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine.

Making the fonts much bigger and emphasizing it for you so you could read it. Hopefully, you have eye glasses in case you can't read it with your own eyes.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1241093246132109312

 

[Hassan Al-Somal]

Boris Johnson: Global overpopulation is the real issue

By Boris Johnson | 25 October 2007
The Telegraph

It is a tragic measure of how far the world has changed – and the infinite capacity of modern man for taking offence – that there are no two subjects that can get you more swiftly into political trouble than motherhood and apple pie.

The last time I tentatively suggested that there was something to be said in favour of apple pie, I caused a frenzy of hatred in the healthy-eating lobby. It reached such a pitch that journalists were actually pelting me with pies, and demanding a retraction, and an apology, and a formal denunciation of the role of apple pie in causing obesity.

As for motherhood – the fertility of the human race – we are getting to the point where you simply can’t discuss it, and we are thereby refusing to say anything sensible about the biggest single challenge facing the Earth; and no, whatever it may now be conventional to say, that single biggest challenge is not global warming. That is a secondary challenge. The primary challenge facing our species is the reproduction of our species itself.

Depending on how fast you read, the population of the planet is growing with every word that skitters beneath your eyeball. There are more than 211,000 people being added every day, and a population the size of Germany every year.

As someone who has now been travelling around the world for decades, I see this change, and I feel it. You can smell it in the traffic jams of the Middle East. You can see it as you fly over Africa at night, and you see mile after mile of fires burning red in the dark, as the scrub is removed to make way for human beings.

You can see it in the satellite pictures of nocturnal Europe, with the whole place lit up like a fairground. You can see it in the crazy dentition of the Shanghai skyline, where new skyscrapers are going up round the clock.

You can see it as you fly over Mexico City, a vast checkerboard of smog-bound, low-rise dwellings stretching from one horizon to the other; and when you look down on what we are doing to the planet, you have a horrifying vision of habitations multiplying and replicating like bacilli in a Petri dish.

The world’s population is now 6.7 billion, roughly double what it was when I was born. If I live to be in my mid-eighties, then it will have trebled in my lifetime.

The UN last year revised its forecasts upwards, predicting that there will be 9.2 billion people by 2050, and I simply cannot understand why no one discusses this impending calamity, and why no world statesmen have the guts to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves.

How the hell can we witter on about tackling global warming, and reducing consumption, when we are continuing to add so relentlessly to the number of consumers? The answer is politics, and political cowardice.

There was a time, in the 1960s and 1970s, when people such as my father, Stanley, were becoming interested in demography, and the UN would hold giant conferences on the subject, and it was perfectly respectable to talk about saving the planet by reducing the growth in the number of human beings.

But over the years, the argument changed, and certain words became taboo, and certain concepts became forbidden, and we have reached the stage where the very discussion of overall human fertility – global motherhood – has become more or less banned.

We seem to have given up on population control, and all sorts of explanations are offered for the surrender. Some say Indira Gandhi gave it all a bad name, by her demented plan to sterilise Indian men with the lure of a transistor radio.

Some attribute our complacency to the Green Revolution, which seemed to prove Malthus wrong. It became the received wisdom that the world’s population could rise to umpteen billions, as mankind learnt to make several ears of corn grow where one had grown before.

And then, in recent years, the idea of global population control has been more or less stifled by a pincer movement from the Right and the Left. American Right-wingers disapprove of anything that sounds like birth control, and so George W. Bush withholds the tiny contribution America makes to the UN Fund for Population Activities, regardless of the impact on the health of women in developing countries.

As for the Left, they dislike suggestions of population control because they seem to smack of colonialism and imperialism and telling the Third World what to do; and so we have reached the absurd position in which humanity bleats about the destruction of the environment, and yet there is not a peep in any communiqué from any summit of the EU, G8 or UN about the population growth that is causing that destruction.

The debate is surely now unavoidable. Look at food prices, driven ever higher by population growth in India and China. Look at the insatiable Chinese desire for meat, which has pushed the cost of feed so high that Vladimir Putin has been obliged to institute price controls in the doomed fashion of Diocletian or Edward Heath.

Even in Britain, chicken farmers are finding that the cost of chickenfeed is no longer exactly chickenfeed, and, though the food crisis may once again be solved by the wit of man, the damage to the environment may be irreversible.

It is time we had a grown-up discussion about the optimum quantity of human beings in this country and on this planet. Do we want the south-east of Britain, already the most densely populated major country in Europe, to resemble a giant suburbia?

This is not, repeat not, an argument about immigration per se, since in a sense it does not matter where people come from, and with their skill and their industry, immigrants add hugely to the economy.

This is a straightforward question of population, and the eventual size of the human race.

All the evidence shows that we can help reduce population growth, and world poverty, by promoting literacy and female emancipation and access to birth control. Isn’t it time politicians stopped being so timid, and started talking about the real number one issue?

Boris Johnson is a British politician, popular historian and journalist who served as Mayor of London and as Member of Parliament for Uxbridge and South Ruislip since 2015.

Professor Milton Siegel, who for 24 years was the Assistant Director-General of the World Health Organization, speaks to Dr. Stephen Mumford in 1992 to reveal that although there was a consensus that overpopulation was a grave public health threat and would be a major cause of preventable death not too far in the future, the Vatican successfully fought off the incorporation of family planning and birth control into official WHO policy. This video is available for public viewing for the first time. Read the full transcript of the interview here.

The current world population of 7.3 billion is expected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050 and 11 billion by the end of the century. (Photo: Carl Court / Getty Images)

Source: churchandstate.org.uk/2016/03/mayor-of-london-global-overpopulation-is-the-real-issue/

 

[k s ahmed]

Please stop this half baked theories.

Coronaviruses are widespread in bats. Please consult scientific literature or go back to school to educate yourself.

and why it never spread before?

not over population - they just want less population so they can control better.. the greedy who think they will never die.

 

[Hassan Al-Somal]

and why it never spread before?

not over population - they just want less population so they can control better.. the greedy who think they will never die.

Some of the people here are too goofy to critically think for themselves. They just took at face value of what they heard from mainstream media and political leaders of some countries and act smart.

 

[Moonlight]

Obviously, this deadly pandemic came out of a lab, the scientist knew about it at least since 2015 or even before. But then someone chose to release it in Wuhen, China, and then threw the blame on a "bat soup". It was also then unleashed in Iran. But then to cover the tracks, some fella chose it to release it in Italy, where majority of the population is elderly.

Just like 9-11, the script is discovered. But it is a deadly one, and the people behind it aren't done yet it seems.

I can’t....Ah you actually believed this speculation?

 

[denel]

It is spreading from people traveling and contacting each other. Wth, it is TheScientist journal confirming that the Corona virus was discovered in a lab. The report was released in 2015. How is that a conspiracy theory? Did you read the link? I posted it below for you.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/lab-made-coronavirus-triggers-debate-34502



Bats were around on this earth in millions of years. Many of them get in people's homes. In some cultures, people consumed bats. however, humans never contracted Corona virus from them before. If we did, the vaccines and treatments would've been known by now. So what is different in this instance? Besides, it is TheScientist journal documenting that it was engineered in a lab. It was an opinion-ed, but the journal allowed it to be published, and it was in 2015. Are we just gonna call it "conspiracy theory" and disregard it?



Making the fonts much bigger and emphasizing it for you so you could read it. Hopefully, you have eye glasses in case you can't read it with your own eyes.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1241093246132109312

Pal ... the genome sequence is different.

and why it never spread before?

not over population - they just want less population so they can control better.. the greedy who think they will never die.

Not all affect humans.

 

[Hassan Al-Somal]

I can’t....Ah you actually believed this speculation?

After 9/11 attacks and how they immediately blamed it on UBL, passed the Patriot Act within 21 days, attacked Afghanistan, then turned around and attacked Iraq in 2003, then Lebanon in 2006, then Somalia in 2006, then Libya in 2011, them Syria 2011, then Yemen 2015, then drone campaign against Pakistan, then sponsorship of PKK/YPG against Turkey, and so on and on. I've actually stopped anything that comes out of the establishment and their mainstream media mouthpieces.

This main story is fishy. The Sinophobia has been engineered and the westerners have been told who the next empire to vilify and go after is going to be.

 

[Pan-Islamic-Pakistan]

After 9/11 attacks and how they immediately blamed it on UBL, passed the Patriot Act within 21 days, attacked Afghanistan, then turned around and attacked Iraq in 2003, then Lebanon in 2006, then Somalia in 2006, then Libya in 2011, them Syria 2011, then Yemen 2015, then drone campaign against Pakistan, then sponsorship of PKK/YPG against Turkey, and so on and on. I've actually stopped anything that comes out of the establishment and their mainstream media mouthpieces.

This main story is fishy. The Sinophobia has been engineered and the westerners have been told who the next empire to vilify and go after is going to be.

Read some of the threads started by some Chinese members, I feel you will get all the information you desire.

 

[Dubious]

Posts on social media and even a scientific paper have suggested the coronavirus that causes COVID-19—seen here in orange, emerging from a cell—originated in a virology lab in Wuhan, China.

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
Scientists ‘strongly condemn’ rumors and conspiracy theories about origin of coronavirus outbreak
By Jon CohenFeb. 19, 2020 , 7:00 AM

A group of 27 prominent public health scientists from outside China is pushing back against a steady stream of stories and even a scientific paper suggesting a laboratory in Wuhan, China, may be the origin of the outbreak of COVID-19. “The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins,” the scientists, from nine countries, write in a statement published online by The Lancet yesterday.

The letter does not criticize any specific assertions about the origin of the outbreak, but many posts on social media have singled out the Wuhan Institute of Virology for intense scrutiny because it has a laboratory at the highest security level—biosafety level 4—and its researchers study coronaviruses from bats, including the one that is closest to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Speculations have included the possibility that the virus was bioengineered in the lab or that a lab worker was infected while handling a bat and then transmitted the disease to others outside the lab. Researchers from the institute have insisted there is no link between the outbreak and their laboratory.

“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” says The Lancet statement, which praises the work of Chinese health professionals as “remarkable” and encourages others to sign on as well.

U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (R–AR) added fuel to controversial assertions on Fox News earlier this month when he noted that the lab was “a few miles away” from a seafood market that had a large cluster of some of the first cases detected. “We don’t have evidence that this disease originated there but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says,” Cotton said, noting that the Chinese government initially turned down the U.S. government’s offer to send scientists to the country to help clarify questions about the outbreak.

The authors of The Lancet statement note that scientists from several countries who have studied SARS-CoV-2 “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” just like many other viruses that have recently emerged in humans. “Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus,” the statement says.

Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance and a cosignatory of the statement, has collaborated with researchers at the Wuhan institute who study bat coronaviruses. “We’re in the midst of the social media misinformation age, and these rumors and conspiracy theories have real consequences, including threats of violence that have occurred to our colleagues in China,” Daszak, a disease ecologist, told ScienceInsider. “We have a choice whether to stand up and support colleagues who are being attacked and threatened daily by conspiracy theorists or to just turn a blind eye. I’m really proud that people from nine countries are able to rapidly come to their defense and show solidarity with people who are, after all, dealing with horrific conditions in an outbreak.”

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...-conspiracy-theories-about-origin-coronavirus

Also read:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200317175442.htm

 

[Hassan Al-Somal]

In Somalia, an unknown disease was killing the camels last year as Somali nomads confirmed. The camels would cough and then blood was coming out of their mouths and bottoms. Many camels died. Then a Muslim scholar suggested that we need to treat them with water filled with garlic (thoom). It worked and saved many camels.

The nomads stated when they slaughtered the camels, they saw huge swelling around the lungs of the camels. And they also stated based on the symptoms that the affected camels showed, and the ones that the people who are affected by the Corona virus show, it seems they match. And the conclusion that can be made from this is, this disease could be affect animals as well, if in fact the disease that were killing the camels and the current Corona virus is the same disease.