Has this been posted already?
Belleville mayor has coronavirus antibodies, believes he had COVID-19 months ago - May 1, 2020
I did post about this in the CDF, but not in the SDF. Everything posted here in the SDF quickly disappears in the torrent of replies making the post moot.
I will post this one however, because it is a very important read, and it explains clearly why this isn't a bioweapon nor bioengineered from a lab.
To make it simple enough, there is no freaking way, someone is that smart on Planet Earth to have figured out to do this. Bioengineering would have required pieces of genetic code that would have existed before, not something completely new from the ground up.
Why do scientists think it wasn’t genetically engineered?
To genetically engineer a new virus, scientists can combine pieces of viruses they’ve seen before. In the case of a genetically engineered coronavirus that was designed to infect humans, the bulk of its genetic material — its “backbone” — would come from SARS or a close relative, while the tools it used to infect cells would be grafted on. But the backbone doesn’t look like any disease-causing virus, and other key parts of the virus are new to science.
In SARS-CoV-2’s case, scientists thought they knew how to optimize SARS to infect human hosts. Coronaviruses enter host cells using protein “spikes” that cover their outer surface. At the tip of each spike is a cluster of amino acids that can bind to a certain receptor on a host cell, like a pick designed to open a particular cellular lock. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the spike binds to human ACE2 receptors, which coat lung cells.
The original SARS coronavirus targeted the same receptors, and after the 2002 SARS epidemic, experiments tinkered with its spike to determine the structure of an “optimized” version of the SARS lock pick. Many factors influence the success of a virus,
, so “if you were going to make a new virus, and make it even more infectious than SARS,” said Goldstein, you would give it that optimized tip.
But, Garry said, the tip of the SARS-CoV-2 spike is unlike anything scientists have seen before, sharing only a single key amino acid with SARS. Modeling suggests that
, but the new configuration is about as effective as the optimized SARS.
How SARS-CoV-2 acquired this unusual tip is still a mystery. But blaming it on genetic engineering overstates the abilities of scientists, Garry said. Guessing that these particular amino acids can bind to ACE2 so effectively is nearly impossible— there are 20 common types of amino acids, and tens of millions of ways to arrange them into a binding tip. It would be like if you looked out over the proverbial infinite monkeys with their infinite typewriters, guessed that a specific macaque would type out
King Lear, and then picked the right animal.
“Nobody has that kind of insight into how the viruses evolve or cause disease,” said Garry. “You could randomly try to make changes, but we’re talking about thousands of years of trying pathogens out. I’ve been really lucky to know a lot of talented virologists, and they’re not clever enough to come up with a virus that’s quite this good at spreading.”
What if it was in a petri dish and got out?
a researcher at the WIV studying a precursor to SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally infected.
But the researchers I spoke to threw cold water on that. “I think it’s
to ask these questions and examine all sources of the outbreak,” said Gregory Koblentz, a professor at George Mason University who studies biosecurity. “But based on what we know of the biology of the virus, a natural source of the outbreak is the most likely explanation.”
The virus’s spike has a hinge-like structure, allowing the spike to change shape as the virus enters the host cell. Like the spike tip, the hinge on SARS-CoV-2 is markedly different from anything seen in its close relatives.
that the hinge loses its unique characteristics when cultured in a lab, said Garry. The spike also appears to be able to shield itself from antibodies—another hint that it evolved in the presence of host immune systems.
Most importantly, there’s no smoking gun connecting the lab to an ancestor of the virus. There’s “no bat virus that’s close enough to be the progenitor,” said Garry.
to SARS-CoV-2 is a cousin that
in bats.
And while critics
WIV might have concealed the ancestral virus, 27 scientists who have collaborated with the WIV, including former U.S. officials,
.
Koblentz agrees there’s not much evidence to suggest a cover-up. “If the Chinese government suspected that the outbreak was the result of a biosafety breach in Wuhan, I would have expected them to come down very hard on that lab, not letting them talk to foreigners,” he said. But in March, a lead researcher at the WIV
about her search for the ancestral strain.
The WIV has
of bat coronavirus in the months since the epidemic started, giving other scientists insight into the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19. Several of the early virus genome sequences in an
were submitted by the WIV, which allowed other countries to begin developing diagnostic tools. That willingness to release data, Koblentz said, could be evidence that weights “the scale towards [the WIV] being transparent and cooperative.”
