Coronavirus Open Thread 2022

Mr Bourla has received four doses of the vaccine his company developed alongside its German partner BioNTech - but said he missed out on getting the new bivalent booster due to contracting the disease in recent months.

ā€œIā€™ve not had the new bivalent booster yet, as I was following CDC guidelines to wait three months since my previous COVID case which was back in mid-August,ā€ Mr Bourla added.

He probably sat through the Pfizer/BioNTech/government meetings and saw the slides describing antibody titers for n=8 mice as well. Maybe he figured it needs a bit more testing on other humans firstā€¦ :upside_down_face:

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This many is all you need: :mouse: :mouse: :mouse: :mouse: :mouse: :mouse: :mouse: :mouse:

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But natural immunity is not the answer either. Or perhaps his natural immunity has been screwed up by the vaccine. The irony!!!

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At a minimum it is a widely held belief that the virus escaped from a Wuhan research facility.

Itā€™s not a secret the US was funding such research.

Is it so outrageous to suggest ā€œAmericans created the covid virusā€

I am a molecular biologist, brother. If I will start to discuss the detailsā€¦

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Were there Americans in the lab?

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Mostly are PRC Chinese :))) But never underestimate Scienceā€¦ And never let propagandists use itā€¦

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Super, @urodacus my apologies @yanganlun your claim to be a molecular biologist and you are trying to assert what?

Americans were funding research into coronaviruses . So you had a barber say it was created by Americans, you then call that a conspiracy theory, but thats kind of like what they were doing. Canā€™t we say so.

US was funding this research to destroy the world??? Or what? Maybe for scientific reason?

I didnā€™t say that. The claim Americans at least had a hand in designing Covid19, is not an outrageous claim.

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SARS-COV-2 is a natural virus derived from animals (bats) that started in Wuhan, China. I am not going into argument discussing technical stuffā€¦

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Up to you, but you wonā€™t convince people like that. Thereā€™s plenty of good reasons to doubt what you say so blithely there. Not in this thread if you want but there are others. One:

Yep, trueā€¦ It worth another threadā€¦ I can go technical, it will be difficult to understand for people without proper education, but they still donā€™t believe the experts and shout their conspiracy theoriesā€¦ Somehow it is easy to convince people on some conspiracyā€¦

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On the other hand this kind of claim about expert credentials is totally meaningless in this context (no demonstration and no supporting information offered). Weā€™ve heard experts say the opposite from what youā€™re saying as well. And (among other things) the lab is right there, so itā€™s never been surprising that people are looking at it.

Do they understand at least what the letters A G T C mean? What is the triplet code? Transcription/translation? Do they know how to manipulate DNA? Restriction enzymes, ligases, etc. Do they know how genome is sequenced? No, they donā€™t know, but happy to grab any conspiracy theory about whatever smarter guys just making virusesā€¦

I have the right background to understand this and there is no reason I can see that it DIDNā€™T come from an accidental release from the virus research lab.

Unfortunately the Chinese govt has blocked access to the virus labs files and staff , deleted databases, and also does not allow international researchers to access the caves in Yunnan where they were catching bats and bringing them back to Wuhan.

So we cannot really check that theory properly, can we?

NO ACCESS PERMITTED

Like the WHO team, I have not gone through Shiā€™s freezers or lab books, and therefore I cannot prove or disprove whether activities associated with her research caused the pandemic

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Maybe, maybe not, but right now you just sound like a guy going on about conspiracy theories. A lot of people here have some scientific knowledge, and you can surely put things in general terms for our benefit if you want. Anyway, your call!

As far as I know the verdict is not yet in on this, and as BrianJ notes there are reasons it may never fully be.

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Ok, there is a bunch of coronaviruses existing in nature, including some well-known common cold viruses like HKU1 and OC43. We clearly know their structure and genes. In 2004 emerged SARS which affected 10,000 people in East Asia, one of them. There is a common knowledge that viruses fastly mutate. One virus, Sars-cov-2 somehow jumped into humans after such mutations. Bats are usually the reservoirs of such viruses, and it is well-known scientific fact. Such viruses emerged and reemerged in human history: Spanish flu after WW1.There epidemics like in 1891. People just donā€™t know about them. Ok, I make two points:

  1. You just cannot make a virus out of scratch