[ExI] it's not? indeed?

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> 
...
>
>>... Ja.  For a long time I have suspected the wet market was the conduit, 
> the second step.  It is completely compatible with the serial passage 
> experiment notion, where the Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers 
> were looking to breed a less lethal corona virus by serial passage,

>...That makes no sense whatsoever.  What possible motivation would they have to breed a less lethal virus?  If they were engaged in biowar work, a more lethal virus would make sense.  Now late in the pandemic, when vaccines had failed to stop the virus, breeding a less lethal version might make sense, but to the best of my knowledge, the less lethal versions emerged by straightforward evolution...

Keith, my own experience with covid may help explain my position.

In December 2019, I had face to face contact with a nurse who had just returned from China where she was visiting family.  She was the only person outside the family with whom I had face to face contact in that week or the week previous (I am retired and don't go to restaurants often.)  I caught viral pneumonia a couple days after that contact, and saw my doctor a coupla days after that.  Two days later, I landed in the hospital in terrible shape.  They diagnosed viral pneumonia, but with a genetic signature unlike anything previous in their RNA library.

There were no covid tests at the time, nor any knowledge of any virus from China.

However... that disease whooped my ass bigtime.  After my hospital stay, it took me seven weeks until I was even halfway normal again.  I have never been so sick as I was with that, ever.

In summer of 2022, I caught covid, tested positive etc, but that time was far different.  It was a minor illness, mild even by the standard of the usual seasonal flu.  Clearly it was covid, but then, natural selection had (murderously) bred a far more benign version of covid, by slaying the hosts of the more lethal variants.

My notion is that if a more benign variant could evolve naturally, one that produces apparent immunity to earlier more-lethal variants, then the less lethal virus is our friend.  It is the bad guy who protects us against the worse bad guy.  So... breed a strain of covid that doesn't do much, then intentionally release it if a more lethal strain breaks out.

If evolution can create a less lethal covid (as it apparently did) then a less lethal covid can be bred in a lab.  Ja?

That makes sense to me, but the process of breeding that less lethal virus is itself dangerous as all hell, because the process itself might accidentally breed a more lethal variant which might escape and create all manner of havoc, death and chaos.  

Even that is a kind of understatement.  The process of breeding a less lethal variant IS LIKELY to create a more lethal variant in the process, which is identified and destroyed (ideally.)  But that accidentally-created more lethal variant might get loose, which is what I think happened.  It wasn't bio-war, it wasn't intentional.  It was dangerous research which accidentally created a planet-killer, which escaped.

Consequently, such experimentation is illegal in the USA.  But not so much in China.

If so, then Dr. Fauci could argue (if he knew what went on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology) that such experimentation was not gain of function research, it was the opposite: loss of function research.  They were looking for a less-lethal covid which could be released in an emergency, such as the outbreak of a more lethal variant of that virus.  Had we had modern covid ready to go in November 2019, perhaps they could have saved millions of lives.

In any case, China was never held accountable, nor was anyone else.  This means that they might still be fooling with lethal viruses.  Oy vey.

spike



















> which meant discarding and destroying the dead bats after each generation in the series.  It is far too easy to imagine a lab worker bagging the dead bats and selling them at the nearby wet market, which is an ideal place to grow up if one is a human-hosted virus: lots of people in close proximity, lots of meat everywhere, etc.

If a lab was working on coronaviruses, they are going to be doing it in culture, not bats. Also, China has considerable experience with the previous coronavirus.  After that epidemic came to a halt, there was one more infection from a lab sample.  They are not going to be hauling infected bats to a market.

> That notion partially exonerates Dr. Fauci (kinda (depending on how you look at it.))  He testified (before severe amnesia set in) that they were not doing gain-of-function research.  In later a more recent congressional hearing, he testified that he did not personally review the details of the experiments he funded.  This almost contradicts the previous testimony that they positively were not doing gain of function research.  He doesn't recall any of it now of course.  They never do, when it starts looking like they are caught.

Gain of function is biowar.  Does it make any sense that the US would be funding biowar in China?

> If the researchers were doing serial passage experiments without proper documentation at the lab, that would also justify the initial testimony: they were doing it, Fauci didn't know.  OK, maybe.
>
> In any case, initial denial allowed the Chinese to destroy evidence and send researchers looking for proximal origins, which turned into a long, expensive and fruitless search.  Meanwhile, the Chinese were squelching the testimony of those who damn well did know what went on in the Wuhan laboratory.  Knowing that information right up front might have helped slow the spread of the virus.

Not a chance.  Once the virus started spreading, it was out of control. China kept it at low levels by draconian measures for a long time, but in the rest of the world, it went wild.  Eventually, there were so many imports that a more infectious version overwhelmed the attempts to keep it down.

> A worrisome consequence of the way this all unfolded is that the Chinese might still be fooling with planet-killer viruses, perhaps even justifying themselves by pointing out that this kind of research is illegal everywhere else.  Eh... ja.  It is illegal everywhere else.  For a reason.

That's just nuts.  On this topic the Chinese are rational, and it is not rational to kill off your own population.  There is no way a planet killer virus could be kept out of China.
>
> >...But it does not matter.
>
> >...Keith
>
> Keith, with that I respectfully disagree sir.  It matters. It matters a lot.

Why?  It only matters if you assume the Chinese are utterly irrational.  Do you have any problem with the first SARs being a spillover without human intervention of any kind?  If you do, why a problem with Covid-19 being the same?  How about MERS?  We know the path from bats to camels to humans for that one and there is no claim for human intervention.

Reality is bad enough without crazy contortions.

Keith

> spike
>