Chinese virus from a Wuhan laboratory?

[The ScorpioN]

He's like James Watson, did brilliant work a while back, got a nobel prize, then just spouted weird shit for the final decade or two. In Luc's case he just wants to stick it to Macron and also believes in homeopathy.

What "weird shit" did Watson spout?

 

[ocean size]

What "weird shit" did Watson spout?

Accurate paraphrases: If you've had black employees, you will know they are not equal. Women are not as effective as* scientists but are more fun for the men to have around. Thinner people are unhappy and thus work harder, so you feel bad interviewing fat people because you won't hire them.

Not too weird for a very old British man, but you wouldn't just take him at his word on a claim that is quasi-scientific.

 

[Jorge Luis Borges]

I call BS. when's the last time china invented anything?

If it we trace it to a lab in china it just means they stole it from a lab in the US.

Like the Harvard professor recently arrested smuggling biological samples to China.

 

[The Audience]

Shi Zhengli , affectionately referred to as China's batwoman, is famous for studying coronaviruses in bats, first wondered if the virus had escaped from her lab. Because she found a remarkable similarity between this virus and coronavirus in Yunnan horseshoe bats. She was skeptical of the Wuhan seafood market theory because these horseshoe bats are not found in that area. She looked at her notes to see if the SARS-Cov-2 virus matched the genome of the viruses she studied and was relieved to find it didn't . But there is another virology lab in Wuhan that was also studying bats and viruses.

Shi Zheng Li, head researcher at Wuhan Institue of Virology has given a rare interview to Science magazine answering a number of questions put to her about the virus origin, the WIV, and the work carried out there. Full interview

Some notable quotes:

• "We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province."

Q6. Do you know whether anyone tested animals from the market? If not, why not?

• A: "Under the deployment of Hubei Provincial Government, our team, alongside researchers from Huazhong Agricultural University, collected environmental samples and frozen animal samples in Huanan seafood market. We detected SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acids only in the environmental samples such as roller shutter door handles, the ground and sewage, but not in the animals.

Q16 The Wuhan Institute of Virology has received worldwide attention as the possible source of SARS-CoV-2. President Donald Trump has said he has “high confidence” the virus came from the lab. What kind of an impact has this had on your lab? And on you personally?

• A: "Scientists from around the world have overwhelmingly concluded that SARS-CoV-2 originated naturally rather than from any institution. The US President Trump’s claim that SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from our institute totally contradicts the facts. It jeopardizes and affects our academic work and personal life. He owes us an apology."

Q17. Many scientists who have analyzed the sequence of SARS-CoV-2 have concluded that it does not have the signatures of a lab-engineered virus. But even some of these researchers say it remains possible that SARS-CoV-2 existed in your lab and accidentally infected a lab worker. They note that several labs had accidental infections with the virus that causes SARS. So how can you rule out this possibility?

• A: We have isolated three closely-related bat coronaviruses over the last 15 years (here an isolated virus is a live virus which can grow in cultured cells in the laboratory) and all of them are SARS-related coronaviruses. These bat viruses share 79.8% sequence identity and are distantly related to SARS-CoV-2. On February 3, we published a paper in Nature and reported that SARS-CoV-2 is 96.2% identical at the whole-genome level to a bat coronavirus named RaTG13 (I would like to emphasize that we have only the genome sequence and didn’t isolate this virus).

Q: Did you do or collaborate on any gain-of-function experiments with coronaviruses that were not published, and, if so what are the details?

• A: No

Science magazine article with commentary:
Wuhan coronavirus hunter Shi Zhengli speaks out

 

[JoshTehV]

But I thought Bill Gates created this in his kitchen while he was installing 5G networks.

damn bro you got banned