Yeah I'm 50/50 on the natural transmission. It's really not a stretch for it to be either one. Viruses have jumped species naturally since the beginning of time. We also know this lab was doing research on these exact type of viruses. I could believe either one with the proper evidence.
There was a MD, PhD professor NYU Langone I believe in the Dept of Pathology that said it’s pretty much 100% likely it came out of the lab. Reason being is even though Coronaviruses jump species, the odds of SARS-2 jumping so quickly to humans after SARS-1 is zero. Basically, to occur naturally, she said it takes hundreds of years for that to happen. I wish I can remember her name, just searched the entire faculty directory in pathology and nothing rings a bell...but wanted to share.
With that said, it seems pretty obvious where it came from. She also said it likely wasn’t “engineered”, even if the leak was purposeful it doesn’t point to an altered virus, and she believed that a purposeful leaking at the epicenter isn’t logically sound, so she’s on the accidental leak train which is what I agree with.
A few other tidbits she added going off memory here,
She works in vaccine research, specifically of SARS-CoV-1 and now SARS-CoV-2. She said the only hard thing about making a vaccine is supply chain issues.
She said the way the vaccine will be made for RNA viruses is they’ll inject mRNA into the body which then produces proteins and antibodies to fight CoV-2.
She said people are overstating the difficulty of producing such a vaccine just because “it hasn’t been done before” doesn’t mean it’s “hard to do”.
She said the global demand for this type of vaccine never existed, so that’s why. Not because it’s rocket science.
She also said there isn’t another “strain” of the viruses, and strains take years to develop after flowing through the population after substantial antigenic drift and mutations. That because this was just introduced into the human population, it simply hasn’t had enough time to produce another strain like influenza has, and she said it will be “Easy” when making the vaccine to find the virus genomes you’ll want to protect against. Simply because it’s one strain. She used another word other than strain, says she hates the word strain because it provides a false narrative of concern.
I came out of that interview very confident in our ability to produce a vaccine that works decently, the issue seems more to be supply chain and timing. Also getting people to take a vaccine that was hurried...already hear a lot of people saying they won’t take it unless forced.
Cc: [mention]Rain Cold [/mention]
www.nytimes.com
www.yahoo.com
www.skynews.com.au
amsterdamnews.com
