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Thread: Wuhan Virus

  1. #601

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    I will be the one who judges what I am reading is misinformation, or not. Not big Daddy tech company.

    It's called critical thinking and lots of human beings practise it. Stop outsourcing your thinking to authorities and gatekeepers of information. I think humanity tried that once, didn't work out during the middle ages and the Catholic priesthoods and it's not going to work today.

    Autistic fact checkers can go to hell. I don't need fact checking baby sitters. Doing so undermines free speech which you so vehemently have professed to value.

    You want curated information, wind back the clock to preinternet era. Then you can get your facts from newspapers, published peer reviewed articles, radio and television reporting.

    Peer reviews are a pathetic joke nowadays.

    The editor of the distinguished Lancet journal has recently gone on record to say medical peer reviews are not athoritatative enough these days. Integrity is in ever degreasing short supply.

    I frequently work with forestry Science punks. A small handful are brilliant, one in particular, the rest are geeky dogmatists with minimal creative thought ability.

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    Quote Originally Posted by timber View Post
    I will be the one who judges what I am reading is misinformation, or not. Not big Daddy tech company.

    It's called critical thinking and lots of human beings practise it. Stop outsourcing your thinking to authorities and gatekeepers of information. I think humanity tried that once, didn't work out during the middle ages and the Catholic priesthoods and it's not going to work today.
    No I agree with you on this. I find it concerning. I can understand why they do it because from their pov misinfo circulating on their platforms that leads to people doing destructive things due to being misinformed, is something they will feel responsible for. But the problem is that this means they're controlling the flow of information. I can imagine lots of dystopian scenarios where basically they control our entire realities especially as increasingly we live virtually.

    I wouldn't call myself vehement about free speech/expression. If I were vehement then I might not be so afraid.

    I do care about fact checking, but fact checking can happen without undermining the flow of information. They don't have to be mutually exclusive.

    The main point of disagreement is that there is a wizard behind the curtain. You seem to think there is. I am saying this could all play out exactly the same way with no wizard (so then why is there a wizard). The only one I see with a motive is China, but I actually would see it as more likely they released a virus by accident than on purpose. This is a less insidious motive as it's scrambling to cover up a mistake (less insidious than, say, engineering it on purpose).
    Last edited by marooned; 07-24-2020 at 04:43 AM.

  3. #603

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    It started spreading way back in last August.Satelite photos of a over full parking lots in Wuhan hospitals, and traffic control coordinating off the parameter around the different Wuhan Virology centers.The Chinese state media questioning if the US military brought it during the military games in September. Viral particles found across the world from before Dec. Circumstantial coincidences such as the two Doctors arrested and walked out in handcuffs last August, for espionage and illegally smuggling viruses they stole from Winnipeg S4 laboratory. The Chinese couple invented the ebola vaccine and awarded the order of Canada, what force could have possessed them to throw away their careers? CCCP pressure? The RCMP have never released a statement and MSM has said it's a done deal the public should not question. Lol, again, this is all real you can't make this shit up.

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    Quote Originally Posted by timber View Post
    It started spreading way back in last August.Satelite photos of a over full parking lots in Wuhan hospitals, and traffic control coordinating off the parameter around the different Wuhan Virology centers.
    I'd add the word possibly to this. And yes at the time there were increased searches on the internet in the area for cough and diarrhea. I would probably prefer more studies on this, but it looks quite suspicious I would agree.

    The Chinese state media questioning if the US military brought it during the military games in September.
    Was that after the US started suggesting they leaked it from their lab? China frequently slanders those who criticize or make damning claims about them. IIRC US went sour on China first. Trump stopped praising Xi Jinping and the US started using China as a scapegoat for its own bad handling of the virus. The relationship has rapidly deteriorated since.

    Viral particles found across the world from before Dec.
    Not sure what this means, but given US intel we know the outbreak was happening at least as early as November in Wuhan. Without any travel restrictions it could go anywhere. And since it seems it might have started even earlier, then there was plenty of time for it to travel.

    There was also this from Oxford, suggesting it didn't originate in Wuhan and had been circulating much longer before mutating into a more contagious variety. This predicts origin as far back as Sept. which is of course closer to August. (there's not that many samples being used though for this... small numbers like 23 and 9)

    Circumstantial coincidences such as the two Doctors arrested and walked out in handcuffs last August, for espionage and illegally smuggling viruses they stole from Winnipeg S4 laboratory. The Chinese couple invented the ebola vaccine and awarded the order of Canada, what force could have possessed them to throw away their careers? CCCP pressure? The RCMP have never released a statement and MSM has said it's a done deal the public should not question. Lol, again, this is all real you can't make this shit up.
    https://www.factcheck.org/2020/01/co...y-from-canada/ ?

    I am not sure what origin you are arguing for at this point.

    Sometimes with coronavirus theories I feel like I'm watching this again:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRXvOgn8cOw
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7ybAt3vJNI
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDVa40ZkzPo

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLxJRPOx4V4
    Last edited by marooned; 07-24-2020 at 06:13 AM.

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    I've never even watched the Plandemic. I don't need to expose my mind to useless garbage.

    The only truth that is real was Zhengli Shi's gain of function GMO. The US State Department had warned with cables three years ago that a virus occupational accident was just waiting to happen out of the Wuhan lab, further, that gain of function research was to dangerous to do and funding pulled through NIH. Then an actual accident happens from this city and the best people can come up with is grand conspiracy theory. Its an eye opener to me just how stupid the average person must actually be. The answer is staring people right in the face and they choose the schizoid fantasy.

    Several Governments and private corporations were funding Shi's work. Lots of people are implicated.

    God I seriously hate society and this only furthers serve to validate my choice to pull away from it completely. You all deserve each other.

  6. #606
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    I don't understand. I can believe they accidentally screwed up (although I'm skeptical of info sources that aren't coming from the horse's mouth and are instead sitting on someone's blog saying there were horses and this is what came out of their mouths). I don't have faith in communist regimes that are kind of struggling to grow. The first blog post you linked suggested it was accidentally leaked (akin to Chernobyl - a situation in which a Communist regime deliberately built flawed reactors to save money and then of course the flaw ended up leading to disaster). I can totally believe they could accidentally cause this somehow (but not as a knee jerk reaction because it's too easy given that from an outside viewpoint there is every reason to jump to ultimate suspicion of China - it reflects a bias and an easy conclusion). I am less likely to think they did it on purpose because I don't believe it's helped them. It hit them too, now everyone is against them, countries are pulling businesses out which will affect their economy and future prospects... Really it seems like all bad news for China that may actually serve to cut off their tentacles that have been subtly reaching into all the countries they have relationships with, so I question a deliberate motive. When investigating a crime, you need to find motive.

    I don't know what you're arguing the answer is... Was it that China deliberately did this and used their associates in Canada to design this virus over there and then ship it overseas, was it that China deliberately generated it in house, was it that every nation got together and said they will arrange a pandemic by infecting a region of China (I can't see China being in on that plan because it sucks for them)? Is it because the EU and US and Canada are working on phase 2 of human control in which they realize if all the humans are trapped in their own hovels all the time, we can massively reduce our carbon footprint (oh they don't care about that), we can start getting used to being more docile creatures who wait for our computer screens to say jump, like I don't know what the motive of the wizards is. I don't know how the wizards have so thoroughly infiltrated every research team on Earth to make sure they're all saying "it didn't start in a lab, it's natural!" I don't know why I should believe that and that it's more legit than say the conspiracy arguments against climate change based on that tiny handful of oil and gas funded scientists who disagree with the scientific consensus on climate change.

    I also feel like you're trying to push me into role of thinking all is great in society simply because I cannot see the deliberate chain of events in a way in which there is a motive that matches the evidence, and because I want proof. Proof is not conjecture. It must be rigorously established. It must be the elimination of all alternatives.

    I guess if I were to choose a theory it would be that the US wanted to break China's influence in much of the democratic world, deliberately engineered the pandemic in their country so they could later blame them for it, leading to massive cutting of ties between China and democratic nations (cut the tentacles), and building of tensions towards war because once China can't gain economically they will turn to military gain (which is what they are doing now). The war will boost the US economy in the end (it seems wars always do that), and the US can reestablish its fading dominance in the image of Trump we trust. There. I don't really believe that though.

    Even it doesn't work because China is trapping other countries in debt and bonding those countries to them--democracies are falling to them. Cut off the tentacles and they shoot out new ones. They seem to be doing this more and more since they are losing economic power.

    I can however believe that Trump admin seized upon a low risk opportunity--given how public opinion in the US is not highly favorable towards China and there probably is a low level of fear (or high level of suppressed background fear) in the consciousness of people that China will start controlling more and more of our industry and government and start censoring us the way they censor their own (as has already begun). The fact that it started in China and China lied already has much of the world suspicious. It's a great way for the US to play hero against a widely agreed upon villain.

    I guess my problem with conspiracy theories is they begin with fear. So if I start concocting one it centers on my fears. If it centers on my fears I am going to question it hard because I know I live in my own version of reality, that the world as I understand it isn't the world but the world in my mind that I created. When I'm paranoid it generally means I need to go back to the doctor. I've come up with some great paranoia about how others have it in for me when I'm not medicated. I need a ground. A tether. Something outside of me, otherwise I'm floating in something that has nothing to do with what's real. This leads me to have high proof standards. The posted examples of 7's theories seem like E6 run amok, albeit cp6 whereas my 6 is the phobic one.
    Last edited by marooned; 07-24-2020 at 06:13 PM.

  7. #607
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    People are starting to call it the Trump Virus.

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    Quote Originally Posted by xerxe View Post
    People are starting to call it the Trump Virus.
    That's an insult to the virus.

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    Slow down girl, I will come back to this when I'm back in town on my laptop. Right now I'm 65 km up a MTN range and am so lazy for typing big thoughts off my phone.

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    Can we all stop the fucking charade now "droplets transfer covid, it's not airborne, let's stay six feet away in pretend boundaries as virus stops at 6 feet".

    Now a team of virologists and aerosol scientists has produced exactly that: confirmation of infectious virus in the air.

    “This is what people have been clamoring for,” said Linsey Marr, an expert in airborne spread of viruses who was not involved in the work. “It’s unambiguous evidence that there is infectious virus in aerosols.”

    A research team at the University of Florida succeeded in isolating live virus from aerosols collected at a distance of seven to 16 feet from patients hospitalized with Covid-19 — farther than the six feet recommended in social distancing guidelines."

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    I thought the distinction was always a bit arbitrary and took it to mean that the closer one is to an infected person the more likely they are to be exposed (which is just I mean true in general), so stay as far away as possible especially out of the close proximity range (arbitrarily defined by 6 ft radius). The intricacies about if it's "droplets" or not didn't matter to me since it's all small "stuff" in the air. It's details to quibble over from my pov. But it ends up becoming a standard, for instance in planning out space in areas. But 6 ft away never meant one isn't going to be exposed. At that distance they might be exposed to less of it though, and I would think a lower viral load to begin with would make it easier for the immune system to get rid of it.

    According to this, 6 ft is the average distance for droplet travel from sneezes or coughs, so that's why that number. And it's true you'll get exposed to a lot more of it if an infected person coughs right in your face regardless of how airborne it is.

    It's like isn't it all kind of droplets? https://first10em.com/aerosols-dropl...rborne-spread/ It's just when they're really small droplets then they are aerosols? I'd rather just think of it as that around any infected person, is a "cloud of infection" and it can be carried farther from them in the air, and it moves as they move though they leave the trail behind them, and really it's everywhere, so good luck. If you only breathe in a little of it, maybe it will never get anywhere (it could get trapped in the nasal passage for instance), or it could be so tiny the immune system just kills it fast if it actually gains entry. But the more you breathe in, the more it has a good shot of gaining the upper hand of course.

    I imagine if barely any of the population has it the infected clouds will be few and far between throughout the overall geographic area, but in an outbreak area like NYC where it was estimated 1/4 of the population caught it, there would be massive "infection clouds" one could encounter, before they all started trying to stay inside. Then the chances of getting it are much higher, the initial viral load will be higher, the sickness will be more difficult to fight off, the death rate will go up, etc.

    And in any building it can circulate around the air system, as the media was obsessed with for a while: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/h...staurants.html
    Last edited by marooned; 08-12-2020 at 09:57 PM.

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    there is always hope.

    Same with the HIV vaccine.

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    Quote Originally Posted by timber View Post
    there is always hope.

    Same with the HIV vaccine.
    basically the points I feel it summarizes well are, 1) this is not like HIV-- the human immune system defeats the virus most of the time. Generally afaik, that makes it easy to make a vaccine. HIV by contrast, if untreated will kill almost all infected. The immune system can't defeat it in most cases. It's a terrible comparison to compare to HIV.

    Next point is that some vaccines are in the final trial period, and distribution is already being set up.

    This is not something that cannot be cured. But I'll wait for the masterminds to push the mutate button right as vaccines are being distributed like when playing one of those online infect the world virus games...

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    Quote Originally Posted by inumbra View Post
    basically the points I feel it summarizes well are, 1) this is not like HIV-- the human immune system defeats the virus most of the time. Generally afaik, that makes it easy to make a vaccine. HIV by contrast, if untreated will kill almost all infected. The immune system can't defeat it in most cases. It's a terrible comparison to compare to HIV.

    Next point is that some vaccines are in the final trial period, and distribution is already being set up.

    This is not something that cannot be cured. But I'll wait for the masterminds to push the mutate button right as vaccines are being distributed like when playing one of those online infect the world virus games...
    Awesome. Science creates the problem and then science solves said problem. Now all of humanity can rejoice and take the vaccine for a bug that only just arrived 5 months ago. Thank-god. Scientists build the virus, and other scientists build the vaccine everyone on Earth gets sticked with. Its a very good system.

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    I live in a University town where the only business is the University. The University has cancelled football games this fall, which means that I will lose the football parking income. But half the city is students who are renting apartments.

    I have a friend who owns a lot of those apartments, and I asked him how his income was affected, and whether a lot of students stopped paying on their leases because physical classes are 90% closed.

    He said that none of his renters have cancelled, and when he talked to another big landlord, none of his leases were cancelled, either.

    I said, "What's going on? The students can't attend classes so there is no reason to live here."

    He said, "Adam, the people who send their kids to this university ($50k/yr) are so rich that they don't even see the expense of a year's rent for their kids, and they are fully expecting a vaccine."

    I said, "They are that rich? Where the hell did I go wrong in this life?"

  18. #618
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    Quote Originally Posted by Adam Strange View Post
    I live in a University town where the only business is the University. The University has cancelled football games this fall, which means that I will lose the football parking income. But half the city is students who are renting apartments.

    I have a friend who owns a lot of those apartments, and I asked him how his income was affected, and whether a lot of students stopped paying on their leases because physical classes are 90% closed.

    He said that none of his renters have cancelled, and when he talked to another big landlord, none of his leases were cancelled, either.

    I said, "What's going on? The students can't attend classes so there is no reason to live here."

    He said, "Adam, the people who send their kids to this university ($50k/yr) are so rich that they don't even see the expense of a year's rent for their kids, and they are fully expecting a vaccine."

    I said, "They are that rich? Where the hell did I go wrong in this life?"
    You didn't make a mistake or go wrong. You simply assumed that "logic" is a thing that works in a world intent on ensuring it does not because reasons. In other words, you were/are naive.

    I mean, it was already obvious to my own limited mind ten years ago. College costs a ton of money. It had best be worth it right? Me? I majored in Philosophy. Yeah, that sounds dumb, but it really isn't. See, studies have been done and the stats have been gathered. Turns out those useless philosophy majors are second only to Engineering bros on the IQ scale. A man/woman who can wrap their heads around the concepts and vagrancies of metaphysics and epistemology are obviously able to "get" a corporate memo.

    To spell it out in full, you're not the type to actually and knowingly sell your soul to Satan. You say you went wrong somewhere, I'd say you were blessed with a grace you may well have rejected if you knew/saw it as such...

  19. #619

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    The origins of the virus are of supreme importance. This was NOT a natural disaster.

    https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/02...n-of-covid-19/

    Part 1:

    There are new findings in the story of the true origin of COVID-19. It begins with a mystery disease that struck six Chinese miners in 2012.
    Jonathan Latham, Ph.D., and Allison Wilson, Ph.D., a virologist and a geneticist, respectively, have a plausible story to tell about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 — the cause of COVID-19. It begins with a mystery disease that struck six Chinese miners in Yunnan province in 2012. These miners became ill while shoveling bat feces (guano) produced by Rhinolophus sinicus, a species of horseshoe bat, which was abundant in the mine.

    The illness of the miners was later described in detail throughout a master’s thesis entitled “An Analysis of Six Severe Pneumonia Cases Related to Unknown Viruses,” written in 2013 by Li Xu. The patients were remotely observed by Zhong Nan Shan, noting the following symptoms: dry cough, shortness of breath, fever, limb soreness (myalgia), headaches, and low blood oxygen.

    Latham and Wilson arranged the translation of the neglected Chinese master’s thesis that documented the symptoms and hospital treatment of these miners. Most importantly, the miners were diagnosed as having coronavirus infections, and second, their symptoms are now recognizable as those of classic COVID-19. This and other information in the thesis caused Wilson and Latham to rethink everything they thought they knew about the origins of the pandemic.

    Latham and Wilson eventually published their theory on Independent Science News, a publication edited by Latham. This report details Latham and Wilson’s search for the origins of the pandemic causing virus, focusing on the nearest genetic relative of SARS-CoV-2, a bat coronavirus called RaTG13. This virus was obtained during virus collecting trips during 2012 and 2013 to the same mine where, shortly before, six miners had developed an unknown illness.

    In “A Proposed Origin for SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 Pandemic,” the authors set out what they call the Mojiang Miners Passaging hypothesis. The theory proposes (1) that the miners acquired a coronavirus from the bats in the mine and (2) that this bat virus evolved extensively inside their bodies to become a highly human-adapted virus. This evolution occurred during a hospitalization period that, for some, lasted many months.

    The translated thesis says blood and other samples were extracted from the miners and some of these were sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Latham and Wilson suggest these samples contained highly human-adapted viruses and were used at the WIV for research. During this research, it is believed that the virus escaped, initiating the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic.

    Latham holds a master’s degree in crop genetics and a Ph.D. in virology. He was subsequently a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In addition to having published scientific papers in disciplines as diverse as plant ecology, plant virology, toxicology, genetics, and genetic engineering, Latham is the director of the Poison Papers project, which publicizes documents of the chemical industry and its regulators. Recently, I interviewed Latham to discuss his work on COVID-19

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    Part 2

    art 2:
    Vigo: What makes this virus so hard to track down in origin?
    Latham: There are a lot of complicated parts to this virus — different from all its potential ancestors. For instance, it has various features that are very well adapted to people — the spike protein bonds very well with the human receptor of the cell for instance. The virus as a whole is also well adapted to humans.
    This is unlike the case with MERS and SARS, the previous pandemic coronaviruses. The early generation of people who were infected, the versions of the infections they got changed very quickly. Imagine if a virus comes from a bat or a pangolin, it has to come to adapt to people. The mutations outcompete older versions of the virus. This hasn’t happened here, which implies that this has been in humans for a long time.

    V:
    What would it take to prove your theory?

    L:
    What we really want to see is for the World Health Organization (WHO) to go to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to see what they were working on when they studied bat coronaviruses. This is the number one lab in the world for studying bat coronaviruses. A bat coronavirus that infects people could happen anywhere — it could happen in America, in Italy, in Africa, and it just so happens that this laboratory where they store thousands of samples of coronavirus is also the precise geographic location of the outbreak of the pandemic.

    V:
    Given that there are myriad theories floating about related to COVID-19’s origin that are being dismissed by many as “conspiracy theory,” what makes your theory plausible?

    L:
    Scientists are supposed to proceed based on evidence. The problem with the theories that claim that this virus was built from other viruses is that you have to have available all the different parts, and they aren’t really available. You have the spike protein, which this virus has, which is quite unique (many amino acids different from any relative).
    The same applies to the other parts of this virus. The nearest relative to the SARS-CoV-2 is 4 percent different. So you don’t have a basis for this argument — the pieces don’t even exist. So those people proposing an engineering theory can’t identify the specific pieces from which SARS-CoV-2 is supposedly built.
    Now for certain, the people from WIV have thousands of samples of bat viruses, but you have no evidence for those pieces existing. It is therefore quite difficult to propose a genetically engineered version of this virus.

    V:
    So your theory doesn’t follow this claim then?

    L:
    Our theory is different. We organized the translation of a master’s thesis which documents that in 2012 six miners got ill after shoveling bat feces. They were treated by the doctor who wrote the thesis and it states that they caught a novel coronavirus that gave them the same symptoms as COVID-19. Basically, those miners don’t exist — lost in China or deceased — but the conclusion of the thesis is that the miners had coronavirus. The next important thing to understand is that the nearest known relative of SARS-CoV-2 was found in the same mine where the miners got sick.
    What we do know is that they took samples from these miners and some of those samples were sent to the WIV in Wuhan and this is documented in the thesis. Our proposition is quite simple — that the hospital sent samples to Wuhan from the miners and what evolved inside the miners was SARS-CoV-2.
    What was really interesting to the researchers at the WIV in Wuhan were the samples from the miners. Our theory suggests that they didn’t realize how infectious those samples would be because a radical evolution of the virus took place inside the miners. Normally, it is argued that to get TaTG13 to infect a human and become SARS-CoV-2 would take 20-50 years of evolution. But the miners were sick for many months inside the hospital and the virus was permanently incubating and evolving inside them.
    If you get a normal coronavirus infection, you become sick for two weeks and the portion of time that you have high viral loads would be approximately one week. The miners had enough virus in them to kill them and it was adapting quickly because it was infecting a new species. Most coronaviruses don’t infect the lungs — they usually just infect the throat and never spread to the lungs. Unique to these miners, their lung infections offered a much larger space for evolution inside the miners’ bodies than would any normal coronavirus infection.
    One of the puzzles of its origin is that the virus has a special mutation called a “furin site” (furins are protease enzymes). The furin site (a few amino acids in length) allows the proteins to be cut in half by the protease, which is made by the lung cells. Its evolution inside the lungs of the miners accounts for the origin of this furin site because this furin site greatly enhancing viral spread in the lungs and the body. If you don’t have the furin site, then the disease is effectively limited to the throat only. With the furin site, however, you can have a viral infection move into the lungs and heart, as well as other organs.

    V:
    So, what does this mean practically speaking, for the average reader who might not understand the implications of what you have just described?

    L:
    Our theory is solid enough that we are going to put it up and see what people make of it. The WIV researchers say they have their high-security laboratory to prevent a virus leak, but we are saying that they created one. If you read their papers, you will see they have been collecting virus samples to make vaccines and diagnostic tools and treatments against viruses. They are claiming to be doing all this useful stuff to prevent pandemics and they managed to do the opposite.

    V:
    Why is the scientific community not calling out this glaring oversight, then? Are they concerned about this getting the same reception as the theories that maintained that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a Chinese laboratory?

    L:
    The people who are funding this research are claiming that contact with bats is potentially enough to set off a pandemic. I believe that is true, but they are actively putting themselves in harm’s way such that they went to the mine even after the miners died. You know, Richard Ebright tweeted recently that this method for preventing pandemics is “like looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.”
    Their sampling methods of bats are one thing, but one step worse was the sampling of the miners and bringing the virus back to the WIV. It is standard practice when medical practitioners come into contact with potentially infected patients their doctors use PPE (personal protective equipment) and the virus dies out.
    Thus, when a person falls ill you treat them, and either they die or the body gets rid of the infection. This process doesn’t normally result in a pandemic. But they went around normal procedures to collect samples and brought the virus back into spaces of frequent human contact.

    V:
    So, your theory is that this was an entirely human-created pandemic resulting from the mishandling of samples, down to incursion into places that scientists should have left alone knowing the high risks of transmission to humans. Are there other scientists who have expressed similar concerns for these methods, or is there an international oversight agency that might be able to take action to avoid any such instances of future pandemics created by human error?

    L:
    Some people have expressed concern about these methods. Cambridge Working Group has complained about some of these methods, as has the Council for Responsible Genetics and the Sunshine Project that complained about these methods of collecting dangerous pathogens. Unfortunately, these groups are now defunct.

    V:
    Are there no independent blocs of scientists or research alliances that have pushed back or which have demanded a more open debate about the origins of this virus, despite the Gates Foundation?

    L:
    We want to point out that there is no scientific publication that claims there is a lab origin worth looking into. There are thousands of publications saying the virus has a zoonotic origin even though there is hardly any evidence for this. You can say that and it can be completely wrong, but nobody will call you out. Nobody has dared to write that it might just as well have come from a lab. No virologist has said this in a peer-reviewed paper.
    The scientific community has made it very clear that they don’t want to hear about a lab origin. You can see that in the coverage of the pandemic. There was a letter in Lancet (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/l...418-9/fulltext) calling the lab origin a “conspiracy,” and what you gather from that is that the bigwigs of virology who signed the letter have set up the dynamic that anyone who comes up with reasonable theories is necessarily a conspiracist.
    Every scientist in the world knows what way the wind is blowing. We want to say that this is outrageous

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    ..
    Part 1:
    A scientific article argues the virus could not have been genetically engineered – but not all scientists are convinced. Claire Robinson reports
    Since the COVID-19 pandemic took off, speculation has been rife about its origins. The truth is that nobody knows for certain how the virus first took hold. But despite that uncertainty, suggestions that the virus may have been genetically engineered, or otherwise lab-generated, have been rejected as “conspiracy theories” incompatible with the evidence.
    Yet, the main evidence that is cited as ending all speculation about the role of genetic engineering and as proving the virus could only have been the product of natural evolution turns out to be surprisingly weak. Let’s take a look at it.
    The authors of a recently published paper in the journal Nature Medicine argue that the SARS-CoV-2 virus driving the pandemic arose through natural mutation and selection in animal (notably bats and pangolins) or human hosts, and not through laboratory manipulation and accidental release. And they say they have identified two key characteristics of the virus that prove this: the absence of a previously used virus backbone and the way in which the virus binds to human cells.

    Not the "ideal" design for infectivity?

    As you would expect of a virus that can cause a global pandemic, SARS-CoV-2 is good at infecting human cells. It does this by binding with high affinity (that is, it binds strongly) to the cell surface membrane protein known as angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), which enables it to enter human cells. But, basing their argument on a computer modelling system, the authors of the Nature Medicine paper argue that the interaction between the virus and the ACE2 receptor is “not ideal”.

    They say that the receptor-binding domain (RBD) amino acid sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein – the part of the spike protein that allows the virus to bind to the ACE2 protein on human cell surfaces – is different from those shown in the SARS-CoV family of viruses to be optimal for receptor binding.

    They appear to argue, based on their and others’ computer modelling data, that they have identified the “ideal” CoV spike protein RBD amino acid sequence for ACE2 receptor binding. They then seem to imply that if you were to genetically engineer SARS-CoV for optimal human ACE2 binding and infectivity, you would use the RBD amino acid sequence predicted by their computer modelling. But they point out that SARS-CoV-2 does not have exactly the same computer program-predicted RBD amino acid sequence. Thus they conclude that it could not have been genetically engineered, stating: “This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.”

    To put it simply, the authors are saying that SARS-CoV-2 was not deliberately engineered because if it were, it would have been designed differently.

    However, the London-based molecular geneticist Dr Michael Antoniou commented that this line of reasoning fails to take into account that there are a number of laboratory-based systems that can select for high affinity RBD variants that are able to take into account the complex environment of a living organism. This complex environment may impact the efficiency with which the SARS-CoV spike protein can find the ACE2 receptor and bind to it. An RBD selected via these more realistic real-world experimental systems would be just as “ideal”, or even more so, for human ACE2 binding than any RBD that a computer model could predict. And crucially, it would likely be different in amino acid sequence. So the fact that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t have the same RBD amino acid sequence as the one that the computer program predicted in no way rules out the possibility that it was genetically engineered.

    Limits to computer modelling

    Dr Antoniou said that the authors’ reasoning is not conclusive because it is based largely on computer modelling, which, he says, is “not definitive but only predictive. It cannot tell us whether any given virus would be optimized for infectivity in a real world scenario, such as in the human body. That's because the environment of the human body will influence how the virus interacts with the receptor. You can’t model that accurately with computer modelling as there are simply too many variables to factor into the equation.”

    Dr Antoniou added, “People can put too much faith in computer programs, but they are only a beginning. You then have to prove whether the computer program’s prediction is correct or not by direct experimentation in a living organism. This has not been done in the case of this hypothesis, so it remains unproven.”

    It is even possible that SARS-CoV-2 was optimized using a living organism model, resulting in a virus that is better at infecting humans than any computer model could predict.

    More than one way to engineer a virus

    The authors of the Nature Medicine article seem to assume that the only way to genetically engineer a virus is to take an already known virus and then engineer it to have the new properties you want. On this premise, they looked for evidence of an already known virus that could have been used in the engineering of SARS-CoV-2.

    And they failed to find that evidence. They stated, “Genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone.”

    But Dr Antoniou told us that while the authors did indeed show that SARS-CoV-2 was unlikely to have been built by deliberate genetic engineering from a previously used virus backbone, that’s not the only way of constructing a virus. There is another method by which an enhanced-infectivity virus can be engineered in the lab.

    A well-known alternative

    A well-known alternative process that could have been used has the cumbersome name of “directed iterative evolutionary selection process”. In this case, it would involve using genetic engineering to generate a large number of randomly mutated versions of the SARS-CoV spike protein receptor binding domain (RBD), which would then be selected for strong binding to the ACE2 receptor and consequently high infectivity of human cells.

    This selection can be done either with purified proteins or, better still, with a mixture of whole coronavirus (CoV) preparations and human cells in tissue culture. Alternatively, the SARS-CoV spike protein variants can be genetically engineered within what is known as a “phage display library”. A phage is a virus that infects bacteria and can be genetically engineered to express on its exterior coat the CoV spike protein with a large number of variants of the RBD. This preparation of phage, displaying on its surface a “library” of CoV spike protein variants, is then added to human cells under laboratory culture conditions in order to select for those that bind to the ACE2 receptor.

    This process is repeated under more and more stringent binding conditions until CoV spike protein variants with a high binding affinity are isolated.

    Once any of the above selection procedures for high affinity interaction of SARS-CoV spike protein with ACE2 has been completed, then whole infectious CoV with these properties can be manufactured.

    Such a directed iterative evolutionary selection process is a
    frequently used method in laboratory research. So there is little or no possibility that the Nature Medicine article authors haven't heard of it – not least, as it is considered so scientifically important that its inventors were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018.

    Yet, the possibility that this is the way that SARS-CoV-2 arose
    is not addressed by the Nature Medicine article authors and so its use has not been disproven.

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    ...

    Part 2:

    • No proof SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered

    In sum, the Nature Medicine article authors offer no evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus could not have been genetically engineered. That's not to say that it was, of course. We can’t know one way or the other on the basis of currently available information.

    Dr Antoniou wrote a short letter to Nature Medicine to point out these omissions in the authors’ case.
    Nature Medicine has no method of submitting a simple letter to the editor, so Dr Antoniou had to submit it as a Matters Arising commentary, which the journal defines as presenting "challenges or clarifications" to an original published work.

    Dr Antoniou's comments were titled, "SARS-CoV-2 could have been created through laboratory manipulation". However, Nature Medicine refused to publish them on the grounds that “we do not feel that they advance or clarify understanding” of the original article. The journal offered no scientific argument to rebut his points.

    In our view, those points do offer clarification to the original article, and what’s more, there is a strong public interest case for making them public. That’s why we reproduce Dr Antoniou’s letter below this article, with his permission.

    • Not genetic engineering – but human intervention

    There is, incidentally, another possible way that SARS-CoV-2 could have been developed in a laboratory, but in this case without using genetic engineering. This was pointed out by Nikolai Petrovsky, a researcher at the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University in South Australia. Petrovsky says that coronaviruses can be cultured in lab dishes with cells that have the human ACE2 receptor. Over time, the virus will gain adaptations that let it efficiently bind to those receptors. Along the way, that virus would pick up random genetic mutations that pop up but don't do anything noticeable.

    “The result of these experiments is a virus that is highly virulent in humans but is sufficiently different that it no longer resembles the original bat virus,” Petrovsky said. “Because the mutations are acquired randomly by selection, there is no signature of a human gene jockey, but this is clearly a virus still created by human intervention.”

    Dr Antoniou agrees that this method is possible – but he points out that waiting for nature to produce the desired mutations is a lot slower than using genetic engineering to generate a large number of random mutations that you can then select for the desired outcome by a directed iterative evolutionary procedure.
    Because genetic engineering greatly speeds up the process, it is by far the most efficient way to generate novel pathogenic viruses in the lab.

    • Vested Interests?

    So why do some experts – and non-experts for that matter – seem so determined to put a stop to any speculation about whether SARS-CoV-2 could have been genetically engineered?

    One explanation might be fear of a backlash against such research from the victims of the pandemic. Virologists, for example, who may want as much freedom as possible to study and manipulate viruses in their labs, won’t want their research restricted because of public concern. Others using genetic engineering in their work may also fear it will damage the general reputation of the technology and encourage tighter regulation.

    And if concerns that SARS-CoV-2 may have been developed in a lab were to gain traction, the consequences in such a heavily commercialised area as biotechnology might not just be reputational but also financial.

    In this context it is worth noting that one of the authors of the Nature Medicine piece is Robert F. Garry, who lists his “competing interest” as being “co-founder of Zalgen Labs, a biotechnology company that develops countermeasures to emerging viruses”. Heavier restrictions on genetic engineering or laboratory virus research might be considered counter to the interests of Zalgen Labs.

    • Conclusion
    It is clear that there is no conclusive evidence either way at this point as to whether SARS-CoV-2 arose by natural mutation and selection in animal and/or human hosts or was genetically engineered in a laboratory. And in this light, the question of where this virus came from should continue to be explored with an open mind.

  23. #623

  24. #624
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    that vaccines are suspicious
    they even got no officially correct safety check. they are pushed without scientific reasons and by mass misleadings
    they may do anything with you. not good for the majority. you may loose the abbility to have children, for example
    digital dictatorship is a part of all that. your minds mb changed too by those vaccines

    even if the vaccine itself will do nothing. with additional factors it may do something

  25. #625

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    I will not be taking the vaccine. I will take my chances with the virus, even though I also acknowledge it is more deadly than the flu and might have long term health consequences (although I'm also in a wait and see approach. One of my cousins caught covid a month ago, and made what is apparently a full recovery without any problems and hardly any symptoms dispite being both obese and non-insulan dependent diabetic.)

    I think this entire episode is fishy as fuck. In two seasons all of humanity is expected to be given a miracle vaccine cure from a virus that has never infected people in all of recorded history. You may not even have a choice in some places. Have you no idea how much power that gives the people who invented it?

    I am not an anti-vaxxer by any means. I have had dozens of vaccines over the years. Vaccines are wonderful. Just not for CCP virus after only several months.

    Finally a vaccine for a coronavirus is a little bit of a pipe dream. And look, several big vaccines have already had the plug pulled recently. Shocker.

    You want to be taking the mRNA vaccine that alters your genome? Never been tried before. Ya, good luck with all that.

  26. #626

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    Words have power and the authorities who speak them change what people think and how they think about things. Covid framed in the correct, true, factual light, would cause many to ask the tough questions. To much was at stake for this to have come from a laboratory. As always, blame mother nature. The same happens when a fire starts. No lightening strikes recorded, yet an inferno blazes across the landscape, starting seemingly out of nowhere.......

    https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/...e-coronavirus/

    Part 1:
    The world’s preeminent scientists say a theory from the Broad Institute’s Alina Chan is too wild to be believed. But when the theory is about the possibility of COVID being man-made, is this science or censorship?

    In January, as she watched the news about a novel virus spreading out of control in China, Alina Chan braced for a shutdown. The molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT started stockpiling medicine and supplies. By the time March rolled around and a quarantine seemed imminent, she’d bought hundreds of dollars’ worth of fillets from her favorite fishmonger in Cambridge and packed them into her freezer. Then she began to ramp down her projects in the lab, isolating her experimental cells from their cultures and freezing them in small tubes.

    As prepared as she was for the shutdown, though, she found herself unprepared for the frustration of being frozen out of work. She paced the walls of her tiny apartment feeling bored and useless. Chan has been a puzzle demon since childhood, which was precisely what she loved about her work—the chance to solve fiendishly difficult problems about how viruses operate and how, through gene therapy, they could be repurposed to help cure devastating genetic diseases. Staring out her window at the eerily quiet streets of her Inman Square neighborhood, she groaned at the thought that it could be months before she was at it again. Her mind wandered back to 2003, when she was a teenager growing up in Singapore and the first SARS virus, a close relative of this coronavirus, appeared in Asia. It hadn’t been anything like this. That one had been relatively easy to corral. How had this virus come out of nowhere and shut down the planet? Why was it so different? she asked herself.

    Then it hit her: The world’s greatest puzzle was staring her in the face. Stuck at home, all she had to work with was her brain and her laptop. Maybe they were enough. Chan fired up the kettle for the first of what would become hundreds of cups of tea, stacked four boxes on her kitchen counter to raise her laptop to the proper height, pulled back her long dark hair, and began reading all of the scientific literature she could find on the coronavirus.

    It wasn’t long before she came across an article about the remarkable stability of the virus, whose genome had barely changed from the earliest human cases, despite trillions of replications. This perplexed Chan. Like many emerging infectious diseases, COVID-19 was thought to be zoonotic—it originated in animals, then somehow found its way into people. At the time, the Chinese government and most scientists insisted the jump had happened at Wuhan’s seafood market, but that didn’t make sense to Chan. If the virus had leapt from animals to humans in the market, it should have immediately started evolving to life inside its new human hosts. But it hadn’t.

    On a hunch, she decided to look at the literature on the 2003 SARS virus, which had jumped from civets to people. Bingo. A few papers mentioned its rapid evolution in its first months of existence. Chan felt the familiar surge of puzzle endorphins. The new virus really wasn’t behaving like it should. Chan knew that delving further into this puzzle would require some deep genetic analysis, and she knew just the person for the task. She opened Google Chat and fired off a message to Shing Hei Zhan. He was an old friend from her days at the University of British Columbia and, more important, he was a computational god.

    “Do you want to partner on a very unusual paper?” she wrote.

    Sure
    , he replied.

    One thing Chan noticed about the original SARS was that the virus in the first human cases was subtly different—a few dozen letters of genetic code—from the one in the civets. That meant it had immediately morphed. She asked Zhan to pull up the genomes for the coronaviruses that had been found on surfaces in the Wuhan seafood market. Were they at all different from the earliest documented cases in humans?

    Zhan ran the analysis.
    Nope, they were 100 percent the same. Definitely from humans, not animals. The seafood-market theory, which Chinese health officials and the World Health Organization espoused in the early days of the pandemic, was wrong. Chan’s puzzle detectors pulsed again. “Shing,” she messaged Zhan, “this paper is going to be insane.”

    In the coming weeks, as the spring sun chased shadows across her kitchen floor, Chan stood at her counter and pounded out her paper, barely pausing to eat or sleep. It was clear that the first SARS evolved rapidly during its first three months of existence, constantly fine-tuning its ability to infect humans, and settling down only during the later stages of the epidemic. In contrast, the new virus looked a lot more like late-stage SARS. “It’s almost as if we’re missing the early phase, Chan marveled to Zhan. Or, as she put it in their paper, as if “it was already well adapted for human transmission.”

    That was a profoundly provocative line. Chan was implying that the virus was already familiar with human physiology when it had its coming-out party in Wuhan in late 2019. If so, there were three possible explanations.

    Perhaps it was just staggeringly bad luck: The mutations had all occurred in an earlier host species, and just happened to be the perfect genetic arrangement for an invasion of humanity. But that made no sense. Those mutations would have been disadvantageous in the old host.

    Maybe the virus had been circulating undetected in humans for months, working out the kinks, and nobody had noticed. Also unlikely. China’s health officials would not have missed it, and even if they had, they’d be able to go back now through stored samples to find the trail of earlier versions. And they weren’t coming up with anything.

    That left a third possibility: The missing phase had happened in a lab, where the virus had been trained on human cells.
    Chan knew this was the third rail of potential explanations. At the time, conspiracy theorists were spinning bioweapon fantasies, and Chan was loath to give them any ammunition. But she also didn’t want to play politics by withholding her findings. Chan is in her early thirties, still at the start of her career, and an absolute idealist about the purity of the scientific process. Facts were facts.

    Or at least they used to be. Since the start of the pandemic, the Trump administration has been criticized for playing fast and loose with facts—denying, exaggerating, or spinning them to suit the president’s political needs. As a result, many scientists have learned to censor themselves for fear that their words will be misrepresented. Still, Chan thought, if she were to sit on scientific research just to avoid providing ammunition to conspiracy theorists or Trump, would she be any better than them?

    Chan knew she had to move forward and make her findings public. In the final draft of her paper, she torpedoed the seafood-market theory, then laid out a case that the virus seemed curiously well adapted to humans. She mentioned all three possible explanations, carefully wording the third to emphasize that if the novel coronavirus did come from a lab, it would have been the result of an accident in the course of legitimate research.

    On May 2, Chan uploaded the paper to a site where as-yet-unpublished biology papers known as “preprints” are shared for open peer review. She tweeted out the news and waited. On May 16, the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, picked up her research. The very next day, Newsweek ran a story with the headline “Scientists Shouldn’t Rule Out Lab as Source of Coronavirus, New Study Says.”

    And that, Chan says, is when “shit exploded everywhere.”
    Chan had come to my attention a week before the Newsweek story was published through her smart and straightforward tweets, which I found refreshing at a time when most scientists were avoiding any serious discussion about the possibility that COVID-19 had escaped from a biolab. I’d written a lot about genetic engineering and so-called gain-of-function research—the fascinating, if scary, line of science in which scientists alter viruses to make them more transmissible or lethal as a way of assessing how close those viruses are to causing pandemics. I also knew that deadly pathogens escape from biolabs with surprising frequency. Most of these accidents end up being harmless, but many researchers have been infected, and people have died as a result.

    For years, concerned scientists have warned that this type of pathogen research was going to trigger a pandemic. Foremost among them was Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, who founded the Cambridge Working Group in 2014 to lobby against these experiments. In a series of policy papers, op-eds, and scientific forums, he pointed out that accidents involving deadly pathogens occurred more than twice a week in U.S. labs, and estimated that just 10 labs performing gain-of-function research over a 10-year period would run a nearly 20 percent risk of an accidental release. In 2018, he argued that such a release could “lead to global spread of a virulent virus, a biosafety incident on a scale never before seen.”

    Thanks in part to the Cambridge Working Group, the federal government briefly instituted a moratorium on such research. By 2017, however, the ban was lifted and U.S. labs were at it again. Today, in the United States and across the globe, there are dozens of labs conducting experiments on a daily basis with the deadliest known pathogens. One of them is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. For more than a decade, its scientists have been discovering coronaviruses in bats in southern China and bringing them back to their lab in Wuhan. There, they mix genes from different strains of these novel viruses to test their infectivity in human cells and lab animals.

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    Part 2:

    When word spread in January that a novel coronavirus had caused an outbreak in Wuhan—which is a thousand miles from where the bats that carry this lineage of viruses are naturally found—many experts were quietly alarmed. There was no proof that the lab was the source of the virus, but the pieces fit.

    Despite the evidence, the scientific community quickly dismissed the idea. Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, which has funded the work of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other labs searching for new viruses, called the notion “preposterous,” and many other experts echoed that sentiment.

    That wasn’t necessarily what every scientist thought in private, though.
    “They can’t speak directly,” one scientist told me confidentially, referring to the virology community’s fear of having their comments sensationalized in today’s politically charged environment. “Many virologists don’t want to be hated by everyone in the field.”

    There are other potential reasons for the pushback. There’s long been a sense that if the public and politicians really knew about the dangerous pathogen research being conducted in many laboratories, they’d be outraged. Denying the possibility of a catastrophic incident like this, then, could be seen as a form of career preservation. “For the substantial subset of virologists who perform gain-of-function research,” Richard Ebright, a Rutgers microbiologist and another founding member of the Cambridge Working Group, told me, “avoiding restrictions on research funding, avoiding implementation of appropriate biosafety standards, and avoiding implementation of appropriate research oversight are powerful motivators.” Antonio Regalado, biomedicine editor of MIT Technology Review, put it more bluntly. If it turned out COVID-19 came from a lab, he tweeted, “it would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom.”

    That’s a pretty good incentive to simply dismiss the whole hypothesis, but it quickly amounted to a global gaslighting of the media—and, by proxy, the public. An unhealthy absolutism set in: Either you insisted that any questions about lab involvement were absurd, or you were a tool of the Trump administration and its desperation to blame China for the virus. I was used to social media pundits ignoring inconvenient or politically toxic facts, but I’d never expected to see that from
    some of our best scientists.

    Which is why Chan stood out on Twitter, daring to speak truth to power. “It is very difficult to do research when one hypothesis has been negatively cast as a conspiracy theory,” she wrote. Then she offered some earnest advice to researchers, suggesting that most viral research should be done with neutered viruses that have had their replicating machinery removed in advance, so that even if they escaped confinement, they would be incapable of making copies of themselves. “When these precautions are not followed, risk of lab escape is exponentially higher,” she explained, adding, “I hope the pandemic motivates local ethics and biosafety committees to think carefully about how they can reduce risk.” She elaborated on this in another tweet several days later: “I’d also—personally—prefer if high biosafety level labs were not located in the most populous cities on earth.”

    Chan had started using her Twitter account this intensely only a few days earlier, as a form of outreach for her paper. The social platform has become the way many scientists find out about one another’s work, and studies have shown that attention on Twitter translates to increased citations for a paper in scientific literature. But it’s a famously raw forum. Many scientists are not prepared for the digital storms that roil the Twitterverse, and they don’t handle it well. Chan dreaded it at first, but quickly took to Twitter like a digital native. “Having Twitter elevates your work,” she says.

    “And I think it’s really fun to talk to nonscientists about that work.”

    After reading her tweets, I reviewed her preprint, which I found mind-blowing, and wrote her to say so. She thanked me and joked that she worried it might be “career suicide.”

    It wasn’t long before it began to look like she might be right.

    Speaking her mind, it turns out—even in the face of censure—was nothing new for Chan, who is Canadian but was raised in Singapore, one of the more repressive regimes on earth. Her parents, both computer science professionals, encouraged free thinking and earnest inquiry in their daughter, but the local school system did not. Instead, it was a pressure-cooker of a system that rewarded students for falling in line, and moved quickly to silence rebels.

    That was a bad fit for Chan. “You have to bow to teachers,” she says. “Sometimes teachers from other classes would show up and ask me to bow to them. And I would say, ‘No, you’re not my teacher.’ Back then they believed in corporal punishment. A teacher could just take a big stick and beat you in front of the class. I got whacked so many times.”

    Still, Chan rebelled in small ways, skipping school and hanging out at the arcade. She also lost interest in her studies. “I just really didn’t like school. And I didn’t like all the extracurriculars they pack you with in Singapore,” she says. That changed when a teacher recruited her for math Olympiads, in which teams of students compete to solve devilishly hard arithmetic puzzles. “I really loved it,” she says. “You just sit in a room and think about problems.”

    Chan might well have pursued a career in math,
    but then she came up against teams from China in Olympiad competitions. “They would just wipe everyone else off the board,” she says. “They were machines. They’d been trained in math since they could walk. They’d hit the buzzer before you could even comprehend the question. I thought, I’m not going to survive in this field.”

    Chan decided to pursue biology instead, studying at the University of British Columbia. “I liked viruses from the time I was a teen,” she says. “I remember the first time I learned about HIV. I thought it was a puzzle and a challenge.” That instinct took her to Harvard Medical School as a postdoc, where the puzzle became how to build virus-like biomolecules to accomplish tasks inside cells, and then to Ben Deverman’s lab at the Broad Institute. “When I see an interesting question, I want to spend 100 percent of my time working on it,” she says. “I get really fixated on answering scientific questions.”

    Deverman, for his part, says he wasn’t actively looking to expand his team when Chan came along, but when “opportunities to hire extraordinary people fall in my lap,” he takes them. “Alina brings a ton of value to the lab,” he explains, adding that she has an ability to pivot between different topics and cut to the chase. Nowhere was that more on display than with her coronavirus work, which Deverman was able to closely observe. In fact, Chan ran so many ideas past him that he eventually became a coauthor. “She is insightful, determined, and has the rare ability to explain complex scientific findings to other scientists and to the public,” he says.

    Those skills would prove highly useful when word got out about her coronavirus paper.

    If Chan had
    spent a lifetime learning how to pursue scientific questions, she spent most of the shutdown learning what happens when the answers you come up with are politically radioactive. After the Newsweek story ran, conservative-leaning publications seized on her paper as conclusive evidence that the virus had come from a lab. “Everyone focused on the one line,” Chan laments. “The tabloids just zoomed in on it.” Meanwhile, conspiracists took it as hard evidence of their wild theories that there had been an intentional leak.

    Chan spent several exhausting days putting out online fires with the many people who had misconstrued her findings. “I was so naive,” she tells me with a quick, self-deprecating laugh. “I just thought, Shouldn’t the world be thinking about this fairly? I really have to kick myself now.”

    Even more troubling, though,
    were the reactions from other scientists. As soon as her paper got picked up by the media, luminaries in the field sought to censure her. Jonathan
    Eisen, a well-known professor at UC Davis, criticized the study in Newsweek and on his influential Twitter account, writing, “Personally, I do not find the analysis in this new paper remotely convincing.” In a long thread, he argued that comparing the new virus to SARS was not enough to show that it was preadapted to humans. He wanted to see comparisons to the initial leap of other viruses from animals to humans.

    Moments later, Daszak piled on. The NIH had recently cut its grant to his organization, EcoHealth Alliance, after the Trump administration learned that some of it had gone to fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s work.
    Daszak was working hard to get it restored and trying to stamp out any suggestion of a lab connection. He didn’t hold back on Chan. “This is sloppy research,” he tweeted, calling it “a poorly designed phylogenetic study with too many inferences and not enough data, riding on a wave of conspiracy to drive a higher impact.” Peppering his tweets with exclamation points, he attacked the wording of the paper, arguing that one experiment it cited was impossible, and told Chan she didn’t understand her own data.

    Afterward,
    a Daszak supporter followed up his thread with a GIF of a mike drop.

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    Part 3:
    It was an old and familiar dynamic: threatened silverback male attempts to bully a junior female member of the tribe. As a postdoc, Chan was in a vulnerable position. The world of science is still a bit medieval in its power structure, with a handful of institutions and individuals deciding who gets published, who gets positions, who gets grants. There’s little room for rebels.

    What happened next was neither old nor familiar: Chan didn’t back down. “Sorry to disrupt mike drop,” she tweeted, providing a link to a paper in the prestigious journal Nature that “does that exact experiment you thought was impossible.” Politely but firmly, she justified each point Daszak had attacked, showing him his mistakes. In the end, Daszak was reduced to arguing that she had used the word “isolate” incorrectly. In a coup de grâce, Chan pointed out that actually the word had come from online data provided by GenBank, the NIH’s genetic sequence database. She offered to change it to whatever made sense. At that point, Daszak stopped replying. He insists, however, that Chan is overinterpreting her findings.

    With Eisen, Chan readily agreed to test her hypothesis by finding other examples of viruses infecting new hosts. Within days, a perfect opportunity came along when news broke that the coronavirus had jumped from humans to minks at European fur farms. Sure enough, the mink version began to rapidly mutate.“You actually see the rapid evolution happening,” Chan said. “Just in the first few weeks, the changes are quite drastic.”

    Chan also pointed out to Eisen that the whole goal of a website such as bioRxiv (pronounced “bioarchive”)—where she posted the paper—is to elicit feedback that will make papers better before publication. Good point, he replied. Eventually he conceded that there was “a lot of interesting analysis in the paper” and agreed to work with Chan on the next draft.

    The Twitter duels with her powerful colleagues didn’t rattle Chan. “I thought Jonathan was very reasonable,” she says. “I really appreciated his expertise, even if he disagreed with me. I like that kind of feedback. It helped to make our paper better.”

    With Daszak, Chan is more circumspect.
    “Some people have trouble keeping their emotions in check,” she says. “Whenever I saw his comments, I’d just think, Is there something I can learn here? Is there something he’s right about that I should be fixing?” Ultimately, she decided, there was not.

    By late May,
    both journalists and armchair detectives interested in the mystery of the coronavirus were discovering Chan as a kind of Holmes to our Watson. She crunched information at twice our speed, zeroing in on small details we’d overlooked, and became a go-to for anyone looking for spin-free explications of the latest science on COVID-19. It was thrilling to see her reasoning in real time, a reminder of why I’ve always loved science, with its pursuit of patterns that sometimes leads to exciting revelations. The website CNET featured her in a story about “a league of scientists-turned-detectives” who were using genetic sequencing technologies to uncover COVID-19’s origins. After it came out, Chan added “scientist-turned-detective” to her Twitter bio.

    She’s lived up to her new nom de tweet. As the search for the source of the virus continued, several scientific teams published papers identifying a closely related coronavirus in pangolins—anteater-like animals that are heavily trafficked in Asia for their meat and scales. The number of different studies made it seem as though this virus was ubiquitous in pangolins. Many scientists eagerly embraced the notion that the animals might have been the intermediate hosts that had passed the novel coronavirus to humans. It fit their preexisting theories about wet markets, and it would have meant no lab had been involved.

    As Chan read the pangolin papers, she grew suspicious.
    The first one was by a team that had analyzed a group of the animals intercepted by anti-smuggling authorities in southern China. They found the closely related virus in a few of them, and published the genomes for that virus. Some of the other papers, though, were strangely ambiguous about where their data was coming from, or how their genomes had been constructed. Had they really taken samples from actual pangolins?

    Once again, Chan messaged Shing Hei Zhan. “Shing, something’s weird here,” she wrote. Zhan pulled up the raw data from the papers and compared the genomes they had published. Individual copies of a virus coming from different animals should have small differences, just as individuals of a species have genetic differences. Yet the genomes in all of the pangolin papers were perfect matches—the authors were all simply using the first group’s data set. Far from being ubiquitous, the virus had been found only in a few pangolins who were held together, and it was unclear where they had caught it. The animals might have even caught it from their own smuggler.

    Remarkably, one group of authors in
    Nature even appeared to use the same genetic sequences from the other paper as if it were confirmation of their own discovery. “These sequences appear to be from the same virus (Pangolin-CoV) that we identified in the present study.”

    Chan called them out on Twitter: “Of course it’s the same Pangolin-CoV, you used the same dataset!” For context, she later added, “Imagine if clinical trials were playing fast and loose with their patient data; renaming patients, throwing them into different datasets without clarification, possibly even describing the same patient multiple times across different studies unintentionally.”

    She and Zhan posted a new preprint on bioRxiv dismantling the pangolin papers. Confirmation came in June when the results of a study of hundreds of pangolins in the wildlife trade were announced: Not a single pangolin had any sign of a coronavirus. Chan took a victory lap on Twitter: “Supports our hypothesis all this time.” The pangolin theory collapsed.

    Chan then turned her Holmesian powers on bigger game: Daszak and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak had been pleading his case everywhere from 60 Minutes to the New York Times and has been successful in rallying sympathy to his cause, even getting 77 Nobel laureates to sign a letter calling for the NIH to restore EcoHealth Alliance’s funding.

    In several long and detailed “tweetorials,” Chan began to cast a cloud of suspicion on the WIV’s work. She pointed out that scientists there had discovered a virus that is more than 96 percent identical to the COVID-19 coronavirus in 2013 in a mineshaft soon after three miners working there had died from a COVID-like illness. The WIV didn’t share these findings until 2020, even though the goal of such work, Chan pointed out, was supposedly to identify viruses with the potential to cause human illnesses and warn the world about them.

    Even though that virus had killed three miners, Daszak said it wasn’t considered a priority to study at the time. “We were looking for SARS-related virus, and this one was 20 percent different. We thought it was interesting, but not high risk. So we didn’t do anything about it and put it in the freezer,” he told a reporter from Wired. It was only in 2020, he maintained, that they started looking into it once they realized its similarity to COVID-19. But Chan pointed to an online database showing that the WIV had been genetically sequencing the mine virus in 2017 and 2018, analyzing it in a way they had done in the past with other viruses in preparation for running experiments with them. Diplomatic yet deadpan, she wrote, “I think Daszak was misinformed.”

    For good measure, almost in passing, Chan pointed out a detail no one else had noticed: COVID-19 contains an uncommon genetic sequence that has been used by genetic engineers in the past to insert genes into coronaviruses without leaving a trace, and it falls at the exact point that would allow experimenters to swap out different genetic parts to change the infectivity. That same sequence can occur naturally in a coronavirus, so this was not irrefutable proof of an unnatural origin, Chan explained, “only an observation.” Still, it was enough for one Twitter user to muse, “If capital punishment were as painful as what Alina Chan is doing to Daszak/WIV regarding their story, it would be illegal.”

    Daszak says that indeed he had been misinformed and was unaware that that virus found in the mine shaft had been sequenced before 2020. He also says that a great lab, with great scientists, is now being picked apart to search for suspicious behavior to support a preconceived theory. “If you believe, deep down, something fishy went on, then what you do is you go through all the evidence and you try to look for things that support that belief,” he says, adding, “That is not how you find the truth.”

    Many of the points in Chan’s tweetorials had also been made by others, but she was the first reputable scientist to put it all together. That same week, London’s Sunday Times and the BBC ran stories following the same trail of breadcrumbs that Chan had laid out to suggest that there had been a coverup at the WIV. The story soon circulated around the world. In the meantime, the WIV has steadfastly denied any viral leak. Lab director Yanyi Wang went on Chinese television and described such charges as “pure fabrication,” and went on to explain that the bat coronavirus from 2013 was so different than COVID that it could not have evolved into it this quickly and that the lab only sequenced it and didn’t obtain a live virus from it.

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    Part 4:

    To this day, there is no definitive evidence as to whether the virus occurred naturally or had its origins in a lab, but the hypothesis that the Wuhan facility was the source is increasingly mainstream and the science behind it can no longer be ignored. And Chan is largely to thank for that.

    In late spring,
    Chan walked through the tall glass doors of the Broad Institute for the first time in months. As she made her way across the gleaming marble foyer, her sneaker squeaks echoed in the silence. It was like the zombie apocalypse version of the Broad; all the bright lights but none of the people. It felt all the weirder that she was wearing her gym clothes to work.

    A few days earlier, the Broad had begun letting researchers back into their labs to restart their projects. All computer work still needed to be done remotely, but bench scientists such as Chan could pop in just long enough to move along their cell cultures, provided they got tested for the virus every four days.

    In her lab, Chan donned her white lab coat and took inventory, throwing out months of expired reagents and ordering new materials. Then she rescued a few samples from the freezer, took her seat at one of the tissue-culture hoods—stainless steel, air-controlled cabinets in which cell engineers do their work—and began reviving some of her old experiments.

    She had mixed emotions about being back. It felt good to free her gene-therapy projects from their stasis, and she was even more excited about the new project she and Deverman were working on: an online tool that allows vaccine developers to track changes in the virus’s genome by time, location, and other characteristics. “It came out of my personal frustration at not being able to get answers fast,” she says.

    On the other hand, she missed being all-consumed by her detective work. “I wanted to stop after the pangolin preprint,” she says, “but this mystery keeps drawing me back in.” So while she waits for her cell cultures to grow, she’s been sleuthing on the side—only this time she has more company: Increasingly, scientists have been quietly contacting her to share their own theories and papers about COVID-19’s origins, forming something of a growing underground resistance. “There’s a lot of curiosity,” she says. “People are starting to think more deeply about it.” And they have to, she says, if we are going to prevent future outbreaks: “It’s really important to find out where this came from so it doesn’t happen again.”

    That is what keeps Chan up at night—the possibility of new outbreaks in humans from the same source. If the virus emerged naturally from a bat cave, there could well be other strains in existence ready to spill over. If they are closely related, whatever vaccines we develop might work on them, too. But that might not be the case with manipulated viruses from a laboratory. “Someone could have been sampling viruses from different caves for a decade and just playing mix-and-match in the lab, and those viruses could be so different from one another that none of our vaccines will work on them,” she says. Either way, “We need to find where this came from, and close it down.”

    Whatever important information she finds, we can be sure Chan will share it with the world. Far from being shaken by the controversy her paper stirred, she is more committed than ever to holding a line that could all too easily be overrun.

    “Scientists shouldn’t be censoring themselves,”
    she says. “We’re obliged to put all the data out there. We shouldn’t be deciding that it’s better if the public doesn’t know about this or that. If we start doing that, we lose credibility, and eventually we lose the public’s trust. And that’s not good for science.” In fact, it would cause an epidemic of doubt, and that wouldn’t be good for any of us.

  30. #630

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    Covid-19, SARS-2 does not replicate in bats, CDC study released this week. SARS-1 does replicate.

    In laymen's terms, Covid-19 did not evolve in the known bat species in China and this study proves it.

    https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/12/20-2308_article

    Differential Tropism of SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 in Bat Cells

    Abstract

    Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 did not replicate efficiently in 13 bat cell lines, whereas severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus replicated efficiently in kidney cells of its ancestral host, the Rhinolophus sinicus bat, suggesting different evolutionary origins. Structural modeling showed that RBD/RsACE2 binding may contribute to the differential cellular tropism.



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    Why would the CDC release this? Are they prepping us for the news that this is indeed Chinese bioweapon? Suggesting different evolutionary origins, meaning gene editing and gain of function? Were in a cold war with China that could turn hot any second, pay close attention to Taiwan. If the PRC tries to overtake the island I think shit will hit the fan.

    And look, didn't USA recently give military weapons to Taiwan?

  32. #632

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    Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research

    https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-m...h-f96dd7413748

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    Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route

    The COVID-19 pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has led to over 910,000 deaths worldwide and unprecedented decimation of the global economy. Despite its tremendous impact, the origin of SARS-CoV-2 has remained mysterious and controversial. The natural origin theory, although widely accepted, lacks substantial support. The alternative theory that the virus may have come from a research laboratory is, however, strictly censored on peer-reviewed scientific journals. Nonetheless, SARS-CoV-2 shows biological characteristics that are inconsistent with a naturally occurring, zoonotic virus. In this report, we describe the genomic, structural, medical, and literature evidence, which, when considered together, strongly contradicts the natural origin theory. The evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 should be a laboratory product created by using bat coronaviruses ZC45 and/or ZXC21 as a template and/or backbone. Building upon the evidence, we further postulate a synthetic route for SARS-CoV-2, demonstrating that the laboratory-creation of this coronavirus is convenient and can be accomplished in approximately six months. Our work emphasizes the need for an independent investigation into the relevant research laboratories. It also argues for a critical look into certain recently published data, which, albeit problematic, was used to support and claim a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. From a public health perspective, these actions are necessary as knowledge of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 and of how the virus entered the human population are of pivotal importance in the fundamental control of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as in preventing similar, future pandemics.


    https://zenodo.org/record/4028830#.X2wBHC0ZNo7

  34. #634
    Haikus SGF's Avatar
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    @raTG13 y did you make a new account?

    It puts on the cuck-mask or it gets the hose!
    Last edited by SGF; 09-24-2020 at 12:41 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by shotgunfingers View Post

    It puts on the cuck-mask or it gets the hose!
    Sure, should that be old, used, under wear mask, or, Made in China KN95s?



    Up to 70 Percent of KN95 Masks From China Don’t Meet US Health Standards, Study Says
    https://www.theepochtimes.com/up-to-...tm_campaign=mb



  36. #636
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    Covid-19 has evolved to the American plague where it has released a bunch of morons and a well wishing dictator
    -
    Dual type (as per tcaudilllg)
    Enneagram 5 (wings either 4 or 6)?


    I'm constantly looking to align the real with the ideal.I've been more oriented toward being overly idealistic by expecting the real to match the ideal. My thinking side is dominent. The result is that sometimes I can be overly impersonal or self-centered in my approach, not being understanding of others in the process and simply thinking "you should do this" or "everyone should follor this rule"..."regardless of how they feel or where they're coming from"which just isn't a good attitude to have. It is a way, though, to give oneself an artificial sense of self-justification. LSE

    Best description of functions:
    http://socionicsstudy.blogspot.com/2...functions.html

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    Dr. Li-Meng Yan, the CCP cover up whistle blower and her paper released last week.




    I won't be posting her Tucker Carlson interview here, as Americans on this site are to brainwashed by bi-partisanship to be objective about the information they are seeing.

    Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route

    https://zenodo.org/record/4028830#.X2O1USK941L

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    Once the restriction sites were successfully introduced, the RBM segment could be swapped
    conveniently using routine restriction enzyme digestion and ligation. Although alternative cloning
    techniques may leave no trace of genetic manipulation (Gibson assembly as one example), this oldfashioned
    approach could be chosen because it offers a great level of convenience in swapping this critical
    RBM.
    Given that RBM fully dictates hACE2-binding and that the SARS RBM-hACE2 binding was fully
    characterized by high-resolution structures (Figure 3)37,38, this RBM-only swap would not be any riskier
    than the full Spike swap. In fact, the feasibility of this RBM-swap strategy has been proven39,47. In 2008,
    Dr. Zhengli Shi’s group swapped a SARS RBM into the Spike proteins of several SARS-like bat
    coronaviruses after introducing a restriction site into a codon-optimized spike gene (Figure 5C)47. They
    then validated the binding of the resulted chimeric Spike proteins with hACE2. Furthermore, in a recent
    publication, the RBM of SARS-CoV-2 was swapped into the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of SARSCoV,
    resulting in a chimeric RBD fully functional in binding hACE2 (Figure 5C)39. Strikingly, in both
    cases, the manipulated RBM segments resemble almost exactly the RBM defined by the positions of the
    EcoRI and BstEII sites (Figure 5C). Although cloning details are lacking in both publications39,47, it is
    conceivable that the actual restriction sites may vary depending on the spike gene receiving the RBM
    insertion as well as the convenience in introducing unique restriction site(s) in regions of interest. It is
    noteworthy that the corresponding author of this recent publication39, Dr. Fang Li, has been an active
    collaborator of Dr. Zhengli Shi since 201049-53. Dr. Li was the first person in the world to have structurally
    elucidated the binding between SARS-CoV RBD and hACE238 and has been the leading expert in the
    structural understanding of Spike-ACE2 interactions38,39,53-56. The striking finding of EcoRI and BstEII
    restriction sites at either end of the SARS-CoV-2 RBM, respectively, and the fact that the same RBM
    region has been swapped both by Dr. Shi and by her long-term collaborator, respectively, using restriction
    enzyme digestion methods are unlikely a coincidence. Rather, it is the smoking gun proving that the
    RBM/Spike of SARS-CoV-2 is a product of genetic manipulation.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Beautiful sky View Post
    Covid-19 has evolved to the American plague where it has released a bunch of morons and a well wishing dictator
    A plague actually has to kill people. Covid is shaping up to be a nothing burger so far for the vast majority of people.

    Could it be that the lab issue is central to why Governments still push the scariness?

    As far as dictators go, you guy's are lucky you had Trump in office for this entire episode. Do you think banning tic tok was done because Trump *just wants power*? You guys are to asleep. tik toc was a back door for Chinese CCP spying and you can't even see past your hatred for Trump to recognize what is really going on.

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    Quote Originally Posted by raTG13 View Post
    A plague actually has to kill people. Covid is shaping up to be a nothing burger so far for the vast majority of people.

    Could it be that the lab issue is central to why Governments still push the scariness?

    As far as dictators go, you guy's are lucky you had Trump in office for this entire episode. Do you think banning tic tok was done because Trump *just wants power*? You guys are to asleep. tik toc was a back door for Chinese CCP spying and you can't even see past your hatred for Trump to recognize what is really going on.
    I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. I work in veterinary medicine and I understand viruses and how they evolve. This is a zoonotic evolution of a virus from one animal to another
    -
    Dual type (as per tcaudilllg)
    Enneagram 5 (wings either 4 or 6)?


    I'm constantly looking to align the real with the ideal.I've been more oriented toward being overly idealistic by expecting the real to match the ideal. My thinking side is dominent. The result is that sometimes I can be overly impersonal or self-centered in my approach, not being understanding of others in the process and simply thinking "you should do this" or "everyone should follor this rule"..."regardless of how they feel or where they're coming from"which just isn't a good attitude to have. It is a way, though, to give oneself an artificial sense of self-justification. LSE

    Best description of functions:
    http://socionicsstudy.blogspot.com/2...functions.html

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