I never realized how many people buy into so many conspiracies until the last five years or so.ramblin_ag02 said:
Even if COVID was released or escaped from a lab, which seems likely, the original virus likely came from bats or pangolins. The lab was actively collecting coronaviruses from both of groups of animals for study. There is zero biochemical evidence that these were fully created in a lab and almost no evidence they were modified. So the most updated thought is that COVID is an unmodified, or only lightly modified, rodent coronavirus that got out of a virology lab in Wuhan.
Some of you people are way too bought into conspiracies
That covid is bioengineered to affect people seems more and more unnecessary to explain it.
From https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/newly-discovered-bat-viruses-give-hints-to-covid-s-origins/ar-AAPwqmZ?li=BBorjTa
Quote:
In the dead of night, they used mist nets and canvas traps to snag the animals as they emerged from nearby caves, gathered samples of saliva, urine and feces, then released them back into the darkness.
The fecal samples turned out to contain coronaviruses, which the scientists studied in high security biosafety labs, known as BSL-3, using specialized protective gear and air filters.
Three of the Laos coronaviruses were unusual: They carried a molecular hook on their surface that was very similar to the hook on the virus that causes Covid-19, called SARS-CoV-2. Like SARS-CoV-2, their hook allowed them to latch onto human cells.
"It is even better than early strains of SARS-CoV-2," said Marc Eloit, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who led the study, referring to how well the hook on the Laos coronaviruses binds to human cells. The study was posted online last month and has not yet been published in a scientific journal.
Virus experts are buzzing about the discovery. Some suspect that these SARS-CoV-2-like viruses may already be infecting people from time to time, causing only mild and limited outbreaks. But under the right circumstances, the pathogens could give rise to a Covid-19-like pandemic, they say.
...
n RaTG13, 11 of the 17 key building blocks of the domain are identical to those of SARS-CoV-2. But in the three viruses from Laos, as many as 16 were identical the closest match to date.
Dr. Eloit speculated that one or more of the coronaviruses might be able to infect humans and cause mild disease. In a separate study, he and colleagues took blood samples from people in Laos who collect bat guano for a living. Although the Laotians did not show signs of having been infected with SARS-CoV-2, they carried immune markers, called antibodies, that appeared to be caused by a similar virus.
Note that covid may undergo a reassortment similar to that of the flu virus:
Quote:
If a bat infected with one coronavirus catches a second one, the two different viruses may end up in a single cell at once. As that cell begins to replicate each of those viruses, their genes get shuffled together, producing new virus hybrids.
In the Laotian coronaviruses, this gene shuffling has given them a receptor-binding domain that's very similar to that of SARS-CoV-2. The original genetic swap took place about a decade ago, according to a preliminary analysis by Spyros Lytras, a graduate student at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.
is this reassortment process common for a wide variety of viruses? I first learned of the process in the 1980s, but until now, I've only heard of it being found with the flu virus.
If the coronaviruses can make new variants through reassortment, there could easily be much larger differences between one variant and another (more lethal as well as less lethal) than we would ever be likely to see from simple mutations.