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This guy appears to also believe that the omicron variant is not a natural mutation but a lab-made version as well. BLAST does not contain all genetic material

This guy appears to also believe that the omicron variant is not a natural mutation but a lab-made version as well. BLAST does not contain all genetic material from all viruses or organisms in all of the natural world. There are countless (really, impossible to count) viruses of all kinds out there dancing around in the bodies of all kinds of creatures. There are literally hundreds of trillions of viruses in your body right now (not different kinds but individual viruses). Each of those hundreds of trillions of replications was an opportunity to mutate. Now multiply that by all of the individual animals human or otherwise who could harbor coronaviruses and you have many hundred billions of trillions of chances to generate the gene sequences in question. If I could get billions of trillions of lottery tickets, I'd win the lottery, and here it looks like SARS-CoV-2 won the "does a gene sequence in the virus exist in a patent by moderna" lottery.

dnautics 5y ago
if the mutation rate is that high, then why don't we see a ton of sequence variants around the wobble pairs of the furin cleavage site? (Or for any parts of the coronavirus, for that matter?)
- efficax 5y ago
  no way to answer such a question without real experimental research, and not even sure what you mean by "see", we dont "see" most virus mutations because most mutations don't survive... and certainly aren't sequenced. And the point isn't that a virus mutates on every replication, but that every replication is a chance for a mutation. The point is everything here hinges on an argument from probability. There are more viruses on earth than there are stars in the universe, the astronomical figures are meet with each other. We're not talking different orders of magnitude between the opportunities for a certain mutation and the probability of a certain mutation occuring.. edit: Further, it looks like the sequence exists in some bacteria, meaning it isn't even a question of a random mutation but possibily the incorporation of the sequence from an existing source (which the author claims doesn't exist, but it does, in mycobacterium smegmatis...). this destroys the entire premise of the claim.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    > "see" most virus mutations because most mutations don't survive And even if they survive the selection pressure is immense.
vintermann 5y ago
Early on one news site I followed kept a long list of all the vaccine candidates that were under development, and there were impressively many. Even the Kazakh Biosafety Research Institute had one. That kind of worried me. Because even if you think sars-cov-2 is completely natural (and I have no problem accepting that position), have you thought about how many groups around would still have the capacity to make such a virus, if they wanted to? Even just the fact that "some people believe the virus was made in a lab" can be dangerous. Because what if, say, Kazakhstan's dictator-emeritus Nursultan Nazarbayev believed it? How far-fetched is it that he, or someone like him even in the more nominally democratic parts of the world, would decide, "they fired the first shot, we can't allow there to be a bioweapon gap!" and commandeer the institute to do "dual use" research? It would be easy to excuse too. They could say, "we're just designing these powerful virus variants to have a vaccine ready in case someone else comes up with the same powerful virus variant", and it would be a reasonable argument, at least as arms race escalation arguments go.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Having the ability to make a vaccine is not the same as having the ability to engineer a virus.
  - vintermann 5y ago
    Right, the latter is probably easier.
arisAlexis 5y ago
> This guy appears to also believe that the omicron variant is not a natural mutation but a lab-made version as well. Dismissing everything as far I'd problematic. If you can't prove it and several scientists were baffled by the number of changes and we still donate an answer, you can't criticize someone from believing A while you believe B.

dnautics 5y ago

if the mutation rate is that high, then why don't we see a ton of sequence variants around the wobble pairs of the furin cleavage site? (Or for any parts of the coronavirus, for that matter?)

efficax 5y ago
no way to answer such a question without real experimental research, and not even sure what you mean by "see", we dont "see" most virus mutations because most mutations don't survive... and certainly aren't sequenced. And the point isn't that a virus mutates on every replication, but that every replication is a chance for a mutation. The point is everything here hinges on an argument from probability. There are more viruses on earth than there are stars in the universe, the astronomical figures are meet with each other. We're not talking different orders of magnitude between the opportunities for a certain mutation and the probability of a certain mutation occuring.. edit: Further, it looks like the sequence exists in some bacteria, meaning it isn't even a question of a random mutation but possibily the incorporation of the sequence from an existing source (which the author claims doesn't exist, but it does, in mycobacterium smegmatis...). this destroys the entire premise of the claim.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  > "see" most virus mutations because most mutations don't survive And even if they survive the selection pressure is immense.

vintermann 5y ago

Early on one news site I followed kept a long list of all the vaccine candidates that were under development, and there were impressively many. Even the Kazakh Biosafety Research Institute had one. That kind of worried me. Because even if you think sars-cov-2 is completely natural (and I have no problem accepting that position), have you thought about how many groups around would still have the capacity to make such a virus, if they wanted to? Even just the fact that "some people believe the virus was made in a lab" can be dangerous. Because what if, say, Kazakhstan's dictator-emeritus Nursultan Nazarbayev believed it? How far-fetched is it that he, or someone like him even in the more nominally democratic parts of the world, would decide, "they fired the first shot, we can't allow there to be a bioweapon gap!" and commandeer the institute to do "dual use" research? It would be easy to excuse too. They could say, "we're just designing these powerful virus variants to have a vaccine ready in case someone else comes up with the same powerful virus variant", and it would be a reasonable argument, at least as arms race escalation arguments go.

jacquesm 5y ago
Having the ability to make a vaccine is not the same as having the ability to engineer a virus.
- vintermann 5y ago
  Right, the latter is probably easier.

arisAlexis 5y ago

> This guy appears to also believe that the omicron variant is not a natural mutation but a lab-made version as well. Dismissing everything as far I'd problematic. If you can't prove it and several scientists were baffled by the number of changes and we still donate an answer, you can't criticize someone from believing A while you believe B.