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Most of that collected and sequenced virus will be dead. For samples like blood it would be very difficult to infect labworkers, it would need to be something l
by lamontcg 4y ago
Most of that collected and sequenced virus will be dead. For samples like blood it would be very difficult to infect labworkers, it would need to be something like an accident with aerosolized fecal samples which were inhaled. But assuming there was any live virus in those samples the human exposure will be dwarfed by the workers in mines and those who collect bat guano for fertilizer without any PPE at all. There's many times more bat-human contact around rural China which doesn't involve labworkers and where there's no precautions (as we know from the Mojiang miners who died).
And there's still a vast gulf from collection sampling to engineered chimeric viruses and gain of function experiments.
- ckw 4y agoExcept there was no gulf. The purpose of the proposed collection of novel bat coronaviruses was to facilitate gain of function experiments at WIV involving the alteration of spike proteins, including the introduction of ‘appropriate human-specific cleavage sites’. In a recent interview Jeffrey Sachs said that he spoke to one of the original reviewers of the DEFUSE proposal, who said ‘the research was done before the proposal went in.’ https://youtu.be/vtfIIG8iYIk https://youtu.be/vtfIIG8iYIk 32:10s So, researchers propose to create a novel corona virus with precisely the attributes of sars-cov-2 in 2018. At the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Having already secretly completed the research. And we are supposed to believe that sars-cov-2 originated naturally, despite no evidence of such an origin, as in sars-1 and mers, and after almost three years spent searching for the reservoir.