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False Claims About The Novel Coronavirus And How To Debunk Them
Today China reported zero new domestic cases of novel coronavirus infections. It has beaten the epidemic just as we predicted early on. Other countries with still expanding epidemics will have to adopt all the measures China has taken to also win the fight.
Our extensive reporting about the novel cornonavirus has attracted many new commentators to this site. Unfortunately some of these, as well as some of the regulars, continue to spread disinformation and myths about the current pandemic and its causes.
To keep some level of quality at this site requires an aggressive countering of such comments. But our capacity to do so is limited. We do delete comments that are nonsensical or have been debunked and we do block people who insist on posting or reposting nonsense. But there are now many more comments per day than we can read. We therefore have to ask other commentators to counter the bad false ones.
Here are some of the false claims that are made about the pandemic and the facts needed to debunk them.
Myth:
The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is a Chinese virus that comes from bats. It infected people because Chinese people eat bats.
Facts:
The source of the virus is actually not known. The patient number 1, the person who first carried the virus, has not been found. The Wuhan wet market where exotic animals are sold was not the source of the outbreak:
The paper, written by a large group of Chinese researchers from several institutions, offers details about the first 41 hospitalized patients who had confirmed infections with what has been dubbed 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). In the earliest case, the patient became ill on 1 December 2019 and had no reported link to the seafood market, the authors report. “No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases,” they state. Their data also show that, in total, 13 of the 41 cases had no link to the marketplace. “That’s a big number, 13, with no link,” says Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University.
While the novel corona virus might be one that was originally carried by bats it is unlikely to have jumped from a bat to a human. The older SARS virus, which is somewhat similar to the novel coronavirus, originated from bats but first spread to other animals before mutating from there into a form that infects humans.
The only place where bats are regularly used as food is the Pacific island Palau which is more or less a U.S. colony. Videos showing Chinese citizens eating fruit bat soup were actually filmed on that island.
Myth:
The virus is related to HIV, the virus that causes aids.
Facts:
Some Indian researchers found four genome sequences in the novel coronavirus that can also be found in the HIV virus. They self published their findings in a paper that was not peer reviewed. We discussed that paper in detail on February 1 in our second post on the virus and we strongly expressed our doubt about its veracity. A few days later the paper was retracted by its authors after other scientists had pointed out that the lengths of each of the four sequences they had compared were way too small to be of statistical significance.
Myth:
Asian people are genetically more receptive for the novel coronavirus.
Fact:
The virus enters human cells by binding to the ACE-2 receptor on the cells hull. There were assertions that people in Asia have more ACE-2 receptors than people elsewhere. But detailed studies of various genome sequence databases have found no statistical basis for such claims. People of Asian, Caucasian or African heritage all have the same numbers of ACE-2 building elements and receptors. The virus will effect them equally.
Myth:
The virus originated from a military weapon research laboratory.
Facts:
There is zero evidence that the virus is from a Chinese or U.S. or other (weapon) laboratory and the claim actually makes no sense. The genome of the virus consists of more then 23,000 'letters'. It is significantly different than the genome of other known viruses. (Added:) It is not lab made:
We offer a perspective on the notable features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome and discuss scenarios by which they could have arisen. Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.
To artificially create such a complex entity and to test all its variants would have been a program of the size of the Manhattan project and would have cost billions.
Weapon researchers are sane people with a limited budget. They look for methods to defeat an enemy. A virus that affects all humans indiscriminately but kills mostly very old ones would have no military value.
Myth:
Moon of Alabama has downplayed the danger of the virus.
Facts:
Our first post on the issue was headlined The Coronavirus – No Need To Panic. It discussed the infectiousness and fatality rate of the novel coronavirus disease in comparison to other virus caused diseases. We pointed out that it is less infectious and less deadly than for example SARS but never said that it is not dangerous at all. In fact the numbers we pointed out said the opposite.
The piece simple put the current epidemic into perspective. We have since posted a total of 15 detailed pieces on the pandemic. To claim that this is a downplaying of the issue is nonsensical.
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Previous Moon of Alabama posts on the issue:
Posted by: H.Schmatz | Mar 21 2020 17:17 utc | 548
The Feds lost control and threw in the towel. All the printed $trillions will not save the house built on sand.
I read many are blaming China that they hid and lied.
While China may have finally tamped down coronavirus to manageable levels within their borders, the fact remains that they initially lied about the virus while actively suppressing early information that may have saved countless lives, according to Dr. Michael Pillsbury, Director for Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute and adviser to President Trump.
“Everybody who wants to can just go online and look at January 14th – the WHO website. You’ll see the WHO say ‘China says there is no human-to-human transmission,'” said Pullsbury.
“Now that was not true. They already knew there was human transmission. And the next day, 20 Chinese came in the White House – with President Trump, Henry Kissinger, Lou Dobbs, myself, we all saw the Chinese up close. Some of them could have been carrying it,” he added.[.]
Here is a question for the evil doctor: Is this a hapstance that CDC was getting prepared in October – November 2019?
I will search if CDC published an Offer Tender for the test kits, ventilators. Seems not.
Hmmmm!!! Curious minds. See this job recruitment for:
Public Health Advisor (Quarantine Program) Apply now.
Job ID HHS-CDC-D3-20-10640010
Date posted 11/15/2019
Location Dallas, Texas, El Paso, Texas, Houston, Texas, Seattle, Washington, Anchorage, Alaska, Los Angeles, California, San Diego, California, San Francisco, California, Miami, Florida, Atlanta, Georgia, Honolulu, Hawaii, Chicago, Illinois, Boston, Massachusetts, Detroit, Michigan, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Newark, New Jersey, New York, New York, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, San Juan
Department: Department of Health And Human Services
Agency: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Job Announcement Number: HHS-CDC-D3-20-10640010
SALARY RANGE: $51440.0 to $93077.0/Per Year
OPEN PERIOD: 2019-11-15 to 2020-05-15
SERIES & GRADE: GS–9/11
AGENCY MARKETING STATEMENT:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the agency Americans trust with their lives. As a global leader in public health, CDC is the nation’s premier health promotion, prevention, and preparedness agency. Whether we are protecting the American people from public health threats, researching emerging diseases, or mobilizing public health programs with our domestic and international partners, we rely on our employees to make a real difference in the health and well-being of people here and around the world. This position is located in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Center for Emerging & Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID), Division of Global Migration and Quarantine (DGMQ), Quarantine and Border Health Services Branch (QBHS) within various locations. Salary may be adjusted to include a Cost of Living Allowance (COLA) of 10.64% for Honolulu, Hawaii. [.]
JOB SUMMARY:
Serves as a project representative for a program responsible for preventing the importation and spread of communicable diseases.
DUTIES:
“Assist in planning and implementing a program for preventing the importation of communicable diseases from abroad and spread of these diseases domestically.”, “Monitor disease trends and consults with senior leaders to ensure that appropriate measures are taken to prevent the introduction/spread of communicable diseases by travelers, etiologic agents or vectors.”, “Provide technical assistance, consultation and guidance to national, state and/or[.]
Those of us thinking COVID-19 will peak and economic life returned to normal in 6 months; plan on 18 months.
Posted by: Likklemore | Mar 21 2020 18:24 utc | 557
@b
“Facts:
Some Indian researchers found four genome sequences in the novel coronavirus that can also be found in the HIV virus. They self published their findings in a paper that was not peer reviewed. We discussed that paper in detail on February 1 in our second post on the virus and we strongly expressed our doubt about its veracity. A few days later the paper was retracted by its authors after other scientists had pointed out that the lengths of each of the four sequences they had compared were way too small to be of statistical significance”
“– Another peculiar characteristic is COVID-19’s similarities to HIV. And so although another since-retracted pre-print noted several very short genomic sequences in COVID-19’s spike-protein gene that look far more similar to sequences found in HIV than to other coronaviruses – critics quickly pointed out that the shared homology didn’t reach statistical significance. However a closer look at the data reveals that there were a few small shared genomic segments that, despite being physically separated from each other along each strand of DNA, all worked together to code for the Wuhan Strain’s protein-spike’s crucial receptor binding site. Something that is highly unlikely to have happened by chance. And despite most of its protein-spike being shared with SARS, these substituted segments weren’t shared at all – nor were they found in any other coronavirus. One possible but likely reason for these HIV-like segments is that they were meant to be epitopes, or molecular flags meant to mark intruders for a vaccine to target – meaning the Wuhan Strain was built as a monster for a specific vaccine to hunt. It is mathematically possible for this to happen in nature – but only in a ten-thousand bats chained to ten-thousand Petri dishes and given until infinity sense. Alternatively, this pattern could also be produced by infecting a room full of ferrets with a bespoke coronavirus and sifting through the wreckage for your genomic needle.”
https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/01/31/logistical-and-technical-analysis-of-the-origins-of-the-wuhan-coronavirus-2019-ncov/
On February 3rd I posted:
“”Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag” https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1
This is a SARS type coronavirus. Its spike glycoprotein contains 4 insertions. The insertions are in a row. None have been seen in another coronavirus (low probability). All 4 are present in all human source samples of the Wuhan coronavirus – all four of which match up to HIV-1 sequences. They do not represent a single unbroken sequence from HIV-1; they come from four different places, but in this new coronavirus they’re all together (low probability). They each enable the new coronavirus to perform a task making the base coronavirus more survivable and more effective, as they are critical for the virus to identify and latch on to host cells, and for viral assembly (low probability for all four to be useful). It is considered unlikely a coronavirus would mutate to pick up 4 novel insertions so quickly, and it is obviously highly unlikely all 4 would match HIV-1 sequences, and there are no useless incidental insertions. Even if we do not parse these into separate events, there are unquestionably no less than three low probability events here with respect to the consideration that this virus arose spontaneously in nature. The researchers, at least some of whom presumably have more than a passing familiarity with virology, which is not likely to be the case with respect to the participants on this forum, have indicated a certain degree of surprise over these low probability events. That would arguably mean they expect it would be at least one in ten or less that they would encounter them or they would not register surprise let alone write an article that could at a minimum subject them to international embarrassment. In other words, people who are familiar with these phenomena are registering a reaction indicative of at least a “one in a thousand” surprise. If virologists believe it is a one in a thousand we would see this happening naturally, and the choices are a seafood market (which some argue is a discredited theory), or the only category 4 lab in China…draw your own conclusions. But keep in mind the question presented is not “what is the % probability the coronavirus was engineered,” but rather “is it more or less likely that the coronavirus was engineered”? These researchers are indicating it is a proverbial lead pipe cinch that it was engineered, using technical and polite language.”
The length of the four chains in question, while indicating each of the four bears no distinctive structure that could act as a signature indicating origin on its own, is a red herring argument. The issue is that there are four, in a row whereas they could have arisen anywhere in the enormous chain, that all four have HIV type function, and all four are in fact found in HIV. The authors who claim they have “clearly” debunked this argument have far lesser credentials than the original Indian authors, and are far less professional and polite in making their claims. Gratuitous use of the term “clearly” is a red flag of weak arguments.
@b
“Myth:
“There is zero evidence that the virus is from a Chinese or U.S. or other (weapon) laboratory and the claim actually makes no sense. The genome of the virus consists of more then 23,000 ‘letters’. It is significantly different than the genome of other known viruses. (Added:) It is not lab made:”
We offer a perspective on the notable features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome and discuss scenarios by which they could have arisen. Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
To artificially create such a complex entity and to test all its variants would have been a program of the size of the Manhattan project and would have cost billions.
Weapon researchers are sane people with a limited budget. They look for methods to defeat an enemy. A virus that affects all humans indiscriminately but kills mostly very old ones would have no military value.”
How about a room full of ferrets instead? This is not something speculative. This is something that has already been accomplished – they’re simply getting better at it.
“This report is the product of a collaboration between a retired professional scientist with dozens of peer-reviewed publications and 30 years of experience in genomic sequencing and analysis, who worked at the Theoretical Biology Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and later helped design several ubiquitous bioinformatic software tools, as well as a former NSA counterterrorism analyst. It considers whether the Wuhan Strain of coronavirus (COVID-19) is the result of naturally emergent mutations against the possibility that it may be a bio-engineered strain – directly altered by genetic manipulation, subject to artificially-guided evolutionary selection, or both – most likely released into the public by accident since China’s rate of occupational accidents is about ten-times higher than America’s, and some twenty-times more than Europe’s, the only other regions with high-level virology labs….
Beijing has had four known accidental leaks of the SARS virus in recent years, so there is absolutely no reason to assume that this strain of coronavirus from Wuhan didn’t accidentally leak out as well….
Given that this outbreak was said to begin in late December when most bat species in the region are hibernating and the Chinese horseshoe bat’s habitat covers an enormous swath of the region containing scores of cities and hundreds of millions people, the fact that this Wuhan Strain of coronavirus, denoted as COVID-19, emerged in close proximity to the only BSL-4 virology lab in China, which in turn was staffed with at least two Chinese scientists – Zhengli Shi and Xing-Yi Ge – both virologists who had previously worked at an American lab which had already bio-engineered an incredibly virulent strain of bat coronavirus – the accidental release of a bio-engineered virus from Wuhan’s virology lab cannot be automatically discounted, especially when the Wuhan Strain’s unnatural genomic signals are considered….
– In 2002, Stony Brook first assembled a DNA virus from scratch, building a polio-virus, and providing proof-of-concept for the creation, alteration, and manipulation of DNA-virus genomes. Two years prior, a separate team had already built an simpler RNA-virus from scratch – choosing to engineer a coronavirus from the ground up, and even swapping out its vital spike-protein genes to make it more infectious. And a generation earlier, artificially enhancing selection by intentionally infecting countless series of lab animals with different viruses is understood to have created the H1N1 Swine Flu. Its Franken-genome has a mysterious untraceable genetic parentage and a “clear unnatural origin,” and H1N1 became the poster-child for a moratorium against gain-of-function research – experimentation that seeks to increase a pathogen’s virulence, creating a more effective double-edged sword to counter and learn from. A ban that was in place for years, but was recently lifted by the American government. In the case of H1N1, it wasn’t a question of if it’d escaped from a research laboratory, only whether it’d been designed as part of a weapons system, or been part of a vaccine trial….
– By 2015, conducting research that was met with an enormous amount of concern, scientists at UNC had successfully created a “chimeric, SARS-like virus” by altering the viral genome of a Chinese bat coronavirus’s spike-protein genes – sequences that code for the spikes that poke out from surface of viruses and allow them to unlock entry into hosts, in this case making the bio-engineered coronavirus incredibly contagious. This research raised eyebrows since it was clearly gain-of-function research, a practice banned in America from 2014 until December 2017 when NIH lifted the ban, specifically to allow research on this sort of virus. Looking at UNC’s gain-of-function research on coronavirus spike-proteins, which received its funding just before the ban was implemented and was only allowed to go forward following a special review, a virologist with the Louis Pasteur Institute of Paris warned: “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory.”…
– Another exceptional and atypical trait of the Wuhan Strain COVID-19 is that not only does it form its own clade, it’s calculated to have diverged from SARS and its other sister coronaviruses some 260 years ago. And yet in all that time, while it every other branch of the coronavirus tree was busy branching-off into countless variants, if it emerged naturally, COVID-19 somehow spent a quarter of a millennium as the lone known example of its clade, somehow not mutating into related lineages in all that time. Another simpler explanation is that this apparent hereditary distance and genetic uniqueness is the just the result of being altered in a lab. And although two distinct strains of COVID-19 have been identified, there’s no reason to believe this mutational differentiation happened before contact with humans in the winter of 2019. Additionally, when neutral sites, the specific points in the genome which most reliably show evolutionary change, were examined: COVID-19 looks even more evolutionarily distant from any of its possible relatives, which would make sense if all that evolutionary distance was gained by artificially accelerated generational turn-over in a lab.
– Also giving credence to the idea that the Wuhan Strain was bio-engineered is the existence of a patent application registered to a scientist from Wuhan that looks to modulate a coronavirus’ spike-protein genes – the precise region altered by Zhengli Shi at UNC to make a hyper-virulent strain of coronavirus, and whose alteration and adaptation would explain the Wuhan Strain’s unusual behavior as discussed above.”
https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/01/31/logistical-and-technical-analysis-of-the-origins-of-the-wuhan-coronavirus-2019-ncov/
There is no question in my mind Covid-19 was bio-engineered, there is no question in my mind Moon of Alabama is among the most valuable Internet resources for information and geo-political analysis, and there is no question in my mind b will not censor this post.
Posted by: Bruce | Mar 21 2020 20:44 utc | 574
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