Humanity is extremely lucky that Delta's single nucleotide mutation in the furin cleavage site which has overclocked SARS2's transmissibility by an order of magnitude only got traction in May 2021, rather than May 2020.
If original SARS2's furin cleavage site would have been as efficient, its R0 would have been around 6, which means by now we would have probably had ~40M dead and ~1B infected.

Thankfully, we now have vaccines that greatly reduce death and severe Covid risks even from Delta.
The furin cleavage site is also a great example how sometimes there are aspects of the virus that our immune system just can't adequately defend against. And it is then just a matter of did we get lucky or unlucky with a particular strain of a virus.
Apparently, we got pretty lucky with SARS2 that it ISN'T susceptible to ADE (antibody-dependent enhancement), and thus vaccines/prior infection provide us with protection against it rather than making us vulnerable to get reinfected or allow the virus to persist in some cells.

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More from @ydeigin

22 Jul
Fauci is lying. What did the NIH-funded 2017 WIV paper describe? They took 8 different bat SARS-like viruses, cut out their receptor binding domains, and pasted them into the WIV1 backbone (progenitor of the first SARS virus) to check if the new chimeras would infect human cells. Image
Let me reiterate. They took the WIV1 backbone, which is derived from Rs3367, the virus Shi Zhengli discovered in Yunnan in 2011, which is the closest known relative of the human SARS virus: 96% close.

They then replaced the RBD in WIV1 by RBDs from 8 other SARS-like CoVs.
Is this potential gain-of-function research? You bet. Even before they checked actual infectivity, there is a reasonable expectation that inserting those new RBDs could increase WIV1 tropism to human ACE2.
Read 4 tweets
20 Jul
@BetterSkeptics #gtcentry Unsupported claim:

[01:02:16] Steve: Which means 5,000 reports translates into 500,000 deaths. And I don’t think it’s that high. Okay?

[01:02:31] Steve: Right. It’s not that high, but-but it’s higher. It’s-- I guarantee you it’s higher.
Even the 5000 VAERS reports of potential deaths at the time of the podcast were yet unconfirmed to be caused by vaccines.
And the 1% estimate for underreported events cannot be extrapolated to underreported deaths, as that estimate comes from a 2011 report based on ALL possible adverse events after vaccinations, the overwhelming majority of which are benign:
Read 5 tweets
20 Jul
@BetterSkeptics #gtcentry Falsification:

[00:39:34] Heather: the authors of the Quillette article don't seem to know what prophylaxis means. Uh, may I- may I?

[00:39:49] Bret: Yeah, please.
[00:39:49] Heather: Yes. So somewhere in its lower down in the- in the written part of-- So here we go. This is just a para-- just one paragraph from their-- the Quillette piece:
[start quote from Quillette article]

"How does the evidence for the prophylactic efficacy of ivermectin stack up against the vaccines? It's not even close. Remember, we don't yet know that the drug provides any significant benefit.
Read 10 tweets
19 Jul
@BetterSkeptics #gtcentry Unsupported claim:

[00:13:22] But the spike protein itself, we now know is very dangerous and cytotoxic.
No, there is no evidence that the spike protein alone is "very dangerous and cytotoxic" in concentrations even orders of magnitude higher than what is ever observed in vaccinated people.

The claim about the dangers of the "lone" (i.e. free-floating) spike protein stems from an incorrect reading the @manorlaboratory Salk study:

Read 6 tweets
19 Jul
@BetterSkeptics #gtcentry Unsupported claim:

[00:17:30] the fact that the drug in question, Ivermectin, comes from, uh, soil bacteria, it's not a completely synthetic molecule, means that that it is likely to be similar to the things that one's ancestors have encountered before,
and there's, therefore, a good chance that the body has a reasonably elegant way of dealing with it rather than uh, using some mechanism that's-that's not so great."
There is no evidence that a molecule extracted from soil bacteria has any safety of efficacy advantage. There are plenty of counterexamples of toxic molecules found in soil bacteria:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthrax
Read 5 tweets
19 Jul
@BetterSkeptics #gtcentry Unsupported claim:

[00:11:10] "what I believe is a flaw in the drug safety system. I published this flaw. And, uh, the flaw basically amounts to the mice that are often used for things like drug safety testing and other experiments having been
"accidentally evolutionarily modified by the breeding protocol that is used to produce them so that their telomeres which are these, um, repetitive sequences at the ends of chromosomes have been elongated tremendously and has, uh, has potentially very large impacts.
"Effectively, these animals have a capacity to repair their tissues so that if you poison them, but you don't outright kill them, they actually have an extremely good capacity to fix themselves whereas we have a limited capacity, so they're-they're bad models.
Read 7 tweets

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